The mid-autumn, 中秋节 also called the moon-cake festival, is joyously celebrated by Chinese everywhere as the date coincides with harvest time when the full moon is at its brightest. I studiously avoid the calorie-packed moon-cakes, but revel at the colourful lanterns displayed for lighting the symbolic path to prosperity. I am reminded during this period also of the poster on the cover of a book I purchased in 1990, the first time I visited China.
The book, ‘Chinese Propaganda Posters’, has a drawing entitled ‘Little Guests in the Moon Palace’ on its cover. It highlights a cherubic Chinese baby with a space helmet riding a space rocket to the moon to visit the palace where the immortal ‘Chang’E’ 嫦娥 resides, to present the immortal elixir to “yutu” 玉兔, the Jade Rabbit. In folklore, Chang-E still resides in the moon after swallowing the elixir of life to become the moon goddess. As for moon cakes, its origin has a patriotic slant. Zhu Yuan Chang 朱元璋 in the 15th century used moon cakes to circulate secret messages to incite the rebellion that overthrew the Mongols and established the Ming Dynasty.
Ludicrous! some would exclaim when seeing the contents of the poster in 1990. The artist must be deranged. China was then dirt poor, having just gone through major social upheavals in the disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’ 大跃进 of 1958, with millions of deaths by starvation in the failed forced march from an agrarian society to an industrial one. The ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ 文化大革命 of 1966 to 1976 followed, devastating the country’s leadership infrastructure. Yet, forty years on, beyond all imagination, China landed a spacecraft, Chang-E, on the moon in 2013 with Yutu, a rover moving around collecting moon-rocks (cakes) in the dark side of the moon since. The book ‘Chinese Propaganda Posters’ is aptly subtitled ‘From Revolution to Modernisation’ as the later part of the book presciently portrays the great modernisation of China.
We in Singapore have reasons to celebrate too, as we went through many existential challenges 50 years ago, though not as extreme. Our national day song recounts that ‘There was a time when people said that Singapore won’t make it, but we did.’ We, too, celebrate with moon-cakes and lanterns in the mid-autumn festival.
Cheong Pak Yean
Dr Cheong Pak Yean is an internal/family medicine physician, psychotherapist, and former NUS associate professor. He is a past president of the Singapore Medical Association and the College of Family Physicians.
