SEPT 26 — I’ve often wondered why we eat mooncakes during Mooncake Festival. Apart from the name (if it were called the Mee Hailam Festival, for example, we would be eating something else), there is no real reason for this custom as far as I can tell.
If you Google “mooncake festival”, you’ll no doubt find a good few tales surrounding it — most famous being the story of Houyi and Chang’e.
For the benefit of those of you not in the know, the story is basically about this couple who were banished from the Kingdom of Heaven. To make a living, Houyi took up archery and got quite good at it. At that time, there were ten suns in the form of three-legged birds. One day they decided to circle the earth together, causing it to burn. The Emperor of China commissioned Houyi to shoot them all down except for one (he’s probably regretting the loss of income from solar energy now).
So Houyi sorted it out and in return the Emperor gave him a pill for eternal life. The emperor advised him not to take it immediately but instead to prepare himself by praying and fasting for a year before taking it. Houyi took it home and hid it in the rafters, but while he was out one day, Chang’e found it and ate it. She then realised she could fly.
When Houyi came home and started to yell at her for eating his magic pill, she flew off to the moon. When she got there, she coughed up half the pill and in so doing lost her ability to fly. So she bullied a rabbit into making her another pill so that she would be able to return to earth/her husband.
Rabbits have never been known for their pharmaceutical abilities, so Chang’e is still stuck on the moon. Because of that, every year on the fifteenth day of the full moon, Houyi goes to visit her and we on earth celebrate this “beautiful love story”. (That’s how the moon cake packaging describes it anyway.)
But what are we celebrating exactly?
A greedy, disobedient wife who is cruel to animals? A husband possibly guilty of domestic violence in previous confrontations (why else would she have flown off just like that?) who is also cruel to animals (shooting rare species of birds)?
On the other hand, folk tales can’t be trusted 100 per cent so maybe it was a beautiful love story, designed to inspire lovers to fly off to the moon so their other halves could chase after them. They do say the best part of a relationship is the pursuit and seeing as we have landed on the moon, it’s not an unrealistic distance. Frank Sinatra certainly thinks it’s a good idea.
If that’s the case, eating mooncakes definitely does not make sense. A lotus seed paste mooncake contains 716 calories and if it has one salted egg yolk it’s 790 calories. Two salted egg yolks means 890 calories, and with four salted egg yolks, you’re looking at a whopping 975 calories! How the hell do you expect to fly off to the moon (in as romantic a fashion as Chang’e) if you’re piling on the pounds before the fifteenth?!
So the tale of Houyi and Chang’e does not explain the consumption of mooncakes, but there is another story that sort of does. However, there are no historical records to prove it (Wikipedia says so, so it must be true)
In the 14th century, there was an uprising in China against the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty. As group gatherings were banned, it was impossible to make plans for a rebellion. Because the Mongols did not eat mooncakes, some dude came up with the brilliant idea of hiding notes inside mooncakes (The notes read: “Kill the Mongols on the 15th day of the 8th month!”, but in Chinese characters of course).
They then distributed thousands of mooncakes to Chinese residents in the city, informing them of the date of the rebellion. On the night of the Moon Festival, the rebels successfully attacked and overthrew the government, and the Ming Dynasty was established.
So to the untrained brain, this would explain why we eat mooncakes. But if you ponder a bit more, by eating mooncakes we’re really commemorating the role played by mooncakes during the rebellion, aren’t we? If that’s the case, why aren’t there any notes inside our mooncakes today?
Ah, the mystery remains!
As a pragmatic person, I’ve thought about it and found that the reasons are probably quite simple:
1) Mooncake manufacturers can’t be bothered with the hassle. If one company started sticking to the story, they would probably have people reporting them to the Ministry of Health or Consumers’ Association for inserting strange pieces of paper into food products/food poisoning etc. Tree huggers would probably also come after them as paper that can go in a mooncake and still be readable is probably non-biodegradable.
2) It’s also pretty pointless. I mean, if somebody gave me a mooncake with a note inside it that read “Kill the Mongols on the 15th day of the 8th month!”, I probably wouldn’t know what to make of it. That, or I would make a police report. Which brings us back to point number 1 — hassle for mooncake manufacturers.
3) Even if the note was still relevant and we all knew what it meant, to assume that everybody is free to kill Mongols on the fifteenth day makes this method of communication impractical and quite rude in this day and age.
So as it stands, there is still no real reason for this custom. In fact, thinking about it has put me off eating them altogether. And I’m probably not the only one who thinks eating mooncakes is so 1992. Kids are brighter these days and get bored easily. So if mooncake manufacturers want to remain in business, their marketing guys had better come up with newer and more relevant stories to cater for inquisitive minds of the future.
* The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist.
