The Mid-Autumn Festival is a traidtional Chinese festival celebrated in the Chinese communities every year on August 15th of the Chinese Calender. It is said the moon is to be the brightest of the entire year on that day. The reason why I'm so interested in the festival is very simple -- I was born on that day. So let's talk about my birthday here.....

The legendary story begins like this: the architect Hou Yih built a beautiful jade palace for the Goddess of Western Heaven. Pleased by Hou Yih's work, the Goddess rewarded him with a potion that will grant him immortality. The potion was in two doses. The Goddess had warned him that the potion is to be taken two time separately, otherwise something tragical will happen. Hou Yih heeded the Goddess's warning and decided to take the potion later on in the night while finishing his work in the day. Hou Yih's wife, Chang O, found the potion and swallowed it whole. Instantly, she found herself becoming lighter and lighter and then she started floating towards the full moon. When Hou Yih had finally found out what happened, it was already too late. Chang O was banished to the moon to live the rest of her now immortal life forever in solitary on the moon as a punishment of her greediness. According to legend, her beauty is most radiant when the moon is the fullest of the year, which is the Mid-Autumn festival.

Nowadays, people celebrate the festival by eating mooncakes, the traditional worshipping of gods. Kids would go out and play with lanterns and candles, enjoying their one night of fire-playing without any punishments. But of course they will have parental or adult guidience with them most of the time. The Mid-Autumn Festival is lots of fun. People gather in parks and open areas with lanterns and candles lit everywhere. Some party and gather together to look at the full moon, which supposedly is to remind them of Chang O's mistake. Strangely, the Mid-Autumn Festival is not a holiday in Hong Kong. People did not think of making it a national holiday until too late. So they used the next day, which is August 16th, to be the national holiday for the Mid-Autumn Festival in Hong Kong.

A poem about the story of Chang O and Hou Yih.

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