Full Moon Cake

Around this time every year is the Mid-Autumn Festival in the Chinese culture. The exact date is the 15th of the eighth month – on the Chinese lunar calendar. So, just like Chinese New Year, that day shifts around every year, which means I have no idea when it is in any given year. All I know is that, for this year, the Festival has just passed. It still feels a little weird to have the Mid-Autumn Festival in the spring, but then again, it can’t be weirder than Christmas in the middle of summer.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, much like the Chinese New Year, is a time for families that have scattered all over the land to re-unite, feast together, and reinforce the familial bond. For families like ours in which one member of the family seems to move farther and farther away from home, that tradition has long ago died an unceremonious death, along with the family get-together during Chinese New Year, ancestral tomb sweeping during Qingming, and various other family activities that are, per tradition, spread throughout the lunar calendar year. Now we squeeze what activities we can into the couple of weeks every couple of years when my family actually gets together. During those couple of weeks, we’d make up for the reunions and family feasts we missed in the previous couple of years, visit the family grave plot, and do everything else completely out of season.

Okay, I am the guilty party in all of this. Whereas I used to be “only” at the other side of the country, now I am at the other side of the world from my family. My annual visits to my family are now taking place about every eighteen months. And now that, for several major reasons, I am planning on staying in Australia for good, we will have to make up for lost times every eighteen months or so. In the mean time, my mom will have to be content with my weekly phone calls.

Actually, the only reason I know that the Mid-Autumn Festival has passed was that, while picking up my ethnic grocery supplies at one of the Asian grocery stores in Chinatown today, I saw all those moon cakes on sale. I always have a soft spot for moon cakes, even though I can only eat about half of one before the sickly sweet cake becomes overwhelming.

This moon cake contains sweet red bean paste and a whole preserved duck egg yolk in the middle.

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Whenever that was.