Hong Kong and Taiwan chapters combined to celebrate the mid-autumn festival with games and moon cake creations on Sept. 17.
As students entered the ballroom, a pattern was drawn on their hand separating them into four teams: sun, moon, star and rabbit. The teams all mixed and mingled, enjoying themselves as they molded sweet dough into a ball around egg yolk custard. Students then pressed the ball into a wooden mold, which created the intricate moon cake shape.
Esther Tsz Chin Lam, a freshman studying international cultural studies from Hong Kong, said the legend of the moon cake tells the story of when Mongolian rulers controlled the Chinese. “They wanted to rebel and take back China. They wanted to gather on a day, but the foreigners wouldn’t allow it. So they put a notice in the moon cake. Because the foreigners didn’t like moon cake they didn’t buy it. But the Chinese like moon cake. When they bought it they would see the notice. That is how they took back China.”
Hannah Marlowe, a freshman biology major from Idaho, said, “I liked making moon cakes. I’ve never done it before, and it was fun to learn something new about the different cultures.”
After the moon cakes were made, they were carted off to the freezers. While students waited for them to be ready to eat, the different teams competed against each other in a series of games. For the first game, people tied neckties around their heads and their teammates carried them. The object of the game was to pull the tie off of the person on the other team.
For a different game using the same ties, one person was blindfolded and threw Skittles while their teammates tried to catch the Skittles in their mouths.
Belle Leung, a senior psychology major from Hong Kong, said her favorite game of the night was telephone charades. Students stood in a line facing away from the front. The first person would act out a word they were given to the person behind them. The next person would then turn and act it again until the message was passed all the way to the end. The last person had to guess what the word was.
Leung said, “We didn’t even know what we were doing, but we were having fun together. In the different teams, we were all mixed together. It [didn’t] matter if you are Taiwanese, Hong Kongese or American. We were all on the same team, trying to figure out what we were doing. And then we laughed together.”
Lam said the legend behind the celebration of the mid-autumn festival tells of ten suns being in the sky. “Many years ago, there were ten suns in the sky. People were too hot and so a man named Hou Yi shot down nine suns, which is why there is only one sun in the sky today. As a reward for this, he was given two drinks that would make him immortal. “A few years later, his wife did not want to die and took two. After she took the medicine she flew into the moon. That is why we see a beautiful lady in the moon.”
Writer: Kelsy Simmons