Lantern night

As a Chinese kid, besides Chinese New Year, the Lantern Festival or Mid-Autumn Festival was the other most looked-forward-to event. It's a time to play with candles, matches and eat lots of mooncakes. Thinking back, mooncakes back then were not as sophisticated as today. The flavours were simpler. We didn't have snow skin, nor did we have pandan or coffee flavours. The popular filling back then was hak tau sar (black sweet bean paste), often with gua chi (white melon seeds) for added crunch. Lin yong (lotus seed paste) filling, so common today, was considered something of a luxury. Similarly, the more expensive mooncakes were filled with yolks (of salted duck eggs). One other expensive mooncake would be ng harm kum twoi. This one has a filling made up of five different types of nuts - all compacted together with sticky malt syrup. It has twoi inside too, which is Cantonese for ham. If you fancy nutty brittle, this is the one for you. It has a complicated citrusy/cinnamony taste - the reason why I liked it so much. The reason could be that I'm Cantonese. Fortunately, this nutty mooncake has survived me growing up and can still be found. But because of its long list of ingredients, finding an authentic one can be a challenge. But trust me, it is quite worth the effort! Having grown up with the black tau sar with melon seed mooncake, I'd try to find it always at the shops. But it's a rarity due to the proliferation of the lin yong types. Has it become extinct? One fix is to buy the Teochew ones. Unlike normal mooncakes, they are as big as a pancake and has flaky skin instead, sort of like a big tau sar bang (tau sar piah in Hokkien). Aside from the main filling of black tau sar, it also has sugared winter melon strips and white sesame seeds. It's not exactly the same but by itself, pretty special. Especially if you have a sweet tooth. In terms of packaging, the mooncakes in those days were no-nonsense packed. They often came in a hexagonal shaped box with a red label and silver writing. The top of the box might be hexagonal but it's actually a square box that held four mooncakes. The base tray was white. Instead of a box, some mooncakes were simply roll-wrapped in white paper or grey tracing paper and stuck with a large label. Usually the soft and flaky skinned types came packaged this way. Today, the mooncakes are so extravagantly packaged that you think the designers are trying to outdo each other for a mooncake Nobel. I've seen some decorated with jade, ancient coin and knotted tassels - all very culture Chinese. Perhaps a bit too much. Then there was this long box with drawers for each mooncake. I am not sure.... Are we supposed to keep 'em mooncakes for very long? The boxes all come in fancy compressed cardboard. They do cost money to make and dispose of. I think time and money could be better spent. Don't get me wrong, I think some of the new mooncake boxes are quite unique and beautifully designed. My family enjoys recycling and so my mom would usually keep the better designed boxes as containers for her jade collection or sewing works. I must say the designs complement her oriental treasures very well! One unique mooncake box that I keep is a metal one with floral designs. It looks ordinary but inside is a musical box mechanism. When wound, it plays Ye Liang Dai Piao Wo De Xin or The Moon Represents My Heart - very appropriate during Mid-Autumn. It's an evergreen by Teresa Teng and is one of my favourite tunes. During this festival, it was also common to be eating steamed mini yams and lin kok (osbeck horn nut). Us kids enjoyed peeling the yams and dipping them in sugar after each bite. The lin kok, shaped like bat, was meant as a symbol of good fortune. I've always found the shaped to be interesting. The flesh is also quite nice, tasting a bit like chestnut but with the texture of soft macadamia. My mom also made a spinning toy out of this lin kok for us kids to play with. As a child, Lantern Festival starts as soon as you see the lanterns in the provision shops. When that happens. we would pester our parents to go buy one. In those days, we did not have plastic battery operated ones - they were all handmade. The materials used then were bamboo strips and cellophane. Designs were usually handpainted on. At times, paper cutouts were used. My mom would delay buying them, which was quite annoying. However, with so many kids in the family, impatient hands usually got 'em damaged before Lantern Night. So she was quite right to hold back her purchase. At the shop, looking up at the array of colourful cellophane lanterns hanging from the ceiling, it was like ogling at a sea of crystal. Beautiful as well as meserising. When buying lanterns, we would buy the candles as well. It's comforting to know that the candles you find today comes in exactly the same box design as in yesteryear. We needn't buy matches because back then everybody used either the stick matches that came in a box or the paper ones that came in a matchbook. I liked using the matchbook because all the spies on TV used them, often to convey covert information. As a kid during Mid-Autumn Festival, one could not escape hearing the story of The Lady and her companion Rabbit in the moon at least once. The story of how maiden Chang Er sacrificed herself by drinking some elixir of life and floating to the moon. (The rabbit didn't drink the elixir, so make up your own backstory for the furry one). There's also the story of how, during the Yuan Dynasty, the mooncake was baked as a tool of communication to spread word of revolt. That's how the Ming Chinese overthrew the Yuan Mongol rulers. It reminds me of Arab Spring - of how certain Middle East rulers were overthrown recently by revolters using Twitter. So, the mooncake was Twitter in its day? Did these Arab revolters take inspiration from the mooncakes's history? Before the Yuan dynasty, the Mid-Autumn Festival was actually a much simpler (and probably less expensive) affair. It was after the Yuan Period that the mooncake came into being. I bet the Hong Kongers are regretting it now. They throw away some one million mooncakes a year! Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated on the 15th day of August in the Chinese calendar. That's when the moon is full. We often refer to that night as Lighting the Lantern Night, or simply, Lantern Night. In my childhood during Lantern Night, the backlanes of Geylang would come alive with children carrying their lanterns. It's kind of compulsory to leave the house and go walk around with one (maybe the adults just wanted us out of the house). This would happen usually after an early dinner. The older children were then tasked to take the lead and look after the younger and less experienced ones, maybe because candles and matches were involved. Dripping wax can also be painful too! Lanterns were typically in the shapes of animals like the rabbit, rooster, dragon - creatures from the Chinese zodiac. Kids would of course choose their own zodiac animal. Outside of the zodiac, a popular animal was the goldfish. Superheroes like Superman, Batman and Ultraman were also popular lantern templates. (It's terrible these days to see lanterns that are nothing but plastic toys with a light in them. It's all very ugly and not in the spirit of things. I think the person who came up with this idea owed a few generations of kids a big apology.) If safety was a concern, parents could make the kid carry the paper accordion lantern instead. The candle flame inside would flicker about less, so it's safer. As the lanterns were all handmade, shopping for a lantern was like shopping in an art gallery: You find the best piece of handiwork that appealed to you. It didn't cost much because the materials were cheap. Schools often took the opportunity to make them during art class time. But the students would make the frames out of wire instead of bamboo strips. For some, it was a challenge to make both sides of the lantern equal. A simple method is to define the shape on say, plywood, and then put nails around it. This would act as a frame. Then by bending wire against the nails, you'll end up with a piece of wire shaped like whatever it was that you had defined/drew/nailed up. With such a frame, you could then repeat the same shape over and over again, getting the same exact replica. For the adults, what's the Lantern Festival all about? Simply put, it's about eating mooncakes, drinking Chinese tea and chatting with friends. If you had a literary bent, you would recite Tang poetry or play a kind of couplet guessing game. In Geylang, the adults would eat mooncake, drink tea and chat over a game of mahjong. My neighbourhood without the sound of mahjong is like a field without the sound of crickets. Very unnatural. For children, the festival was also a great chance to play with fire. A chance to learn how to light a match. And a chance to learn the pain of seeing your precious lantern go up in smoke! As you might know, each lantern was lit by a small candle, so if you did not put your candle up properly, it will lean and start a fire. You then learn very quickly that cellophane burns with alarming speed. Sometimes in all the excitement, kids would bump into each other or trip, crushing their lanterns beneath them. Families often bought extra so the fun would not be extinguished too soon for some poor kid on Lantern Night. (If you see a kid crying and holding an empty stick, you'd know what had happened.) And I think if you ask anybody, they would be able to recall the very first lantern they bought or burnt. Such was the psychological trauma. But we kids loved it then. And having brought the lanterns home, we would often hang them by the bedpost and admire them till Lantern Night arrived. In Singapore, over the years, children from the other races and cultures have joined in the fun. It's a great thing to see. Of course, Lantern Night was more than just about lanterns for kids. With matches and candles in hand, it was also time to take revenge on the creepy crawlies. Ants got it worst. Children would be hunched and squatting beside some drain dripping wax on their trail. One time, during Lantern Night, we found a dead dog in the alley. Its body was already badly decomposed and with our lanterns held over it, we could see maggots swarming inside the carcass. We burnt maggots then. But it got too gruesome and so decided to tell an adult about it. That night, we cremated the poor creature in a drain, piling on newspapers to the already turpentine-soaked carcass. From our third storey apartment, the sight of children with candlelit cellophane lanterns dotting the backlanes was special. You'd get tints of red, blue, green, yellow, etc., dancing off the walls. As a kid, it made you reflect on the more quiet and beautiful moments in your life. Years later, I would have a flashback of that backlane scene. I was in Taiwan up a mountain on military training, digging a very nasty trench that refused to be dug. After two days, we didn't even reach knee-deep. The problem was that the area was filled with large stones and rocks. Compounding the situation were some very tough tree roots that seemed to snake everywhere. We broke so many changkuls (hoes) and spades that we were ordered to stop. The army couldn't afford it anymore! During this break, I wandered off to a comrade's location. His was further aside and looked down the valley. There at the bottom, around a small pond were a group of kids. They had with them their Mid-Autumn Festival lanterns. As the wind blew, their candles flickered. The whole group looked like fireflies instead. It was a special and magical moment and reminded me of a similar time a decade ago in the backlanes of Geylang. That night, we were all given a special snack of red bean soup. There were no mooncakes but it did not matter. The full moon was out and we all felt connected back home. That was good enough.