Subdued mid-autumn festival

A reminder that today's the day when the Chinese community shall be celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival with the traditional mooncakes. The festival falls on the 15th day of the Chinese eighth lunar month. 

Usually, the Chinese clan associations around George Town would openly celebrate with worship at the altars of their resident deities and also at the ancestral tablets, but the coronavirus pandemic has forced everyone to scale back their worship activities for yet another year. The situation is worse this time as the virus is still ravaging the community with hundreds in the city getting infected every day. When can it ever end?

In the good old days of the 1960s, there were lots of celebrations around George Town in connection with Mid-Autumn. The late CS Wong in his book A Cycle of Chinese Festivities wrote that according to the Sin Pin Jit Poh newspaper (星檳日報) of 27 Sept 1963: 

The Penang Peng Seah, which was then celebrating its 15th anniversary, held a tea party in the spacious flower garden of the Rubber Trade Association at Anson Road where amateur vocalists in Peking dialect regaled the audience with songs from the Peking repertory. The youths from the Hainanese Association in Muntri Street played harmonica numbers at their moonlit tea party, while members of the Hakka Association at Burmah Road entertained themselves with mooncakes and modern tunes. Finally, the Nightingale Musical Party went round the city in a decorated vehicle to serenade in the gay moonlight.

The 99.9 percent-illuminated moon at 9.45pm on 20 Sept 2021. The
astronomical full moon had occurred exactly one hour 50 minutes
earlier at 7.55pm.

As a young boy still staying in the rented Seang Tek Road house in the early 1960s, the night of this 15th day of the lunar month would be spent on the top floor at the back where there was an open-air terrace. The terrace faced East North East (ENE), meaning that we had an unhindered view of the rising full moon if the weather was clear. By nine or ten o'clock, it would be reasonably high up in the sky. Here, my family would set up a make-shift altar for worship, regardless of whether the full moon could be seen or not. There would be fruits and nyonya sweetmeat, and not forgetting the most essential offering of all, the mooncake. I would have lit my paper dragon-shaped lantern and gone parading around the neighbourhood. We would wait for the arrival of my grandmother's sister's family from Ayer Itam, then we would all troop upstairs to the terrace to commence worship of Ch'ang-O (嫦娥).

It's all rather inexplicably baffling because why should anyone worship a thief like Ch'ang-O, even though she was imbued with magic powers. According to legend, she fled to the moon after stealing an elixir of immortality that the Queen Mother of the Western Paradise, Hsi Wang Mu (西王母), had gifted Ch'ang-O's famous archer-husband, Hou-I (后羿).

Incidentally, Ch'ang-O is still honoured by the Chinese government today through their lunar exploratory missions, starting with Chang'e 1 and Chang'e 2 in 2007 and 2010 respectively, Chang'e 3 in 2013 and Chang'e 4 which softlanded rovers on the moon in 2019, and finally Chang'e 5 which returned to Earth with moon samples last year.