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心血来潮, 写点英文博, 毕竟是鸟语,晚了一个半钟头, 让大家等了. 不好意思. 坚持天天更新, 绝对的.

On October 6^th, all of Chinese will be eating super sweet cakes loaded with chemicals while staring at the moon.  This is the moon festival, formerly a nice little festival for family gathering that has taken off on commercial steroids.  Moon Cake as a gift has become a must for business partners, particularly those you need to please or plead.  The fact that this year’s Moon Festival is part of National Day Holidays is disastrous for city traffic – the already crowded pre-holiday highway is double crowed with company drivers zipping around town delivering moon cakes.

My first case of moon cake crisis was in 1986. I had just finished college education in America and returned to China to work for a German trading company.  

“Our competitor is giving the most expensive moon cake this year. ” I was informed by my assistant. She is this sexy girl with long hair whom I always suspected of sleeping with our clients from Texas.

“Oh yeah?” I said, “ how much?”

“2000 yuan each, and it has real 24 karat gold glaze all over it.”

“Don’t you die from swallowing gold?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter, you can’t beat it, it’s the best moon cake this year.”

She was right, even if I had the budget, I couldn’t have bought a more expensive moon cake . I had to settle for a large tropical fruit basket, I lost face - fruit baskets just wasn’t going to get you more business in China. Later, in the roaring 90s, smart moon cake merchants figured out how to make moon cake with Rolex watch filling and I heard the most expensive moon cake came with a Rolls Royce. Failing to come up with a solution made me realize Western education is very impractical for success in China business.

When I started the magazine business, the moon cake situation became even worse when I started the magazine business in the late 90s. As a small local start-up, we are forced to write advertorial, i.e. paid for editorial, for advertising clients. I found myself forced to write how tasty it is to mix milk chocolate with egg yolk as a new way of celebrating the moon festival.  I got a scolding phone call from my mother: “What happened to you?” she demanded, “How can you have such bad taste in moon cakes?” I had to make a buck, so I took the scolding as long as the advertising money kept coming in.

This year, I am boycotting moon cakes. I didn’t give out any moon cakes; in fact, I don’t even want to see the moon. I am going to have moon cake lunch instead of dinner so I don’t have to see the moon. But yesterday, I went to a restaurant and was served a moon cake banquet.

“What is this?!” I screamed, “I hate moon cakes!”

“It’s the pre-festival moon cake dinner,” said the host, “don’t you know, it’s the fashion this year!”

I sighed and resigned myself to a 4 course moon cake dinner. There is no way to escape moon cakes in China, or so it seems.