Last week’s full moon brought the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节) or Moon Festival, the second-largest holiday in Taiwan after Lunar New Year. I can give the broad strokes: It’s akin to a harvest celebration that gives thanks for the fall’s bounty, and involves gathering with family for a meal. People share round foods that resemble the full moon, specifically mooncakes and big green pomelo fruits. In Taiwan’s unique twist, as opposed to the rest of the Chinese diaspora, families barbecue together.
It’s my third Mid-Autumn Festival and I cannot get past the Wikipedia version of the holiday. We are sent box after giant, laminated, expensive, wasted box of shiny, lard-packed mooncakes doled out by corporations, the pastries stuffed with dense, sticky lotus or red-bean paste. Does anyone even eat these hockey pucks?? I wonder as I break down all the boxes. I don’t really get the holiday, but what are holidays if not layers upon layers, generations upon generations, of memories and myths and family tradition that cannot be explained with the basic facts? I don’t personally celebrate December 25 as the birth of humanity’s savior, but I have hundreds of important associations and memories and feelings about Christmas anyway. Sometimes I realize I’m still watching Taiwanese cultural rites play out like a museum exhibit—a diorama, under glass. Many aspects are by nature inward and family-based, which is to say: not for me. In an Uber ride home Tuesday night, at the height of the holiday, we drove past a family celebrating on the sidewalk in front of mini-grills, a dad handing out fresh skewers, the kids rowdy and laughing. It was the clearest I’ve seen yet of the joy of the day.
When we were little, my mom would cut the mooncakes into eights and we would get to eat an eighth a day. Nowadays I know the "kind" of mooncakes I like and it's not those dense lotus seed paste shaped ones with egg yolk. My husband used to tell me how his mom would get the ice cream filled ones from Ganso to give away and he would always get excited, thinking it was for him. It was not. So this year I bought him a box of ice cream filled ones from Ganso and obviously, we loved those lol.
But also I hear people do a lot of regifting, like, you get a box of mooncakes and you're like OH WOW THANKS SO MUCH and then you turn around and give that box to someone else lol.
I have zero idea how this holiday works either, haha. Had no idea that people bbq to celebrate! I do remember getting mooncakes dropped off to our house as a kid. They are soooo caloric though, and not tasty enough to be worth eating...