Same Moon , Different Feeling

Caiyun Liang

Draft 3  

    Festive occasions, more than ever, make one think of our dear one's far away. The Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the four most important Chinese festivals. Like harvest time in other countries, the Mid-Autumn Festival actually began as a thanksgiving celebration, honoring the Soil God and the Crop God. It is the time that every family member comes together and shares happiness. Chinese families will feel lonely if they cannot enjoy the festival with their family and relatives. I lived China for thirty- six years before I moved to Chicago. I love the traditional Chinese culture so much that I miss my Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival every fall in Chicago. I have a particular nostalgia for all traditional culture of China, especially at Mid-Autumn Festival.

     All my nostalgia is caused by my longing for holidays, which includes the national holidays, because I can’t enjoy this holiday properly in Chicago. In China, a month or two months before Mid-Autumn Festival, the Chinese people will prepare for the celebration. They will buy moon cakes, which are a Chinese dessert traditionally eaten during the Mid-Autumn Festival and some fruit to bring when visiting their family or their friends. It is a good opportunity to make wishes for each other. In China most of people have three-day long national holidays to enjoy the festival. It was a happy time for me because I could relax by myself after busy days of work. I could enjoy the moments with my family and friends celebrating the holiday. It was a especially important holiday for me because it helped me counteract my oppressive and stressful job.

     Despite the importance of holidays, the warm feelings about traditional Chinese customs make my nostalgia even stronger. Chinese people have been celebrating this festival since ancient’s times, so it really has a long history. I always spent the festival with my family before I came to Chicago. We would eat the moon cakes on that day, and we had a big meal for dinner with delicious meat and seafood. We ate together and talked with happiness. After we finished our dinner at about eight o’clock, we prepared another important event. My mom put some moon cakes on the table. The older people would drink some tea, and the children would drink juice. Family members came together again and watched the beautiful moon and enjoyed the fantastic moon cakes. The moon is the symbol for pureness and goodness, and there is a famous song in China called “The Moon Can Express from My Heart”, so you can understand how Chinese people love the moon from this song. I thought this celebration was one of the most valuable things in the world. Accompanying the celebration, there are additional cultural practices, such as carrying brightly lit lanterns, lighting lanterns on towers and burning incense in reverence to deities including Change’s, which is the beautiful woman who resides in the moon.

     The above two main aspects of Chinese customs can be experienced in Chicago by a few Chinese people, but family members and friends don’t have time to gather together to admire the bright moon. For instance, most Chinese people are busy with their business and they have no time to gather. It is because of the work schedule that Chinese people have ignored the festival. Even if the holidays and celebration tare negligible, a sense of history and tradition may not be. When we are in Chicago, we also will eat the moon cakes, but the taste is lost without the tradition. We will also admire the moon cakes, but now family and friends are apart, we can only bless each other in our hearts.

    Moving to Chicago has been a wonderful and rewarding experience and I have learned many interesting things here, but I have given up so much more by leaving my beloved China. My cultural holidays seem empty and hollow now. On this holiday, I did sat around a big table under the tree, ate the moon cakes and admired the full moon in the sky, but the feeling has changed, because I missed my family and my friends in China. They were only a shadow of the memories I enjoyed in China.