Legend of Hou Yi and the Moon Goddess Chang'e

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdkdEvng4II

A Guide to MOONCAKES!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbDlwM98FA4

4 Things You Need to Know About the Mid-Autumn Festival

By Julie Tha Gyaw | Date: September 3rd, 2014 | Category: Chinese Culture

Though much of China is still experiencing the last hot and muggy (mēn rè 闷热／悶熱) days of summer, the country has been gearing up for what’s known as the Mid-Autumn holiday for weeks now.

Festive lantern decorations are hanging in shop entrances and apartment building lobbies. Public transportation is filled with advertisements for various kinds of mooncakes. Travel agencies and websites are encouraging everyone to take advantage of the holiday to do some traveling.

Zhōng qiū jié is both a centuries-old Chinese holiday and an important one in modern Chinese culture. As someone who’s learning Chinese or is interested in China, you ought to know a thing or two about it, even if you’ve never been in China to experience it first-hand.

There are a lot of different traditions and stories behind the holiday, but as it is celebrated today in most of China, it can all be summed up by four main activities: admiring a full moon, giving and receiving mooncakes, getting together with loved ones, and taking a vacation.

Below are some basic explanations of those four things, along with some related Chinese language for you to add to your growing vocabulary, according to your level.

The Moon

The holiday falls on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the traditional Chinese lunar calendar, when there’s a big, bright full moon.

In the past, people would gather together to celebrate the harvest or to make offerings to the moon, but these days, most people just gather together with friends and family to enjoy the view of the moon together.

The moon being full and round is not only something to be admired, but also a symbol of unity and completeness.

Beginner Vocabulary:

• The moon

yuè liàng

月亮

• Full moon

mǎn yuè

满月

• Admire the moon

shǎng yuè

赏月

Intermediate Vocabulary

• 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar

nóng lì bā yuè shí wǔ

农历八月十五

• Wishing your whole family harmony and success!

zhù nǐ quán jiā hé mù yuán mǎn!

祝你全家和睦圆满

Up for a challenge!

• Check out this video of a beautiful Su Shi poem set to music and sung by Faye Wong, keeping in mind that the lyrics are entirely in classical, poetic Chinese!

• Learn this song, probably the most famous Chinese song about the moon

Mooncakes

This time of year, the whole country goes mooncake crazy!

Most people will buy a range of mooncakes during the season to give to the various people in their lives.

For that average acquaintance who doesn’t need to be impressed, you can buy a plain mooncake in basic packaging.

For someone who you need to impress, say, an important client, you can buy a box of super elaborate and pricey mooncakes in extravagant packaging.

Most people will receive so many mooncakes that they will still be eating them days after the holiday has ended, even if they are sick of them by then.

Many apartment and office buildings will also organize some kind of recycling initiative to help people feel a little less guilty about the amount of waste that’s associated with this tradition.

That's because even a mid-range mooncake is usually wrapped in a layer of plastic, put inside a plastic tray, and then covered in a cardboard box. Not to mention the amount of packaging that goes into making the high-end mooncakes look fancy is truly amazing!

Since they are round like the full moon, these traditional Chinese pastries are also a symbol of unity, and are eaten together with family and friends.

Not everyone especially likes traditional mooncakes, which are flaky crusts filled with lotus seed paste or red bean paste, but there are so many different varieties of fillings and crusts now that there is something to suit everyone’s palate.

Beginner Vocabulary

• Mooncake

yuè bǐng

月饼

• A box of mooncakes

yì hé yuè bǐng

一盒月饼

• To give (as a gift)

sòng

送

Intermediate Vocabulary

• Filling/flavor (of a mooncake or dumpling)

xiàn(r)

馅儿

• Lotus seed paste

lián róng

莲蓉

• Red bean paste

dòu shā

豆沙

Up for a challenge!

• Watch this video about Hong Kong’s “ice skin mooncakes,” which is part of the awesome TV documentary series called “A Bite of China.”

• See how much of the narration you can catch at the end of this mooncake advertisement

Time with family/loved ones

Similar to Thanksgiving in the U.S., Mid-Autumn Festival is one that’s best spent in the company of family.

“Reunion” is definitely a big theme of the holiday, and those who are living elsewhere will generally try to make it back home for a big reunion meal followed by gazing at the moon with their family.

A legend that’s told this time of year, the story of a champion archer named Hòu Yì (后羿) and his wife, Cháng É (嫦娥), is centered on this idea of reunion.

There are several different versions of the story, but the gist of them all is that Cháng É took an elixir that caused her to become an immortal living on the moon, forever separated from Hòu Yì.

He began offering her food and praying for her well-being during the Mid-Autumn full moon, and soon the tradition caught on.

Now Cháng É, the goddess in the sky, while she’ll never be reunited with her husband, receives offerings each year from those below who are fortunate enough to be with their loved ones.

Beginner Vocabulary

• Go home for the holiday

Huí jiā guò jié

回家过节

• Reunion meal

Tuán yuán fàn

团圆饭

Intermediate lesson

Check out Yoyo Intermediate Conversational Chinese Lessons 44 and 45 below to see interviews with Chinese people about how they celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival!

Up for a challenge!

• If you only ever learn one classical Chinese poem, it should be this one by Lǐ Bái about gazing at the moon and reminiscing about this home.

Vacation

Everyone gets just one day off of work or school in China for this holiday, but it’s usually at the beginning or end of a weekend, to make a three-day weekend.

And on some lucky years, Mid-Autumn Festival falls close to China’s National Day (October 1), giving people a whole week off.

Late summer or early fall is a great time to travel in China, so a lot of people take advantage of the time off and the good weather to go on a trip, often together with family.

Beginner Vocabulary

• Have a vacation from work/school

Fàng jià

放假

• To travel

Lǚ xíng

旅行

Intermediate Vocabulary

• How many days' vacation?

Fàng jǐ tiān de jià?

放几天的假?

• The weather is good for traveling.

Tiān qì shì hé chū qù lǚ yóu.

天气适合出去旅游.

Up for a challenge!

• Watch this news report and see how much you can catch about traveling for the holiday, airfare deals, and the possibility of seeing the moon from the plane on a late flight!

In Hong Kong where I live now, there are sure to be lots of vacationers visiting from around China for the holiday.

The day off here is actually on the day following the holiday, in order to give people a chance to stay up extra late to gaze at the moon and play with lanterns without worrying about getting up early for work or school the next morning.

So how will you be celebrating the holiday? Let us know in the comments section.

No matter where you are for the holiday, I hope you get a chance to enjoy the moon and wish your Chinese friends “zhōng qīu kuài lè!”

Chinese New Year is Nuts!

By Michael Hurwitz | Date: January 17th, 2014 | Category: Chinese Language

Chinese New Year is a time for fun, frivolities and some very unusual superstitions, but the changing social, migration and economic realities of modern China mean that bizarre and fascinating things happen when a huge portion of the world’s most populous country goes on the move. Train tickets (even the dreaded standing room cars!) are nigh on impossible to get for certain days, long-distance buses are packed to the gills, and even cheap flights are tough to find. So what, in short, is going on here?

First, a quick primer. "Chinese New Year" is just one of a handful of terms for the celebration of the turning over of the lunisolar calendar, which occurs in late January or early February every year. Other terms include Spring Festival (a.k.a 春节/chūn jíe, we’ll get to that in a minute) and 过年 (guò nián), which is technically a verb meaning to celebrate the holiday but often gets used in conversation to represent the event itself as well.

Doesn’t it seem weird that “Spring Festival” is celebrated during possibly the coldest part of the year? As a person who despises cold weather, is certainly does to me, and the reasoning behind it is interesting. The term “Spring Festival” only came into common use about 100 years ago, before which it referred to the first period, or 节气 (jiéqi), of spring on the lunisolar calendar. There are 24 jiéqi per year, and the calendar planners thought it wise to begin the year with spring, hence why “Spring Festival” takes place is possibly the coldest part of the year!

Anyway, there are such a huge number of ancillary festivals, important individual days within the holiday and other ways to celebrate Chinese New Year that it’d be folly to try to get into them all here. It’s essentially a two-week holiday with distinct individual celebrations on each specific day, but aside from common ones like setting off fireworks(happens on a huge scale in the Mainland and HK) and big family gatherings, specific foods are always eaten, often ones with names that sound like some sort of positive word.

People always eat fish, for example, because the word for fish, 鱼 (yú) sounds exactly like the auspicious word for extra excess or surplus, 余 (yú). It’d essentially be like Don Draper (played by actor Jon Hamm) fans eating ham at the start of every Mad Men season or something - I don’t know, maybe people do that anyway, I don’t watch that show (or eat ham). It’s a Chinese play on words, similar to the superstition surrounding the number four (four - sì (四 ) sounds like death - sǐ (死)), and the avoidance of many types of four-related activities and buildings.

Moving on, Spring Festival is far and away the most important holiday on the calendar in China and countries with large Chinese populations like Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. That’s in part because it’s been around for an extremely long time, some 4,600 years by most estimates, making it one of the world’s oldest continually-celebrated holidays. It’s importance also means that Spring Festival traditions, namely returning home and seeing family, are a big priority for most people, leading to the transportation chaos we mentioned earlier.

The result: People end up camping out in lines (in January, mind you) outside ticket offices like so many Cameron Crazies or Harry Potter fanatics (Potter Patrons?? Harry Heretics??) just for the chance to head home for a week or so. It’s all part of the largest regular human migration in history, known as 春运 (chūn yùn); an estimated 3.62 billion passenger journeys will be made during the multi-week travel period beginning this weekend, the highest ever and a difficult number to really wrap your head around. Let’s look a bit deeper at why the heck this happens.

First, holidays in China are weird. There are really only two breaks of consequence, known as “Golden Weeks” - huángjīn zhōu (黄金周), in which the central government mandates 7 consecutive days off for workers. One is for the October National Day holiday (though this only became official policy in 1999) and the other is for Chinese New Year, by a wide margin the most important day on the calendar. Not unlike Christmastime in the West, the tradition for Chinese New Year is to head home to relax with the family. For an enormous, developing country like China, though, travelling long distances is much more difficult than a simple jaunt down I-95 - hence the madness every January and February.

The second part of the equation here is the enormous internal migration that has happened in China over the last several decades. In short, industrialization and globalization came to China’s coastal, urban areas first, drawing hundreds of millions of people from that nation’s interior with the promise of city jobs, amenities, and much higher standards of living. As a result, much as with my hometown of Washington, DC, a huge portion of the residents of most cities aren’t actually from there, and often travel far and wide to return to their hometowns for the New Year holiday break. It’s like Thanksgiving and Christmas combined and then given 1990’s baseball players-levels of steroids - you gotta see it to believe it.

In my book, though, the most interesting part is how mammoth mega-cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou become relative ghost towns for a few weeks each winter - it is truly surreal to see places defined primarily by their energy and crowdedness suddenly become serene and quiet. Migrant workers, known slightly pejoratively as 外地人 (wàidì rén, “outside place people”), primarily work in industries like service and construction, and when they all head home you’ll see stores that are open 24/7 the rest of the year shut down entirely for Spring Festival - it’s the strangest thing. Shanghai goes eerily silent and gets noticeably cleaner as construction on the city’s myriad office and apartment buildings ceases. Tables at open restaurants in much of the city are easy to get, but here’s the kicker: tourist hot spots like the Bund, Yu Gardens and People’s Square are jam-packed. In this day and age, it seems, China has become a country where travel and tourism super cede even important traditions like Spring Festival.

端午节 May 5th

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TECNMoBVCFo