Mooncake Festival
Seeing all the mooncakes for sale in the Chinese Bakeries along Clement Street and Irving Street brings evokes a lot of nostalgia and fond memories of my childhood. As a kid, I always looked forward to the Mooncake Festival, sometimes known as the Lantern Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival, which falls on the 15th of the 8th Lunar Month, which roughly translates to around mid-September, depending on the lunar calendar of that year. We were very poor when I was growing up; we could only afford paper lanterns, the colorful ones that cost between 5 and 50 cents each. These paper lanterns have a simple metal holder in the middle for the candle and folded paper forming the body of the lantern. The light diffused through the translucent paper is a beautiful glow. Inevitably at sometime during the night, some lanterns would catch fire and go up in flames. That has happened to me almost every year! As the years went by and the economy improved, I upgraded to ‘electronic’ lanterns, not candles but battery operated lights, that would even flash and sing a nice tune, somewhat like Christmas tree lights.
After carrying the lanterns around, we would eat mooncakes. Cutting up a mooncake into quarters or eights, we would devour them, often with Chinese tea. Mooncake is a pastry, often filled with lotus seed paste or red bean paste, and in more recent times, filled with durian paste, green tea paste or any local inventions or adaptations; with ‘ice’ skin, a sweet white skin instead of the traditional brown skin or puffy flaky skin, which is more Teochew (specific province in China and one of 4 major dialect groups among the Chinese in Singapore). I love the flaky ones with taro filling, so yummy!
Thanks to the significant Chinese community in the Bay Area, I can continue to eat my much beloved mooncakes!
