By Zhu Yuan (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-09-29 07:24

Mooncakes are symbolic, their round shape resembling a full moon, epitomizing the wish for the reunion of loved ones. And so is the convention of sending such cakes to relatives or good friends immediately before the Mid-Autumn Festival that falls on the fifth day of August on the Chinese lunar calendar.

Many people my age, who have gone through the good old days of the 1960s and 1970s, cherish good memories of this festival.

Financially strained as most families were at the time, many would bake cakes of their own and of course receive cakes made by bakeries as gifts from relatives or friends. To some extent, the occasion provided an opportunity for family members to enjoy the good food they did not usually have.

That is, in my opinion, one of the major reasons we had festivals: to give ourselves an excuse to indulge in luxuries that we could not normally afford.

Along with good food, all family members sitting under a full moon to appreciate its beauty used to be an important family ritual that night. There were also some other parties for people to enjoy the festivity.

But I have begun to dislike mooncakes in recent years. To be specific, I dislike the way mooncakes are decorated and packaged, the way they are given as white elephants or as a twisted way to bribe superiors or connections.

The most expensive mooncakes can be as high as 310,000 yuan ($40,000) a case, and along with the mooncakes come digital video cameras, famous alcohol brands and other valuable gifts. It has become quite common for the package and decorations to steal the limelight of moon cakes either in their real value or appearance.

In this sense, the nature of mooncakes as a token of good wishes has been vulgarized, which has twisted the cultural connotation of this traditional festival and blasphemed the beautiful associations that come with the cakes.

Even worse is that using mooncakes for connections has resulted in the giving of the cakes throughout the days around the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Many families receive more cakes than they can consume, and thereby they have to give away the cakes as gift to their relatives or friends, who will do the same when they have more than enough.

The vicious circle comes to a close after many cakes have gone bad and have found their way to trashcans. It has become common for people to throw away mooncakes that have gone bad after the festival.

It is vanity that is the driving force behind this circle. Most who send cakes as gifts know well that they are nothing but white elephants, but they do not want to lose face or to be looked down upon by their relatives or friends as being cheap.

Those who receive more than enough mooncakes also have a self-contradictory mentality: on the one hand, they know that they can never consume even a small proportion of the cakes they have received; on the other hand, they have a list in their minds of people who have sent them cakes and people that have not.

We have a saying that a gift even as light as a goose feather coming from afar conveys affection as heavy as a mountain. This epitomizes how our ancient ancestors appreciated the gesture of friendship rather than the gift itself.

What is flowing now behind the circulation of mooncakes is much more complicated than friendship, we can hardly suppose that we are more civilized than our ancestors in this particular matter at least. Many can hardly take the festival with the mooncakes as they are.

Reciprocity in the form of flowing mooncakes for whatever purpose gives an impression of social harmony. But hidden underneath are inharmonious elements.

On the part of mooncake makers, they cater to the twisted needs of consumers by applying luxurious packages for mooncakes. Yes, they make a great fortune by doing so, but the waste of money from such packaging is shocking.

It is estimated that 400 to 600 trees of 10 centimeters in diameter are needed to make 10 million mooncake cases, and thousands of trees are needed per year to make cases for mooncake packages nationwide. Almost of all these cases are discarded after the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Tainjin Urban Sanitation Department estimates that several million cases are thrown away every year in the city.

Mooncake packages are much more luxurious than a decade or two decades ago although it was reported the repeated calls for frugality and restrictions on mooncake packages have reduced over-luxurious packages considerably this year.

We used to say the sending of postcards during the Spring Festival is a waste of resources. Apparently, mooncake packaging waste is far more serious.

As a sort of environmentalist, I argue with my wife every year about buying mooncakes with or without case packaging. I maintain that the cases are a waste, but my wife insists cakes without cases are not courteous enough to present to relatives as a gift.

We came to consensus this year that we would not send mooncakes to any relatives because they did not need them. Instead, we made phone calls to give them our festival greetings.

Fortunately, the Internet has provided us with the alternative of selling our extra mooncakes to those who need them. The effect of avoiding unnecessary waste from mooncakes and other festival gifts has outweighed the online business itself.

There are indeed some who do not receive such gifts and may need them or buy them for a price much lower than at the market to give their friends or relatives as a gift, or to just enjoy themselves.

Even so, in the long term we need to change our gift-giving habits toward a more civilized and frugal way of spending the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Let's try to let mooncakes be what they are and enjoy them as a token for the reunion with our loved ones.

(China Daily 09/29/2007 page4)