Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival

Moon Cakes!

Everyone familiar with Chinese holidays knows that with the mid-autumn festival comes moon cakes. They are thick cakes of red bean paste, lotus seed paste, or green bean paste with a brown floured coating. Indeed, even a month before the moon festival was supposed to happen, every store from the nearest 7eleven to the high-scaled Soho Department Store was selling moon cakes. Bakeries stopped selling many of their other products to focus on these moon cakes. The day before the moon festival, every floor of the Lotus supermarket had salespeople shouting out markdowns on moon cakes as well as customers lining up to grab them. It was like the day before Christmas, everyone scrambling to buy gifts they had forgotten.

In Ann Arbor, I had celebrated this holiday with family. We would go out to a Chinese restaurant, come back, and eat moon cakes. In Philly, I'd done the same thing but with friends. My parents would send me moon cakes so we'd eat them in the dorms and then go out to Chinese. This year, I was excited about spending the holiday in China - the "real" way.

Zha-jiang mian!

The night before, my host family and I had dinner. They made zha-jiang mian, a Beijing specialty (they pointed out to me that Biden had eaten it when he had come to Beijing). When I asked about their holiday plans, they told me that they always watch the CCTV celebrations on television and look out at the moon. They also told me good places in Beijing to watch the moon.

Annie, Jay, Sue, and DH at Weiming Lake

So my friends--Jay, Annie, Sue, DH, and I--decided we would celebrate the moon festival by watching the moon at Weiming Lake, the lake on Peking University's campus. Prior to that, we had a lot of fun buying boxes of moon cakes and gifts for our host families. DH's nai nai, or grandmother (host), had her birthday on that day, so we went and bought her a bottle of baijiu (Chinese wine) before his family dinner. Sue was invited by her host family to play dice games in order to "win" various moon cakes. Luckily, she won a couple expensive ones!

It also happened to be my grandfather's birthday. All of our family members always scramble to find a phone on the mid-autumn festival because luckily, none of us forget that this holiday means my grandfather's birthday. I called and spoke with him and it seemed that he also had a great holiday, surrounded by family. Yay!

Once we had all finished our dinner celebrations, my friends and I met up to walk over to the lake. Unfortunately, there was no moon (clouds + pollution), but it was still a beautiful night. It was great to see the lake at night and we had a fun time!

I love these people