Worst Kept Secrets

It’s almost time for Mid-Autumn Festival (I think it’s officially on the 14th of September). As far as I can tell, Mid-Autumn Festival is the Thanksgiving to Spring Festival’s Christmas - it’s centered around a big family dinner, and people don’t go insane over it, they just have a good time. It’s low key and easy, and unlike the idiot holiday planners in the West, the Chinese had the sense to spread things out a little bit more, so there’s none of the stress involved with having to pull off two major holidays with only one month in between.

Instead of a turkey, Mid-Autumn Festival features the consumption of mooncakes. I freaking love mooncakes. My students all roll their eyes at me when I bring this up, and I think they’ve got the same association with mooncakes as I do with fruit cake, but I’ve already eaten four today and I’ve only been awake about an hour (I’m home sick with the sniffles, currently). I’ve been looking forward to mooncake season ever since I moved to China - when I visited about a year ago, I ate a ton of them, and I’ve got a really strong taste association between that and deciding to uproot my entire life and charge across a really big ocean. Hence, Mid-Autumn Festival is not only a time for me to munch on tasty Chinese pastries and contemplate the beauty of the full moon, it also commemorates the first time in my post-collegiate career when I finally overcompensated for the massive self-respect points deficit I’d been running by actually Doing Something I Was Proud Of. Really, when I think about Anne one year ago, I still get revved up about it and think to myself, “oh rock on, Gresham.”

Mid-Autumn Festival dates back to the Zhou Dynasty some 3,000 years ago (this is all according to Wikipedia), and occurs on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. This is the day that the moon is supposed to be at its fullest and most beautiful, and the whole idea behind the festival is that your family gets together and celebrates the harvest and enjoys a brightly lit autumn night. I think autumn is a superior season, and I’m one hundred percent down with harvest festivals. I think it’s absolutely lovely to set aside an entire legal holiday for kicking back and appreciating the moon.

There’s a legend associated with the festival, of course, and like most Chinese stories there are approximately eighteen million versions. They all seem to start out with the earth having ten suns a long long long time ago. This was problematic, since farmers couldn’t grow anything and it was wretchedly hot all the time. Finally, a talented young archer named Houyi came along, and shot down nine of the ten suns. As a reward, the emperor gave him a pill that granted immortality. Of course, it was an Asian folklore gift, so it came with a warning that it should never be swallowed. In one version, Chang’e (his wife) swallowed the pill of her own free will, and in another, Houyi gave it to her for safe keeping while he went away on business. One of their servants tried to steal it, and Chang’e panicked and took it herself, not knowing what else to do to protect it. Both of these versions end with Chang’e floating up off the ground and all the way to the moon. She managed to stop her flight when she reached the Moon Palace, and hacked up a part of the pill. There was an immortal rabbit who lived in the moon, and Chang’e ordered it to figure out how to reproduce the pill so that she could get back to the earth to see her husband. The rabbit is purportedly still up there pounding away trying to get the pill right while Chang’e waits. Houyi went on to build his own palace in the sun, and he sees Chang’e once a year on Mid-Autumn festival - hence, the moon looks its best on that night. Another version casts Houyi as a tyrannical jerk, who shot down the suns and was rewarded by becoming the Emperor. He commanded his advisors to concoct the immortality pill so that he could be emperor forever. Chang’e realized that this would be absolutely terrible, so she took the pill herself to spare China an eternity of horrible leadership. She started floating off the ground, and had the wherewithal to grab a rabbit for company. There’s no man in the moon in China - it’s a lady and a rabbit, and you can see their shadow as they make mooncakes together in the Moon Palace. There’s another version of the story here.

The other big mythological presence for Mid-Autumn Festival is Yue Lao (literally “Old Moon”), a god in charge of marriage, but that’s not as much fun as archery, immortality, flying ladies, and anthropomorphic rabbits.

Back to mooncakes. Mooncakes are roundish pastries with a design on top (characters or pictures of Chang’e floating off into outer space). The sort I’ve been chowing down on are incredibly dense, and all the recipes I’ve looked at use an alarming amount of lard. I just found out that you’re supposed to eat them in little wedges and wash them down with tea, as opposed to shoving them into your mouth whole like a blonde western piglet. Traditionally, they’re filled with lotus or red bean paste and maybe some salted duck eggs (eggs=moon, symbolically speaking), but today you can find variations that involve ice cream, yoghurt, jelly, oreos, etc. Here’s one with egg yolks inside:

Mooncakes figure into mid-autumn festival thusly: Remember the Mongols? Around 1271, Kublai Khan rode in and founded the Yuan Dynasty, which lasted until 1368. Toward the end of the dynasty, civil unrest was erupting all over the place, in spite of strict laws against public assembly, free speech, and the like (and yes, I’m tempted to make an obvious analogy). According to legend, the rebel force spread a rumor of a nasty plague that could only be prevented by eating moon cakes. The Chinese population flocked to buy them (which is completely plausible if you’ve ever heard anything about traditional Chinese medicine - apologies for sounding snarky). The rebels had inserted little pieces of paper with a message - “KILL THE MONGOLS ON SUCH AND SUCH DATE,” or something to that effect. This is in no way historically substantiated, but it’s part of the reason for the national mooncake consumption on Mid-Autumn Festival.

AND: Pieces of paper inside baked desserts? Sound familiar? I read that story and immediately thought of fortune cookies. There are no fortune cookies in China, and most people have never heard of them:

The internet tells me that fortune cookies were based on a Japanese cookie, and they have no real historical connection to China whatsoever (Wikipedia insinuates that the whole Mongol story was dreamed up in order to give some Chinese legitimacy to the fortune cookie), but I prefer to ignorantly believe that there is a remote path of lineage in there somewhere. I’ll ask my students about it if my nose will stop running long enough for me to teach a class.

For those of you not faced with mooncake options every time you leave your house, here are some do-it-yourself recipes:

Azuki Bean Flaky Crust Mooncake

Azuki Bean Mooncake WITHOUT 3/4 cups of lard

Lotus Paste Mooncake

Lotus Seed and Black Sesame Mooncake

A Bunch of Step-by-Step Recipes, Including Nutella Filling - plus, a pretty awesome blog. She’s involved with Heifer Project in Arkansas, no less. Which means we probably know some of the same people, which is a weird result to get out of a random google search for mooncake recipes.