Mid-autumn mooncake / lantern festival

According to the Chinese lunisolar calendar, today is the 15th day of the eight lunar month, meaning that today we are celebrating the Mid-autumn Festival with mooncakes. Traditionally, mooncakes were either sweet with fillings of lotus paste or red bean paste with an enclosed salted duck egg yolk, or savoury with nutty fillings mixed with pieces of Chinese ham. But for quite a long time already, we've seen mooncakes with every inconceivable flavours as fillings. I quite welcomed them then but now, I don't quite like them.

Culturally, we Chinese have been praying to the Moon Goddess during this Mid-autumn Festival since time immemorial. When I was small and still living in Seang Tek Road, this was an occasion to look forward to every year. Come about nine o'clock at night, we would await my grand-aunt and her family. They would drive down from Ayer Itam to visit their elder sister - my grandmother - and we would then all troop upstairs to the open-air balcony at the back of the house.

I would follow them upstairs with my dragon paper lantern. My lantern was usually the grandest among my neighbours. I can say this about my parents. They always gave me the best lanterns every year and it was invariably designed as a dragon. Possibly it was the same paper lantern, kept and stored away till the following year, but I was too young to notice the difference or to care. If it was not displaying the lantern upstairs on the balcony, it would be out on the streets at night during the festival evening when the other kids in the neighbourhood would come out with their lanterns too. But as I mentioned, mine was always the dragon, and always the biggest and the grandest.

My grandmother would have already laid out a table there and placed the joss stick urn and candle holders on it. At 10 o'clock or so, she would lay out the mooncakes and mooncake biscuits and we would then spend the next hour or so worshipping the Moon Goddess. It being the night of the 15th day of the lunar month, the moon would be a round, bright disc in the dark sky. But occasionally, there would be thick cloud cover too and the moon couldn't be seen during that hour of worship.

But these prayers, if I remember correctly, tapered off soon after 1969. Maybe not immediately but it took a few more years before we stopped completely. By then, I had moved temporarily to Kuala Lumpur for my studies and lost touch with this moon worship. When I came back to Penang about four years later, my family were on the verge of moving to Ayer Itam because the Seang Tek Road house was about to be taken back by new landlords. Yes, we were being evicted on their pretext of redevelopment of the land on which their four houses, including our rented home, were standing. We moved to Ayer Itam and never prayed to the Moon Goddess during the Mid-autumn Festival ever again. (Note: The properties were never redeveloped. Until today, the four houses are still standing in Seang Tek Road.)

Even though as a family, we do not observe the worship anymore, this is a culture that is still widely popular among the Chinese community, particularly by the Chinese guilds. Only this morning, I was at the Swee Cheok Tong, the Quah Kongsi, to pay my respects to our resident deities and the ancestral tablets on the occasion of the Mid-autumn Festival. Apart from the usual array of fruits, roast meat and roast chicken, we offered boxes of mooncakes at the various altars. Unfortunately, missing this year were the mooncake biscuits; missing not by design but simply because the Treasurer forgot all about them! 😛

Anyway, tonight is the Mid-autumn Festival night. Would we be able to see the full moon tonight? I would say not likely. It will be more than clouds that will cover the sky. It will be the dreaded haze that had enveloped much of the country for at least a week now. No thanks to the irresponsible people of Indonesia who had been doing open burning on their plantations, the country is now more or less totally shrouded with a thick haze around the clock. Even rain cannot eliminate the haze. Only a change in wind direction can do it and none is expected till one or two weeks from now.

As long as the haze persists, there is little chance of seeing the moon tonight. And this is a great pity because tonight, at 8.21pm, the International Space Station is scheduled to streak right across the face of the moon. It will be very fleeting: the transit across the moon's face is expected to last a mere 1.26 seconds. Over in the blink of an eye. And will be missed by most Malaysians because of the inconsiderate Indonesians. Ah, well....