did not want the mooncakes, and tried to refuse the boxes of them my journalism students at Communication University of China heaped upon me during my first year in the country during the Mid-Autumn Festival, but they insisted. I wasn’t really sure what they were, or why a single person would need so many.
I tried eating them, and in terms of snacks, I much preferred Chinese rice krispie squares. I quickly concluded that these mooncakes were the equivalent of Christmas fruit cakes - more admired than eaten, more frequently regifted than reopened.
Back in 2007, the mooncakes I received came in very large boxes. This was a different era, when gift-giving to officials and higher-ups was an ingrained part of the culture. I visited the home of a student whose father was a government official once, and every spare surface was covered with fruit baskets.
Specialty shops existed for officials to exchange all the luxury cigarettes and fine liquor they received for cash. Unfortunately, there was no such shop for mooncakes. Groups of students would occasionally come over to my apartment to work on the class newspaper, and marvel at the mountain of mooncakes piled on a desk in the corner. One student timidly asked if she could take one, and for the first time I realized someone might actually enjoy eating these things. I started to slowly give the boxes back to my students, and the mountain soon vanished.
At this time, one of the most confounding things I faced was pinning down dates for holidays. The university never knew when the holidays would be until they got a notice from the government, and that might not come until a few weeks before the date, making travel plans a headache.
In addition, employers insisted that people “make up” the days taken off for the holidays by working on the weekends. It reminded me of a traditional saying I learned at the time, about a farmer whose monkeys complained about receiving only three peaches in the morning and four peaches in the evening. He satisfied them by giving them four peaches in the morning and three in the evening.
As the years passed by, I started to read about chocolate mooncakes, and even ice cream mooncakes. I would occasionally hear stories about people receiving mooncakes made of solid gold. Needless to say, I never received a golden one, or even a chocolate one for that matter.
But one year a student gave me three mooncakes that changed my attitude about them forever.
Unlike the big shiny red boxes with giant gold lettering from other students, these came in a newspaper wrapper tied with string. They were oval shaped, not flat and round, and made of a flaky pastry. The inside had a thin layer of sweet bean paste, surrounding a salty egg yolk. They were sublime, and delicious.
They came from Shanghai. This was the first moment it really dawned on me that the country was full of culinary treasures, and the greasy local food in Beijing, which I now know is not the best China has to offer, was only a small piece of a bigger picture.
As the years went on, there was a change in the type of mooncakes I received. The boxes became smaller, but the mooncakes were better quality. Eventually the gifts tapered off almost altogether.
This came with an increasing attention to eliminating corruption and waste in government.
When I first arrived at the school, I remember a teacher going shopping for luxury goods with gift cards she had mysteriously received. That’s now ancient history. After a crackdown that started in 2012, university officials started to be careful, shunning anything that smacked of wasteful behavior, eventually going so far as measuring their offices to make sure they were not wastefully large.
This year’s Mid-Autumn Festival coincided with the National Holiday. Travel is now much smoother. For example, in 2007 one could not book a return train ticket. Now you can do everything online.
Chinese have grown used to traveling, and this year, for obvious reasons, domestic travel has boomed. The government announced there were 637 million tourist visits. That means roughly one in four people in the country took a vacation.
This year, due to the coronavirus, I spent my first Mid-Autumn Festival outside China since 2007. From being overwhelmed with mooncakes that I didn’t really like, I’ve transitioned to missing them. My wife and I looked around for mooncakes here in Malaysia. It’s not the treats that matter, but the comforting rituals and sense of home they represent. The only ones we could find were durian flavored. We passed, and I look forward to salted-egg ones next year.
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