Mooncake (happykiddo / Flickr)
Eat (Mooncakes), Pray (for Auspice), Love (to Travel)
By Kiril Bolotnikov
This year, Mid-Autumn Festival falls on September 27. To celebrate this holiday, we asked Kiril Bolotnikov, a junior at NYU Shanghai, to report on how international students celebrate this Chinese holiday. Here is his story.
As I bit through the mooncake’s flaky pastry into tender pork and sauce, still sore from the day’s biking, I reflected on my experiences with the Mid-Autumn Festival over the years as a student of the Chinese language, and later as an international student in China.
As an international student, I look at the Mid-Autumn Festival from four different angles: the mythical story behind this holiday, the actual celebration today, the travel, and the food.
The Myth Behind the Mid-Autumn Festival
The Mid-Autumn Festival rises out of an ancient myth of Houyi and his wife, Chang’e. There are many different versions of this story, but one of the more romantic ones goes like this: Houyi was a legendary archer—so when ten suns rose over the earth one day, bringing widespread disaster to the people, it was Houyi who shot down nine of them, leaving just one behind to light and warm the earth. Read on! |
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