Happy Mid Autumn Festival

"Mei feng jia jie bei si qin."

"One will extremely miss the family members when the traditional festivals are around the corner."

-Wang Wei, poet, Tang dynasty

Once, a very long time ago, the sky held 10 suns. It was so hot every day on Earth that the people could not grow crops and life for them was very bad. So Hou-Yi decided one day to shoot down 9 of the suns. He shot them down with an arrow and life on Earth became much better.

Hou-Yi was a hero on Earth, but he and his beautiful wife, Chang-E, were very poor. Chang-E was very resourceful though--since they did not have much food, she would make very small cakes for dinner and fill them with delicious flavors. These were her and Hou-Yi's favorite meals. 

As a reward for Hou-Yi's bravery, the Queen of Paradise gave him some magical pills. If he ate the pills, they would give him immortality--but he was warned that he mustn't eat them all at once or they would cause problems. Hou-Yi brought the pills home and showed them to his wife before hiding them away.

One day while Hou-Yi was working in the fields, robbers came into the house looking for the gift from the Queen of Paradise. Chang-E tried to get them out, and there was a scuffle over the pills. Frantically, Chang-E grabbed the pills and ate them all in one gulp. Immediately, Chang-E began to feel lighter and lighter--until she was floating in the air! She began floating higher and higher--up, up, up into the sky.

Chang-E begged the King of the Sky to let her go back down to earth, but the King of the Sky was angry with Hou-Yi for changing his sky and shooting down the suns. He cursed Chang-E to remain in the sky for all of her never-ending life. She moved into the Moon Palace, where she lived alone, except for a rabbit (?) and another man cursed to live on the moon, Wu Gang (Wu Gang had accepted a bet that he could chop down any tree--so he was sent to the moon to cut down the only tree there. He began cutting the tree with his ax, but the tree was so alive that it would immediately grow back where his ax had been before the next stroke. He was cursed to chop at that tree forever).

And so Hou-Yi was left to die alone on Earth while his wife was doomed to live forever alone on the moon. Once a year, though, Hou-Yi would make the delicious cakes that he and his wife had loved so much together and sit out on the 5th full moon of the season to gaze at the moon and offer the cakes to Chang-E. Chang-E also made the cakes up on the moon, and once a year would cast them down to the Earth in sadness. 

Moon cake

And now the Mid-Autumn Festival gives us 3 days of holiday. The Chinese people give moon cakes as gifts to each other and gather as a family for a large, delicious meal and then sit together as a family outside under the full moon. History says that proof of moon cakes can be found all the way back to 700 A.D. The moon holds a special role in Chinese culture--it's sacredness is used to illustrate a very sacred love: "She is a full moon in my heart," means that she is a true love. And so families take time on Mid-Autumn Day to gaze at the moon together and feel its light.

The legend of Mid-Autumn festival was taught to me by groups of my sophomore English majors. The above story is a compilation of all their lessons.