MID-AUTUMN FESTIVAL
Mooncake, 月餅 or yuet bang in Cantonese, are pastries enjoyed on Mid-Autumn Festival. It’s a great lesson in sweet-savoury, or the Chinese principle of desserts that should never be saccharine: a salty egg yolk is wrapped in a luscious lotus seed paste, then encased in golden pastry. Mooncakes are pretty labour-intensive and the flavour and texture are rich, with a single mooncake made to be shared among family.
This Chinese celebration of the moon never really resonated with me when I was a child, partly because the folklore that my parents passed onto me about selfless rabbits and a lost lover on the moon were so removed from my experience as a second generation CBC (Canadian-born Chinese). Instead, I devoured every book at my school library on ancient mythology and tales of King Arthur, and I wanted adventure and the Western narrative of conquest and destiny, not stories about love and sacrifice. But now as an adult trying to unlearn and decolonize my ways of thinking in the age of late capitalism, it's the latter themes that make more sense to me.
More than that, as an adult working in a food non-profit, I understand now that Mid-Autumn Festival is really a celebration of harvest. Each spring, farmers place sweat and wits and hopes into a new growing season. And after toiling all summer to combat pests and too much or too little rain and increasingly, climate change, fall comes with its cooler night air. There is the rush to harvest the abundance, and finally, that night where the harvest moon rises over the horizon, calling us to celebrate the earth that continues to nourish us, and the end of an agricultural year.
I’m thinking now of how it was like to celebrate Mid-Autumn when I still lived with my family in Toronto. For all the ways I kept my Chinese heritage at a skeptical arms length, the way that immigrant kids do, I did love the festivity of it – family showing up for a massive dinner, my grandma buying too many lanterns at the 四 五 六 Chinese grocery store, and having mooncake at the end of the meal. My gong gong (公公, paternal grandfather) would peel a pomelo, and someone would make tea. My dad would open the sliding door to the backyard, and we’d go onto the deck to light lanterns under an impossibly big moon.
After moving to Montréal, these traditions suddenly changed from family obligation to nostalgia. Knowing how homesick I felt, my mah mah (嫲嫲, paternal grandmother) would save a mooncake for me every year, carefully wrapped in a freezer bag. She would then give it to my sister, who would keep it in her freezer until my next trip to Toronto and I could take this symbol of the harvest festival back with me. I didn’t think much about the gesture then, but what I wouldn’t give to have my mah mah buy me her favourite mooncake again.
It’s been ten months since I’ve been to Toronto, the longest I have ever been away from my hometown and family. So this year, with a heart full of homesickness and an empty tote bag, I followed a tip from someone on Instagram to a small shop in Chinatown. Chow’s Patisserie is an unassuming shop on de la Gauchetière, a family business where pastries, even as complicated as the mooncake, are made by hand. I stepped in and the daughter started explaining the flavours to me, and our halting conversation in franglais instantly warmed up as we switched to Cantonese.
Montréal Chinatown, September 2020
Chow’s Patisserie, 16 Rue de la Gauchetière E in Montréal
Unfortunately, this is the last festival that Chow’s Patisserie will be helping Montrealers celebrate, as the patriarch and main baker is retiring. So I bought two mooncakes – far too much for someone living alone, but with the plan that I too would freeze some to save for later, for when the homesickness hit particularly deep.
I’m not sure what to do with these traditions and memories, because I don’t have or want children to pass them onto. But perhaps passing traditions onto the next generation is essentially passing traditions onto new family. And in this way, I can also pass it onto my chosen family. So last night, when my bff Robin came over for a glass of wine, I shared with her the meaning of Mid-Autumn Festival and the tradition of mooncake. It felt right to share it with her, over a glass of herbaceous cab franc. There were no lanterns or tea, but the sentiment was the same: that of surviving and celebrating another year.
