September 22, 2002

From: Meg Thomsen meginchina@yahoo.com
Subject: East Meets West

Hello Friends and Family,

On Friday, Yang Ning brought me two presents. She had a basket of mooncakes in one hand and a jar of Nescafe in the other. "I've brought you gifts for the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival!" she said, and then added proudly, "Eastern AND Western!"

During the Moon Festival, everyone will go home to their families. According to Liang Aiping, "Every Chinese person has a dream of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival. They dream that they will go to their hometowns, and they will go with their family to sit under the osmanthus tree to eat mooncakes and watch the moon." Naturally, being a foreigner in Dengguan elicited a great deal of sympathy. "Tang Mali, who will eat the mooncakes with you? Maybe you will be very lonely!" Then they each presented me with a gift of mooncakes and left, after inviting me to their hometown.

As it turned out, we all ended up sticking around school, thanks to an scheduling error. The college scheduled an important examination for the students, and none of them were able to return home for the festival. They weren't happy, as the prospect of studying computers (the test subject) was far less appealing than a journey home to their families to eat mooncakes and have a special meal. But, as Chinese students often must, they made the best of it, and last night, One Yuan Street was raucous with students drinking Blue Sword beer, spitting sunflower seeds like crazy, and of course, eating the ubiquitous mooncakes.

Caryn (my new sitemate) and I had to find someone to eat mooncakes with. We invited Amy and Poyan, volunteers from nearby Yibin, to come and visit. We attempted to climb the hill behind campus to look for osmanthus trees at the summit, but it's been raining now for quite a while and the thick mud made the climb impossible- for laowai anyhow. The local farmers were briskly walking up and down the muddy hill, carrying bamboo poles on their shoulders holding perilously heavy loads of water and pig slop. We gave up after slipping and sliding only to notice that the sky was too cloudy to see the moon. We slid down the hill to warm and well-lit One Yuan Street, where we ate until we were full of rice and eggplants, and then ate the pineapple-mint mooncakes that were hastily thrust upon us by the restaurant owner.

What's in a mooncake? Just about anything, really. Lemon, lotus, red bean, pork, taro, even green tea. The presentation is everything. Each mooncake is baked into an elaborate shape with auspicious characters molded on the top, and then is usually brushed with egg or a starch mixture to give it a shiny picture. The most expensive ones come packaged in silk. And it's simply good manners to bring mooncakes to anyone that one might happen to visit near the moon festival.

Every Chinese primary schoolchild can recite a simple Tang Dynasty poem by Li Bai. It reads as follows (I've attached it to the bottom in characters):

The moonlight shines before the bed,
As if the ground is covered in snow.
I raise my head to view the moon,
I lower it and think of my home."

Home is precious to everyone, but especially to those of us who are far from home, whether they are college students in Dengguan or Peace Corps volunteers. This week, my father will arrive in China. Tomorrow, I'll take the 36-hour slow train to Beijing to meet him at the airport. I'll greet him with a hug from one arm and a basket full of mooncakes in the other.

We create home wherever we might happen to be. Somehow, through my mooncakes-and-Nescafe existence, I've found a home of sorts in Dengguan. How lucky that I've found it in time to share mooncakes with the folks in my town. Wo zhu nimen Zhongqiu Jie kuaile- Happy Moon Festival!

Love, Meg