The Cupertino Courier
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Moon Festival of Silicon Valley a celebration of Chinese culture
By Crystal Lu
The ninth Moon Festival of Silicon Valley is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sept. 29 and 30 at Cupertino's Memorial Park on Stevens Creek Boulevard. It will feature more than 100 booths with food, free activities and entertainment.
Moon Festival of Silicon Valley is held annually on a weekend near the popular Asian holiday of the same name, marked by the eighth full moon of the Chinese lunar calendar. The holiday usually falls in September or early October. It's Sept. 25 this year.
This year's Moon Festival of Silicon Valley was scheduled for the later weekend to avoid conflicts with Moon Festival celebrations in San Francisco and Oakland, according to Jennie Yeung, a board director of the Moon Festival of Silicon Valley, the nonprofit group that organizes the annual event.
"One of our highlights this year is wedding traditions. We will have a narrator introduce the period wedding gown each beauty queen is wearing and explain the meaning behind every custom in a wedding scene we're going to put on," said Yeung. "Other highlights are a tea ceremony and a book exhibition."
Organizers say the Moon Festival of Silicon Valley is intended "to promote unity, not only within the family, but in the community as a whole, and to bring crosscultural understanding to the multitudes of nationalities within the Silicon Valley."
"Cupertino Memorial Park is a beautiful venue for this wonderful annual event, and once again we expect to have over 60,000 attendees at the two-day celebration of Chinese cultural heritage," said Otto Lee, the mayor of Sunnyvale and a Festival board director.
Moon Festival dates back more than 3,000 years to China's Zhou Dynasty. It gradually evolved from a moon-worshipping festival into a holiday for family reunion.
On this traditional holiday, Chinese family members and friends gather on the patio after dinner to admire the bright full moon and eat moon cakes or share a pomelo, a large and sweet citrus fruit.
Some other Asian countries have adopted the holiday and developed their own customs around it.
Koreans often refer to Moon Festival as Korean Thanksgiving. .
Moon Festival brings colorful lanterns to Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese will have children parade on the street with lanterns.
As Moon Festival customs follow Asian immigrants to the United States, they mix with other cultures and become even more diverse. There have been jazz, ballet, Mexican music and Indian dance at this year's event will have multicultural performances as well.
For more information, visit www.themoonfestival.org.
Different phases of moon cakes
Moon cakes, the quintessential dessert for Moon Festival, are usually about the size of a large muffin and come in a wide variety.
Cantonese-style moon cakes are the most commonly seen. Their light brown crusts have a glossy sheen. The filling encased in the crust has up to 200 variations, most of which include a salted duck egg yolk in the center. Some common flavors are lotus seed paste, azuki bean (a dark red bean) paste, jujube (a dried fruit similar to dates) paste, and five-kernel, which contains at least five kinds of nuts and seeds.
Suzhou-style moon cakes, also known as Shanghai-style for Suzhou's proximity to Shanghai, distinguish themselves by having a flaky white crust. They share a few sweet pastes and the five-kernel flavor with their Cantonese counterparts. They also have some unique fillings. A popular one contains sugar, salt, pepper and crushed walnuts. Another favorite includes dried rose powder in the nutty and sugary filling.
Other regional Chinese moon cakes tend to stay local.
Vietnamese moon cakes resemble Cantonese style, but one of their most frequently used fillings is mung bean (a small green bean) paste, which is less seen in Cantonese moon cakes.
Korean song-pyon is a steamed dessert Koreans have for Moon Festival instead of moon cakes. Unlike moon cakes that are either round or square, a song-pyon is in an olive shape. Its crust is made of ground rice. Its filling can be chestnut paste, azuki bean paste, or a mixture of sesame seeds and honey.
Modern-style moon cakes have been around since the early 1980s. They may not need to be baked. The crust can be made of glutinous rice or gelatin. The filling can be fruit jam, tea extract, coffee syrup or ice cream of any flavor.
