~~It might be better not to ruin the universe

with our own patterns.

~~Deng Ming-Dao

Mid-Autumn Festival in China… a festival of moon cakes everywhere… those heavy pastries filled with sodden lumps of unrecognizable sweet stuff… a version of what we in the West have learned to gasp at… store bought fruitcake!!! The Chinese love you madly with moon cakes. Does anyone really eat them?

Now to a game of checkers. Let me think. The Chinese teachers gave me two. Who could I give them to? The housekeepers? No… they would know. How about the school guards? There are six of them… so I can buy four to give two away. Next the school gave me four. Ah! Ha! Give them to the four at the beauty salon. They were mad with joy as I handed them the festive box. They were madder with joy as they handed me their festive box of two. Two more!!!! I gave them to the young waiter who brings me take-out arranged prettily in covered dishes in a bamboo basket and then returns to pick them up. He gave me two more!!! Oh, no!! I was scheming fast now. Then, I thought, what the hell? I sat down with the paring knife and gingerly cut into one. A whole egg had been baked into that one. I filed it in the XYZ receptacle. No thank you!!! I cut the second one expecting a host of scorpions to come scuttling out. What was that gooey, slightly stringy stuff? It turned out to be a congealed pumpkin concoction. I chewed and chewed… not bad… not good, but the tea was hot and smelled of Spanish polio and menta, my thinking still back in August on the hill of cascading cacti over the sea in the distance.

 I had dodged China for the last two weeks until the Moon Cakes arrived preferring to float along in the aura of Egypt looking at tourist photos that served no purpose… ridiculous, perfunctory camel rides… the same thousand pictures that everyone and their relatives, friends and distant acquaintances takes and foists upon you as a captive… one by one by one until boredom and weariness brings one closer to death. (One might add that about a departing-middle-age traveler who shares her amateur writing and picture-taking as well). It wasn’t the same for me to look at the pictures. I missed the Egyptologist, Romany, who took me out to Saqqara again for my last day in Egypt. We were the only ones out in those tombs that day and knocked around in the stifling air studying the walls that depicted simple acts of Egyptian life as it had been in 2400 BC. I was enchanted. Romany and I had gotten close… so seemingly young still, not married, no kids, few prospects because of the financial considerations of an Egyptian life. We shook hands in the lobby of the Zayed Hotel…hasta luego, Romany… maybe.

I also missed Mohammed Farouk, a man who worked the desk at the Zayed hotel. I missed his handlebar moustache… his starched shirt with French cuffs and gleaming gold cufflinks… his concise instructions executed in perfect British English that he expected guests to follow… “We will call for a cab, but we will not fight about the price for you… you must do that yourself.” and “Madam, should you be going to the souk, you must remember to cover your head as it is 50 degrees (122 degrees F) today.” Polite way of telling me, of course, that I am in a Muslim country and that it would just be better to keep the social fabric intact by covering my head if I was shopping alone. He had a constant eye on the bell captain… chiding the bell boys and the doormen… as if he was a general ensuring the state of the Pyramids from behind the desk.

 Showered, packed up and ready to leave Cairo and the kitschy Zayed Hotel with its lotus-flower folded towels on the bed, I found I was a bit sad. I sat down on the bed and listened to the call to prayer one last time. Cairo… smog-ridden, snarled with traffic, is also brimming over with life spilling  into the streets… especially at night when there is relief from the heat of the day. For a few days I, along with my heart, was one of the millions brimming over into the streets, too…

 … but, far too soon, the car came. I was off to Dubai with a passle of twenty kids on the plane along with a troupe of voluptuous women and muscular men on their way to a belly dancers’ convention. The kids screamed and rough housed. The parents yelled. The belly dancers twirled in the aisle while the men sang, looping colorful, ribbon-swathed canes in rhythm to ducks and sways. What a delight! Cairo had come along with me. I arrived in Dubai in the middle of the night. The airport was teaming with frenetic people shopping… eating… slurping upscale, Western ice cream, and many poor souls of the Third World sleeping all over the floor as I picked my way over the bodies looking for a chair to wait for my plane. What a vibrant place! I bought chocolate covered dates in the gargantuan Duty Free for friends and couldn’t even get through the aisles or near a cash register. I wondered, if just for a few days, I could be Tom Hanks in Terminal. It seemed like that would be fun in Dubai.

Back in Beijing… lovely Beijing… dirt market… Beijing Opera… White Cloud Temple with the museum around the corner. I had missed Beijing… Coal Hill… dinners at Lake HoHai with friends and the Little Dumpling Restaurant where I indulged myself on cold spinach with wasabi and the best Kung Pao Chicken I had ever tasted.

 

 … but still in Cairo… still in Cairo… why not Cairo?… my mantra. Then came the Moon Cakes. Bye-bye Egypt.

 Now, its Sunday and I’ve sent dinner over to my next door neighbors, Jay and Kat. Kat has broken her foot and is on crutches. I roast pork tenderloin with sauteed shitake mushrooms so fresh that they cut themselves into slices. I also roast, bright fall vegetables and make a salad of flawless leaf lettuce with Spanish tuna and Manchego cheese, olives, fat, purple onions, pine nuts and vinaigrette. I’ve bought date cakes to send over and a laughable version of Chinese seven grain bread. I’ve cut up perfect Beijing peaches… the white slices striated with rosiness… so rosey colored that I decide to make a syrup of rose water, Spanish mountain honey, lemon and nutmeg. The slices are lovely in the glass bowl… so I garnish them with toasted Spanish almonds as a last touch. It could be a perfect Arab dish….there I go again… still in Cairo… still in Cairo.

 I have to face it, though, that the harvest has come in with a bumper crop of peaches… a glorious array of all that summer gives up in the fall spread on the sidewalks of China and, after the heat of the brilliant sun and blue skies during the day, the nights are, indeed cooler. There are fewer crickets each night.

 It is Sunday evening now. Moon Festival. The moon is full outside of my window. I look for Chang’e in the moon. She must be up there because the moon is especially luminescent casting shadows of her across its surface. The legend is one full of longing coming from a time when the earth had ten suns. The earth was scorched and there was no water. The Jade Emperor asked Houyi, an archer, to shoot down nine of the suns. Each sun perished with the release of an arrow from his quiver until just one remained. The Jade Emperor rewarded him with an elixir in the form of a pill that would make him immortal. He had to pray and fast before he took it, so he hid the pill, but it was full of light.  Chang’e spied it in the rafters. Compelled by its wonder, she swallowed it. Amazed, she began to fly until she reached the moon. Houyi sped after her, but the force of the wind carried him back to earth. Now frightened, she spit out some of the pill, but the elixir was still so strong that she can only reunite with Houyi once a year… the 15th day of the 8th lunar month… the perfect day of yin combined with yang. Chinese people long for those they love and are separated from by distance on this day. So do I.

 I’ve been invited to a party. We will sit out under the moon and eat moon cakes after the Chinese custom. I’ll visit the bakery before I go… and once again, buy more moon cakes to take along in the never-ending cycle of this festival season… and yes, I’ll nibble one. But before I go to the party, I will see China as I saw it so many years ago for the first time… quiet with few cars on the streets. Everyone will be celebrating the holiday at home. Families will walk into the street to see the moon. They will tell their children to say hello to the foreigner in the belief that it is “xingfu”…good luck. I’ll play along in the brightness of little faces in their pajamas. Hardened Chinese checker players will have excused themselves from the final courses of dumplings, watermelon and moon cakes to play out under the street lamp with their buddies. They sit over the board on tiny, low stools in their undershirts, pant legs rolled up around their knees. The streets will be littered with confetti from the fireworks that have been set off… the smell of gunpowder in the air. The harvest moon… quaint, old, old China…and me…the three of us together again. The warmth of Egypt’s sun lingers in the place where once thoughts about it had been, but now a familiar old mantra begins to fill that space… a sigh of satisfaction… barely heard… a whisper, really…  China…  China… just China…