In the past few weeks, whenever I catch myself grumbling about the midday California sun, relentless even in late September, I quickly remind myself: thank God I’m not back in Shanghai, where the humidity clings like a second skin. It slicks your hair to your temples until you feel half-dissolved.
Or maybe I should say: thank God Houyi shot down nine of the 10 suns once upon a time, saving humanity from drought and famine. That’s the story I grew up with, Chinese mythology stitched into the fabric of how I learned to understand the world. It must’ve been unbearable with that many suns.
But where there’s Houyi’s sun, there’s also Chang’e’s moon. One myth leads to the other, day folds into night, and before I know it, the seasons have slipped forward. As dusk settled over the sky this brisk October night, I realized that the moon’s out early — a waxing gibbous, pale and patient. I thought of Chang’e, the Moon Goddess, and then, only then did it hit me. The Mid-Autumn Festival is right around the corner and I had almost forgotten.
I never paid much attention to this holiday when I was still back in China, before I came to college. It signified a three day weekend, sure, but the compensatory working system, or tiaoxiu, ensured we paid it back the following week by going to school for an extra day. Only after leaving did I realize how much those quiet routines had shaped me. From afar, I felt a pang of cultural dissonance, the distance sharpening habits I once took for granted into something tender and irreplaceable.
The story goes that Chang’e was the wife of the heroic archer Houyi. As a reward, Houyi received an elixir of immortality, which Chang’e swallowed alone to keep it from falling into the hands of a villainous apprentice. She ascended to the moon, where she still resides. Each year, on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month — Mid-Autumn — people honor her by offering food, hoping to catch a glimpse of her face in the full moon. This year, it fell on October 6.
On this day, it’s supposedly a tradition to share mooncakes with your loved ones while moongazing after dinner. Yet, many families rarely bought mooncakes just for themselves, mine included. Those were reserved for others — relatives, business partners or anyone important. You would present them with a lavish box, the lid fringed with golden lining. Even then, it was more a gesture of respect and generosity than celebration.
Now, in the States, I find myself circling back to Mid-Autumn. I never imagined how tangible my identity as a Chinese and Taiwanese international student would be until I got here. As we inch toward October 31st, every Target aisle is bursting with pumpkins, skeletons and candy corn, things that were never part of the landscape back home. Meanwhile, I still get push notifications from Chinese apps reminding me of mooncake gift discounts, or new boba flavors released just for the holiday.
I can almost picture the ancient supermarket around the corner from our apartment complex, with a pyramid of mooncakes stacked by the entrance right now. When home — and everything it holds — is so far away, it’s hard to grasp its realness. It becomes slippery in my mind, like trying to hold water in my hands. In a way, I feel like a child struggling to grasp object permanence.
Sometimes I wonder: what exactly am I doing here, all the way across the Pacific, studying in a foreign language and trying to advocate for all my intersecting identities in ways that often feel abstract?
As a Writing & Rhetoric (and perhaps sociology) major, most of what I write and research ultimately serves my own curiosities. Still, I can’t help thinking of Sisyphus, a figure from Greek mythology punished by the gods tasked with rolling a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down each time, a frustrating and futile endeavor. Just like him and his boulder: am I really shifting anyone’s views on race, gender or identity by writing about them in English? In America?
If I am, it would have to be people from English-speaking backgrounds. The people who might understand my actual perspective best, as those back home are locked out by the language itself. So what are my goals really? And how much of that ambition is bound up with my identity as an international student here, as someone whose presence always feels provisional?
Why am I not back in China or Taiwan, where activism might feel more immediate, where my foreign identity wouldn’t color every conversation about belonging?
These feelings extend beyond myself. Every now and then, I see elderly shoppers at the Asian supermarket — lugging vegetables in their rolling carts, debating soy sauce brands, picking up jars of Lao Gan Ma priced 10 times higher than at home. I start to wonder what brought them here. What trade-offs once felt worth the distance? After decades of building lives abroad, do they still think of their home countries the way I do, or have they already made peace with where they are?
Why am I here? Why is anyone here, there, all existing at once?
“ The moon is hanging above us right now, and somewhere up there, Chang’e is gazing down at us buzzing about. ”
But think about it. The moon is hanging above us right now, and somewhere up there, Chang’e is gazing down at us buzzing about. Beyond her, planets spin quietly in their own orbits, and farther still lie realities we can’t even begin to comprehend. Maybe no one can truly answer these questions, and in the end, our answers to these contemplations are probably as varied as the fillings of mooncakes. Red bean paste for sweetness and salted egg yolk for completeness. We live such distinct lives, and you’ll never even graze a billionth of the ones that exist, have existed or will exist in the world.
So despite all the physical, emotional and temporal distance during Mid-Autumn, when people look up at the same full moon from different corners of the world, I’ve started to feel a strange sort of closeness.
Mid-Autumn can’t quite be about family reunions anymore; I’m too far away, and I never appreciated the ease of togetherness enough when I had it. It’s become more about realizing that familiar concepts surrounding traditions don’t vanish when I move, and existential crises about purpose or identity don’t have to feel so panicky.
I can be in a Halloween aisle in Claremont and still get a push notification for new taro-latte-flavored mooncakes in Shanghai. I can be an international student and still try my best to get my voice out there in English. That duality becomes its own kind of belonging, surpassing the cultural dissonance.
Truly, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, maybe even holding a mooncake.
The holiday might have felt like just another long weekend back home. But here, I’m musing that no matter how scattered our lives are, no matter how much “purpose” we serve or how much we feel that we “belong,”we’re all somehow under the same full moon.
Happy (belated) Mid-Autumn Festival!
Rochelle Lu SC ’28 is from Shanghai, China and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Her favorite mooncake flavor is red bean paste with salted egg yolk.