Mid-Autumn Festival

China's Mid-Autumn Festival is based on the lunar calendar, but this year it fell on Sept 22, last Wednesday. According to my Chinese teacher, the legend is built around Houyi, a famous archer, and Chang'e, his faithful wife. 10 suns used to exist, though each day only one sun would encircle the Earth. One day, all 10 encircled the Earth, making it too hot. Upon the Emperor's command, Houyi shot down nine suns, earning a pill that granted him eternal life in the process. He didn't want to take the pill since he wanted to stay united with his wife Chang'e. One day, Peng, one of Houyi's apprentice archers, tried to steal the pill. Chang'e, knowing that she couldn't defend the pill against Peng, swallowed it. She floated up to the moon and lives there for eternity. Houyi came home to find his wife and the pill gone so he always looks up at the moon to be close to Chang'e. The Mid-Autumn Festival is closely aligned to the equinox when the moon is the fullest and when Chang'e is supposedly most visible.

However, according to Wikipedia, many versions of this legend abound with many contradictions. Anyway, in real life, the government gives all workers a day off for the Mid-Autumn Festival. Since it also coincides with the end of the summer harvest, most people, resting from the harvest or returning home from the cities, spend time with their families enjoying the spectacular moon and eating moon cakes, which are synonymous with the Festival. In some sense, the Mid-Autumn Festival seems similar to Thanksgiving with the moon cakes being the turkey. To be fair, there is no "Thanks", football, or Black Friday involved (actually, without those three things, I'm not sure how much of Thanksgiving is left)

Personally, I didn't like the taste of moon cakes, they were bland and dry. However, don't say that to an Asian person (The Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated in different forms in Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc). The grocery stores have immense and elaborate boxes of moon cakes that are probably exchanged as gifts. Even NYU plied us with piles of mooncakes, but I'm sure Chinese families are worse. My Taiwanese roommate went to see a family friend and came back with a large box of mooncakes, which he's been attempting to eat for the past week.

Mooncakes come in a variety of flavors, including red bean, taro, pineapple, dried fruits, etc. You can even get them in sweetened contemporary flavors like chocolate. I'm not sure what the inscriptions on the top mean, but you usually cut mooncakes into four pieces and eat them with tea. If you've never tried one, good luck finding one in the States, ask an Asian friend.