The Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival or Mooncake Festival, is a traditional festival celebrated in Chinese culture. Similar holidays are celebrated in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other countries in East and Southeast Asia, and, much like Thanksgiving in the US, it’s often a time of reunion with families.
For those of you who will be celebrating, we hope your Mid-Autumn Festival is filled with joy, prosperity, and delicious mooncakes!
Hua Bai
Manager, Digital Analytics
Mid-Autumn has always been my favorite festival ever since I was a kid, because my birthday happens to be the next day on the lunar calendar. Growing up near the northeast borderline of China, Russia, and Mongolia, I remember my biggest wish was to wear a skirt during Mid-Autumn Festival, as the temperature typically drops to 50F (10C) around that time of the year. Fast forward to the present, and I’m living somewhere much warmer, with an ocean apart from my families. However, as an ancient Chinese poetry goes, "the sea mirrors the rising moon bright; miles apart, our hearts share tonight (海上生明月，天涯共此時)." It’s true that no matter where I am, I’ll always be sharing the same full moon with those I miss the most.
Recommended listen: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang. It's getting a lot of attention on Chinese social media.
Yellowface
Jing Chen
Software Developer, Technology
I think I most closely associate the Mid-Autumn Festival with mooncakes and lanterns. When I was little, my family would often gather together with a few other friends in order to have a potluck party; afterwards, us kids would get to run around with our lanterns and then eat a dessert of mooncakes. Growing up in a neighborhood that didn’t have a lot of other Asian families, the Mid-Autumn Festival was a special time to gather together with kids from a similar cultural background to myself where we would just "get" each other.
Recommended listen: The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. As a sci-fi lover, it was super cool to experience a novel from a non-Western writer for the first time!
The Three-Body Problem
Jennifer Shin
Director of Global Community Impact, The Global Center for Urban Development
Chuseok, which is Korea’s Mid-Autumn Fest (and commonly attributed as Korea’s Thanksgiving), is historically meant to celebrate a bountiful harvest but has become a holiday to be spent with family and loved ones around delicious meals. Our family celebrates Chuseok with my mom preparing a small feast (while I am being totally unhelpful in the kitchen)—and though some of our relatives are far away, celebrating traditions like this keeps us connected to family near and far and to our culture. I also highly recommend songpyeon, rice cake filled with things like sweet beans, cinnamon, and nuts, which is one of the major foods prepared and eaten during Chuseok!
Recommended listen: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. Come for all of the feelings, as Michelle explores her family and deep loss, but stay for the descriptions of Korean food. It will make you run to H Mart.
Crying in H Mart
Christy Kwok
Senior Manager, Procurement
Taking place on the 15th day of the eighth month according to the lunar calendar, the Mid-Autumn Festival is rooted in thousands of years of culture and used to be focused on agriculture. But now, it’s mostly about reunions, lanterns, mooncake, and admiring the moon. Back home in Hong Kong, extended families will gather for a big dinner. As the night goes on, lanterns are lit and us children play while the adults sip on tea and nibble on mooncakes while chatting. Since the moon is always the biggest and roundest on Mid-Autumn Festival, I’ve always been told that it’s also supposed to symbolize the wholeness of a family reunion. Here in the States, we have a much smaller friends and family gatherings, but it still mostly consists of dinner and mooncakes while admiring the moon by the lake.
Recommended listen: Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. I’m a huge fan of historical fiction.
Pachinko
Toan Vo
Associate Director, Strategy and Corporate Development
In Vietnam, the Mid-Autumn Festival is also known as the Children's Festival or Tết Trung Thu. The main purpose of this festival in my home country is to bring joy to the kids through traditional customs and activities such as folk dancing, singing, or playing games. When I was a kid, my favorite Mid-Autumn Festival tradition was getting candies and toys from the adults in the family/village. The more, the merrier. The most popular toy during this festival is a star lantern (Vietnamese: đèn ông sao) made from bamboo sticks. In the last 10 years, I was not able to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival in Vietnam, but fortunately my wife always makes a lot of excellent mooncakes. We also try to take our son to the Mid-Autumn Festival organized by the local Vietnamese American community every year so he understands the true meaning of this event to all of us—an expression of love and care.
Recommended listen: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, the first-ever Vietnamese author to win a Pulitzer Prize. First, I listened to show support but got hooked by the storyline, a Vietnamese spy during the Vietnam War.
The Sympathizer
Wendy Luu
Director, Enterprise Risk Management
My favorite tradition is praying and offering food to our ancestors. One of my favorite childhood memories was when my parents explained to me why it was important to retain some of our cultural traditions after they moved to Australia as Vietnamese refugees. I remember I’d help my parents burn incense and place steaming bowls of rice, fruit, and mooncakes on the altar by our dining room. Dad would show me where we could place burned incense around the entrances to our house to guide our ancestors back home. I would watch the steam from the rice bowls and incense smoke gently waft into the air as I imagined our ancestors transcending back to the Earth’s plane to be with us for a brief period and sharing sentiments of their past lives while enjoying the food offered. After our ancestors finished eating, my mum would cut up the mooncakes into small triangles. I loved biting into each one, trying to guess each flavor with my siblings.
Recommended listen: All That's Left Unsaid by Tracey Lien. This novel is set in my hometown of Cabramatta, Sydney, Australia. I loved how the author portrayed the protagonist’s challenges in assimilating to the Australian culture while navigating her upbringing as a child of Vietnamese refugees.
All That's Left Unsaid
Ada Lau
UX Director, Web Growth
Growing up in Hong Kong, the Mid-Autumn Festival began a week early, where my family began preparing for the celebration with home-cooked food and decorations. My mom would cook a lotus root dish with braised duck and Chinese mushrooms, a wok-fried garlic bok choy, and an aromatic jasmine rice with Chinese sausages. Snacks would be on the table throughout the day with Chinese sugar melon candy and walnuts. It was important for my dad that we, as a family, celebrate every festival and holiday together by sharing a wonderful meal. Mooncake was the highlight of the festival, where I could only eat half of a mooncake because of how big one traditional mooncake was. But as time went on, new and innovative mooncakes were introduced, and the last mooncake I had was a bunny shaped ice-cream mooncake.
Recommended listen: Fake Dates and Mooncakes by Sher Lee, a wonderful rom-com about an aspiring chef who enters a mooncake-making competition and discovers love along the way.
Fake Dates and Mooncakes
Eddie Chen
Product Manager, Audible on Amazon
Because a lot of my family is scattered throughout the US, Mid-Autumn Festival was a time for our family friends to gather. Our families switched off hosting large parties, complete with a potluck, mooncakes, and karaoke. The parents would also play cards (Tractor) late into the night. The kids would gather and play video games, like Super Smash Bros and Mario Kart. Some of these friends who I made from these parties remain some of my best friends to this day. Funnily enough, our hangouts now consist of the stuff our parents used to do.
Recommended listen: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. It’s a combination of friendship, love, and video games. Amazing listen!
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Cynthia Chu
CFO and Growth Officer
Growing up in Hong Kong, the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節) was something I looked forward to each year. It is usually a time for big family gatherings with great home-cooked meals. A fun time for children who get to stay up late at night playing with colorful lanterns (lit with real candles), especially going to see lantern exhibitions with hundreds of beautiful creations. It is also a special time of year for one of my favorite desserts—mooncake! Reflecting on it now, I think the best of it were the fond memories I had with my sister and parents.
Recommended listen: Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See. It is inspired by the true story of a female physician in 15th-century China, when being educated was not something society expected of women. It is a captivating story of women helping women and how some of them broke from tradition to achieve a better lives for themselves and their families.
