The Moon
As it reflects on life, family, culture, and in literature around the world
August 15th on the Chinese agricultural calendar 農曆 Nong Li1 is the Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節 - August on the Chinese calendar is the middle month of autumn and 15th is the middle of the month, so August 15th is the “mid-Autumn”. It is also called the Moon Festival because the full moon—which appears on the 15th of every Nong Li month—in August is believed to be the largest and brightest of all.
A circle symbolizes perfection in Chinese culture—perfectly symmetrical, with no beginning or ending. A circle is not just round 圓, but complete and fulfilled 圓滿, together and reunited 團圓.
When the moon is full, it’s a time for families to gather together, and it’s a time of completion and contentment.
This year’s Mid-Autumn Festival falls on September 17th on the Gregorian calendar.
There are many folklores about the moon in Chinese culture; the best-known involves a lady called 嫦娥 Chang’e who lives on the moon after she stole her husband’s potion—a gift from a goddess—and flew to the moon.
The first time I heard the story of Chang’e and the moon was on a moonlit autumn night, sitting on my grandma A-Puo’s lap.
“That’s Chang’e’s long dress swept by the breeze on the moon,” A-Puo pointed to the shadows on the moon. “She would never be able to return to her home on earth, and the jade rabbit was her lone companion.”
A-Puo came from a prominent family in Sichuan (Szechuan in old translation). Her father was once the mayor of Kaifeng of Henan province and the personal assistant to a famous general in the Warlord Era of China. To avoid the fate of being married to a warlord, A-Puo married my grandpa—with whom she shared nothing in common but a Christian faith—in haste, and was therefore told by her parents that she was unwelcome ever to return home.
I was too young to remember much of the story’s details, nor could I understand its morals about love, betrayal, loneliness, and immortality. But I remember the feeling of the autumn breeze stroking my cheeks, and what I now know as the feeling of longing, longing for something unattainable, under the cool light of an autumn full moon. Was there also longing for her original family in A-Puo’s voice? I couldn’t tell.
Years later, under the same moonlight, Grandpa A Gong told a much different story, a story of his own.
A Gong was born on a Mid-Autumn Festival night, in a fishing village in Ningbo province. By the time he reached school age, he had already lost his father to mental illness. His tirelessly hard-working mother was too sick to care for her three young children, and A Gong was sent to an orphanage run by Christian missionaries.
There, he was put in charge of caring for a toddler at night. If there was ever a bed-wetting incident, A Gong would be punished and ordered to wash the dirty bedding in a cold stream. Many nights, he’d be sitting by the bed, not daring to fall asleep, afraid that the little boy would wet the bed.
“The full moon rose outside of the window high up on the wall,” A Gong’s eyes drifting to the sky. “I thought of Mom and home, on the other side of the wall, under that bright full moon.”
I understood then, in A Gong’s weathered voice, the longing of a young boy for his mother’s love, and the longing for his home.
In the immense and timeless anthology of Chinese poetry, there are countless references to the moon. Probably the most famous (and frequently cited) one would be Tang poet Li Bai’s Thoughts on A Still Night （李白 靜夜思）:
床前明月光，疑是地上霜。
举头望明月，低头思故乡。
The bright moonlight pours before my bed,
is it frost cast upon the ground?
Looking up, I gaze at the splendid of the moon,
bowing my head, I am drowning in the longing of my homeland.
And if Li Bai’s poem is about longing induced by the beautiful moonlight and is often recited by schoolchildren, Song poet Su Shi’s Melody of Water （蘇軾 水調歌頭） is about overcoming the adversities of life. Not everyone can recite the entire poem, but the verses referencing the moon are known to just about anyone.2
明月几时有，把酒问青天
Wine in hand, I ask the just heavens when will the moon shine bright?
人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺
Mankind prevails through joy and sorrow, union and parting; the moon perdures through full and crescent, bright and dim.
但愿人长久，千里共婵娟
May our lives endure, and share the moon’s graceful luster a thousand miles apart.
Reciting these poems, I can’t help but wonder if the all-so-mystic and sentimental moon plays a similar role in Western literature and culture. And I turn to my friend and collaborator Jeffrey Streeter, who writes the English Republic of Letters.
Xue Yi has written eloquently and movingly about the moon in Chinese literature and culture and in the context of her family’s history.
The moon, of course, is important in the “western” tradition (I’ll stop using scare quotes after this, but they are still there in my mind). In English, poets have written about it since forever before Chaucer was writing, when English was only just taking shaping as a language of literature. More recently, think of Shelley, Plath, Mary Oliver, Hopkins, and Dickinson, among countless others.
The moon is universal in that sense but perhaps not universally the same thing. In the west, generalising dangerously, the treatment seems more personal, sometimes a one-to-one conversation with nature, and the sense of separation that the satellite sometimes inspires seems existential rather than a longing for family.
Although harvest moons crop up in poems or songs about the autumn, the western lunar tradition, if I can call it that, seems less focussed on one season or on family than in the Chinese tradition as mentioned by Xue Yi. It seems more focussed on the self.
For example, Dickinson’s haunting and beautiful The Moon is distant from the Sea sets up a relationship between the Moon and the Sea/herself. It is about a one-to-one relationship that might be spiritual or erotic. It’s about power and influence, not community. And it’s not about coming together:
He comes just so far – toward the Town –
Just so far – goes away –
In Neruda or Lorca, the moon appears in beautiful, almost desperate poems about love, despair, or innocence. There is separation in both, but unlike Li Bai’s famous poem, the isolation here seems radical and existential rather than circumstantial.
In Shelley’s famous lyric, the moon is the object of pity, as it is addressed as
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth
And the poet is also surely describing himself and his own social isolation at that moment.
In Love’s Philosophy, Shelly uses a more romantic image of the moon in nature:
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?
But the moonbeams exquisitely kissing the sea are simply employed as part of a lover’s otherwise standard-issue sophistry to get the woman he desires to kiss him.
Elsewhere, the moon is the setting (or excuse) for wild, exotic, or romantic adventures from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso to Calvino’s glorious Cosmicomics, from Jules Verne’s classic From the Earth to the Moon to the bizarre “The Voyage to the World in the Moon” by Francis Godwin (1638) (the latter, intriguingly, for me, including trips to Tenerife and China, two very different places I’ve lived in).
But as an Edward Lear fan, it would be wrong of me to end without an example of the moon shining brightly on a coming together (even if not a human one), where, at the end of The Owl and the Pussycat, the eponymous heroes find happiness beneath its splendid beams:
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Today, September 17th, 2024, is the Mid-Autumn Festival. Our Pacific Northwest sky is cloudy, so here is a photo of last year’s full moon (taken by my husband):
Wherever the moonlight reaches, it is homeland,
Whenever the moonlight shines, it is time for gathering.
Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!
More often than not, the traditional Chinese calendar is mistakenly referred to as a “lunar” calendar when in fact it is a lunisolar calendar based on astronomical observations of both the sun’s longitude and the moon’s phases.
In its preface, Su Shi stated that the poem was written on the Mid-Autumn Festival, after a long night of drinking.
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I loved this meditation on the moon. The way you wove your grandparents’ stories with the legend of Chang’e and the meanings of loss and home was beautiful. Thank you, Yi Xue. And thank you, Jeffrey, for sharing her work. I look forward to diving into more of it.
Such a wonderful look at the moon at such an apt time! I love it. The moon always induce a sense of melancholy and nostalgia in me :)
I actually learned of the Li Bai's poem through a Cantonese singing class with my son and loved it immediately.