"THE Moon represents my heart", crooned the late songbird, Teresa Teng. For centuries, the Mooncake or Mid-Autumn festival has been celebrated in many countries around Asia with much love and interest.
When I was small, I recalled the moon being very big and bright during the festival night. However, today, it looks somewhat smaller and dimmer. Perhaps, it's because I'm bigger now and the sky is a lot hazier. Nevertheless, my childhood memory of the Mooncake festival remains dear and crystal clear.
On the night of the Mooncake festival, the full moon was so bright that it illuminated the whole compound of our house and neighbourhood. Despite the darkness, we could see each other's faces quite clearly. The night was also bright due to the many candles and lanterns being lit up around the neighbourhood.
My father commented that was the reason why no theft or robbery occurred during the Mooncake festival. However, I thought that perhaps the night was also peaceful because of the love in our hearts on this special night.
After dusk, my brothers and I would spend the whole hour to light up our house with candles. Every part of the house would be covered with candles, from the toilet at the back to the foyer at the front.
Even our plants and trees would be decorated with candles and lanterns. We climbed and lit up the branches of our trees. We stuck and lit up our candles all along our fence perimeter too. Our whole house was turned into a fairy tale wonderland.
LIGHT OF THE LANTERNS
Lanterns were an important part of the Mooncake festival. They came in different shapes, sizes and colours. Each of us would have our favourite lantern. They were all handmade with bamboo and transparent cellophane paper into shapes of different animals like the butterfly, fish, rabbit, and dragon.
Quite often, these paper lanterns would catch fire. To save money, we made our own Lok, Lok lanterns using Milo tins, with slits and rollers. When we pushed them, they would go round and produce a "Lok, Lok" sound. It was music to our little ears.
Years later, electric lanterns became more popular among children as they could switch on the blinking light and listen to music, bringing them much delight. Even old cultural practices like playing lanterns need to adapt to new technology.
Some of the newer lanterns now come in the form of Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Pokemon and Hello Kitty. It is a form of cultural hybridisation as the old Eastern culture is being infused with a Western and modern one. By looking at the kind of lanterns you played, I could tell what generation you belong to.
CHILDHOOD FAVOURITES
After lighting up our candles around the house, we would wait impatiently for father's instruction to pray to the moon goddess. After the prayer, our family would sit around the table with its offering of fruits and mooncakes to the Moon.
We'd have pomelos, yams, groundnuts, "Bat" nuts and others. The Tambun pomelos from Ipoh were especially sweet and juicy at this time of the year. Father taught us how to choose a good pomelo by striking it with our middle finger.
From the vibration, one could tell whether the pomelo was juicy or not. He also taught us a special way to cut and peel the pomelos in order to bring good tidings. The pomelo leaves were believed to chase away evil spirits.
As young children, my brothers and I loved the black batnuts as they reminded us of our favourite Batman. It is popular with the Chinese because its name Fook suggests luck. These batnuts or water caltrop have a very hard shell. Through the night, one could hear "Kok, Kok, Kok" as we busily hammered away.
Once, my brother hit the batnut so hard that he broke the wooden chair. Luckily, he had the good sense of hitting it on a chair and not the table. Otherwise, all the food would be scattered on the floor, a sign of bad omen on a festive night.
MOONCAKE MAGIC
The favourite of the night was our mooncakes. In the 1960s, there was only one variety available — the traditional baked lotus paste mooncakes. There was no snow skin or soft jelly mooncakes then. Neither was there any matcha, pandan, green tea or durian mooncakes.
Anyway, many of us could not afford a refrigerator in those days and keeping them fresh would be a problem. These traditional mooncakes came with either a single, double or no egg yolk at all.
The richer folks would go for the double egg yolk variety as the Chinese believe that good things should come in pairs as it was both auspicious and delicious. The folks then were not aware or conscious of health issues. Cholesterol problems were unheard of then.
My father would buy just a couple of mooncakes with no egg yolk for us. He did so not because of health reasons. We were living in the village then and could not afford the expensive mooncakes.
My mother would cut the mooncake into eight small segments to be shared equally by all of us. She believed that sharing a mooncake among the family was a symbol of unity and harmony.
However, she sliced some segments bigger than the others. Our elder sisters would get the bigger slices and my brothers and I would end up with the smaller ones. That was my first lesson on social hierarchy and equitable distribution.
We would be eating our favourite mooncakes while drinking Chinese tea. My father explained that the tea was a perfect complement to the mooncakes.
It seems a strange cultural hybridity that some people nowadays are eating mooncakes with Coca Cola. The cold and gassy Coca Cola would make the mooncake more sticky and oily inside our stomach, contributing to our discomfort and bloating through the night.
While happily eating the round mooncakes and drinking at the round table, we would be watching and marvelling at the bright and round moon. Roundness is auspicious as it signifies fullness and harmony. It's puzzling to see square mooncakes nowadays as the moon is always round. It just doesn't square with the fact.
My father pointed to a shaded spot on the moon and told us that the moon goddess Chang-er was staying with her jaded rabbit in a big cave there. He regaled us with the story of how Chang-er ascended to the moon.
Father also told us of how the Ming dynasty was founded in China. The folks then passed secret messages in their mooncakes in their overthrow of the Mongols of the Yuan dynasty.
My eldest sister also explained eruditiously that the full moon exerted a gravitational effect on our ocean tides. She added that it also caused some folks to become lunatic and turn into werewolves.
I wondered whether my sister was serious or joking. I guessed my sister's occasional mood swings could have something to do with the full moon too. As young boys, our immediate focus was the tempting food in front of us rather than faraway dynasties and esoteric ideas and concepts.
Often, my brothers and I were hungry for more mooncakes. After the festival, my father would buy more of them for us to indulge in. We had to strike a balance between indulgence and affordability.
The price of mooncakes dropped sharply after the mooncake festival as retailers and merchants tried to clear their stocks. It was an eye-opening introduction to the market dynamics of demand and supply for me.
EFFECTS OF THE MOON
After feasting with our family, my brothers and I would join our friends in the neighbourhood for a lantern procession around our village. There were some 80 of us altogether. We would be holding hands and walking, two by two, while singing wholeheartedly along the way, "Yuet kong kong, jiew day tong, lien sar man, chat bang long ..."
A few village elders would be leading our procession. Some young men and women would also hold hands and join in the procession. However, they always seemed to have other things on their minds.
Halfway through the procession, they would disappear altogether. On the way back, I would see some of them under the shady trees or behind the bushes. The moon must have made their hearts flutter and they decided to go away and enjoy it quietly in their own privacy. Perhaps, the moon really inspired some folks to become romantic, lunatic and neurotic too.
I recall once there was a lunar eclipse during the middle of the celebration of the mooncake festival. The sky suddenly became dark. We felt a sense of despair as the moon turned a scary bloody red colour.
According to Chinese legend, lunar eclipse was a bad omen as the heavenly dog was eating up the moon. As a young boy, I often wondered why there was a dog in heaven. I guessed he must be one angry and hungry dog.
The village folks would bang loudly on their pots and pans to chase away the heavenly dog. After an hour or so, the bright moon would re-appear. We would all breathe a collective sigh of relief and continue with our celebration.
Years later, I learnt that Christopher Columbus had cunningly made use of his knowledge of the lunar eclipse in 1503 to trick and subjugate the natives in Jamaica. Columbus attributed the reason for the lunar eclipse to the fact that his god was angry with the natives.
He predicted to the natives that his god would forgive them if they agreed to obey him (Columbus) and his men. True enough, the eclipse was over in a few hours and the moon re-appeared, much to the astonishment of the natives.
On July 20, 1969, Apollo-11 made its historic landing on the moon. The whole world watched as Commander Neil Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon and made his moon walk.
However, there was no sign of our Goddess Chang-er around then. Having caught wind of the imminent invasion by Apollo, Chang-er had probably already departed from the moon.
Since then, the worship of the moon had gone into an irreversible and inexorable decline. Many folks felt sad that the Greek Apollo had conquered the moon and chased away the Goddess Chang-er. Nevertheless, we all still remember our beautiful Chang-er with our mooncakes, pomelos and lanterns every year.
Gary Lit Ying Loong, a retired academic from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore is presently a Visiting Professor to some universities in Asia and Europe. Reach him at garylit33@gmail.com.