Moon Festival is about family, romance & thanksgiving

Moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars.— J.R.R.

Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

We ran as if to meet the moon.— Robert Frost

The world’s longest Christmas season here in the Philippines has started with the onset of the “ber” months, happily coinciding with the end of East Asia’s “ghost month” and the celebration of Tiong-chiu or the over 3,000-year-old “Mid-Autumn Festival” on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month when the moon is at its fullest.

It is not only the second most important festival in Chinese culture, but also for Koreans, Vietnamese and other Asians. This year in the Gregorian calendar, it falls on Thursday, Sept. 19. It usually coincides with the autumnal equinox, one of only two times in the year when the length of night and day are almost equal.

Like Chinese lunar new year and the sweet rice cake we the ethnic Chinese minority call tikoy in the Hokkien dialect, the Mid-Autumn Festival and the delicious mooncake as gifts have likewise through the generations become part of Filipino culture in the same way siopao, siomai, lumpia, pancit and mami already are.

I think mooncake and tikoy are the Chinese equivalents (but more delicious!) of the Christmas fruitcakes of the West — our favorite gifts to kin, friends and clients.  

Why do we celebrate this festival of the full moon near the autumnal equinox? There are basically three wonderful reasons — family togetherness like the roundness of the full moon or the mooncake, romance between spouses or lovers, and thanksgiving to the heavens because this started out as an ancient harvest festival. 

Family reunions, exciting mooncake dice game

Tiong-chiu is a time for joyous family reunions over dinner, with the delightful dessert of mooncake, plus the ancient traditional mooncake dice game called pwa tiong-chiu in Hokkien.

The family reunion dinner takes place on the night of the festival itself (which we often also call “mooncake festival” for short), but many other mooncake dinner celebrations are usually held by alumni, friends, civic or professional and civic associations of our community throughout this month.

Instead of just offering different sizes of mooncakes as prizes for the exciting dice game, many have improvised with different kinds of foodstuffs, candies or other gift items as prizes.

This year, I’m lending an unused townhouse unit I’ve invested in located in the Scout area of Quezon City as a simple venue for my former high school classmates to have our annual pwa tiong-chiu dinner reunion. 

Up to now, I don’t exactly know how to exactly win the exciting mooncake dice game, though I have some vague ideas. There’s usually some person who studies the rules on what combinations of dice numbers can win what prizes and acting like a trusted referee or arbiter. Mooncake shops usually give out the dice game guide on a piece of paper for people who buy whole sets of mooncakes in different sizes.

The ultimate grand prize winner of the mooncake dice game is called chiong-guan in Hokkien or champion. The term chiong-guan comes from the word used for the topnotcher of the ancient imperial civil service examinations pioneered by the short-lived Sui Dynasty in year 650 AD, and pronounced as Zhuangyuan in Mandarin. 

Each player gets to roll a set of six die into a ceramic bowl, the each player gets to play on his or her turn, with the dice and the bowl passing from one person to the next in as many rounds as it takes to finish off all prizes. A mooncake dice game usually lasts one hour.

All players get to win mooncake or gifts, of varying sizes or degrees of importance depending on one’s luck (or skill?). The much-coveted title of chiong-guan is not assured until the final part of the game, and there are often instances of the title being wrested away by another player with better dice combinations.

The moon symbolizes

romance

There’s something instinctively romantic and feminine about the moon. In many parts of Asia, the mid-autumn moon has traditionally been a favorite occasion for marriages. The festival was equivalent to Valentine’s Day of ancient China. 

Yueliang Daibiao Wode Xin or “the moon represents my heart” is one of the most most famous pop songs about love in Mandarin, popularized by Taiwan’s late Teresa Teng in the 1970s, also sung in the Philippines by actress/singer Zsa Zsa Padilla and young actress Kim Chiu.

By the way, is the English word “honeymoon” for a newly married couple’s holiday inspired also by the moon and literally implying “sweet moon”? The French term lune de mile or “moon of honey” is similar to the Spanish term luna de miel.

One of the mythologies behind this festival was the ill-fated and bittersweet love story of Chang E, goddess of the moon, who was loyal to her husband. The Chang-E legend plays a prominent part in Amy Tan’s children’s book, The Moon Lady, retold from her bestselling and more adult novel The Joy Luck Club in 1989.

As a kid, I recall our late mother mentioned that tiong-chiu or the Mid-Autumn Festival was her marriage anniversary with our late father; both were already widowed and no longer young then but still fortuitously met.

Mom was 40 years old and dad was already 56 when I was born. Mom’s late husband was a third-generation scion of an ethnic Chinese trading family in La Union, while dad was the son of a Chinese immigrant who settled in and became the wealthiest person in seaside Salay municipality of Misamis Oriental province.

Our mom recounted that she had no plans of remarrying after her first husband’s death, until the day that dad’s paternal uncle from the Dee Tian branch of his clan made kaysiaw or introduced them to each other. Dad died after a few years, but mom told me and my sister that those were among the happiest periods of her life.    

Mooncake festival is occasion to thank the heavens

Like the Jewish people’s eight-day Hanukkah festival, which marks the defeat of Seleucid Empire forces who persecuted the Jewish people, and the Passover festival, which marks the liberation of the Jewish people from Egypt, another reason the Mid-Autumn Festival is so popular is it’s the Chinese people’s thankful commemoration of liberation from the Mongolian rulers of the Yuan Dynasty (1230 to 1368 B.C.).

Anne-Marie Slaughter, a top international lawyer and the former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, wrote: “One of the many stories surrounding the Moon Festival, which is also known as the Mid-Autumn Festival, is that during the Yuan Dynasty (A.D. 1280-1368) Chinese rebels against the ruling Mongols ordered the making of special cakes for the Moon Festival and baked a message with a call to action and the outline of the planned attack into each cake. The rebellion succeeded and established the Ming Dynasty. Moon cakes continue to have elaborate designs stamped into them.”

Asia’s Mid-Autumn Festival is the closest thing to America’s Thanksgiving Day. It also started out as gratitude or as a traditional harvest festival, so let us pray to thank God for our many blessings whenever we see a full moon or eat mooncake! 

* * *

Thanks for your feedback! E-mail willsoonflourish@gmail.com or follow WilsonLeeFlores on Twitter, Facebook and http://willsoonflourish.blogspot.com/