mooncake madness

means mid-autumn festival. yesterday was zhongqiu jie, and today is the official holiday. the name in chinesei'm not quite sure why, but it's according to the lunar calendar, which is generally a mystery to me, so i'll just roll with it. people also call it yuebing jie, or mooncake day/festival. this is probably a more accurate name because for the week prior beijing turned into a ridiculous mooncake madhouse.

a typical mooncake or two

i'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that mooncake is modeled after the full moon of zhongqiu jie. the outside is a dense and somewhat greasy cookie-type material. inside is one a variety of flavors, though i think the classic is a red bean paste, sometimes with a solid egg yolk center.

in full hallmark spirit, the mooncake industry has convinced people that giving mooncake is a social responsibility and crucial to maintaining good relationships. therefore, everybody is giving everybody mooncake. all last week were messengers with bikes piled high of the stuff. most come in fancy boxes of four or five delivered in colorful bags that produce a fairly significant amount of waste, despite government urging to reduce and go with "green packaging."

i ended up with two boxes myself. one my company gave to every employee. the other i got as a kind of bizarre reward for participating in a fire drill. my friend charley commented that giving everybody in the office a box of mooncake could be a kind of social experiment. people just went crazy for the stuff and a black market economy developed. i was out of the office one afternoon and when i came back i discovered that a coworker had traded away a whole box of mine, mostly to charley, who apparently operates on a don't-ask-don't-tell policy when dealing in mooncake.

the haagen-dazs ice cream store in my building transformed into a mooncakedispensary for the second half of last week and the ice cream mooncake proved extraordinarily popular. workers were continually shuttling in stacks of styrofoam boxes, while employees in the store made ten foot high forts out of the individual mooncake boxes. when i left work on friday night around 7:30, there was a line stretching around the building.

in general, mooncake is mostly ok. it's one of those things you only eat once a year and so when it comes around you think it's the best thing in the world. by the time the actual holiday rolls around, however, it's time for it to go.