Making a Mooncake with Words
Where the filling of a poem comes from
Today, we’re bringing you another part of the blog: published writers in Aperture giving their own takes on the writing they’ve submitted!
This time around, we asked Grace Wong (‘22) to talk about the delicious poem she submitted in our Spring 2020 edition, “Savoring a Mooncake with Tea.”
The piece I submitted was a poem, “Savoring a Mooncake with Tea.” This blog post is about the writing process, but to be honest, I didn’t know what to write about at first. That’s because people have a lot of different approaches to writing poetry, and for me, I just start writing down whatever comes to mind. I might stop every other line to figure out the perfect word or cut a phrase here and there, but it’s kind of random. Instead, I’ll talk about the inspiration behind the poem — the most important part for me — in this post.
As an introduction, I feel like my style of writing is more of trying to paint a picture of a scene rather than describing or exploring feelings. I don’t think of this poem as “deep.” You could try to pull a theme out of it - for example, one about family and community would make sense since that’s definitely part of the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is the setting of the poem. But, my original reason for writing this was to capture the feeling of this Chinese holiday and to appreciate the culture behind it.
This poem originated from my poetry unit of English last year, when I was challenged to write a poem that had to do with identity or culture. I’d always wanted to write a poem showcasing a part of Chinese culture, and I had the idea to write about the Mid-Autumn Festival because there’s food involved (and who doesn’t like writing about food?). I think food is also a great way to introduce different cultures because food brings people together. On this holiday, it’s traditional to eat mooncakes, drink tea, and go outside to look at the full moon. So in writing this poem, I tried to choose words that would paint a picture of this scene vividly, starting with the mooncake and “zooming out” to see the whole picture.
A reflection of the moon,
The same full circle--
Smooth and waxen,
A warm brown shell
With rounded ridges
The first half of the poem is, of course, about the mooncake. I did my best to be descriptive enough so that anyone who has never tried mooncake before can visualize one. But if not, here’s what mooncake looks like.
I’ve always loved biting into a slice of mooncake and encountering the dense and sweet lotus paste inside. Mooncakes usually come with a salted egg yolk, too (which I personally never eat, but most people find it a very important ingredient).
A lustrous golden egg yolk
with a hint of salt.An inviting warm sweetness
Enveloping the tongue
It was a lot of fun thinking of ways to describe each part of the mooncake. (The process of describing biting into a mooncake involved eating a lot of mooncakes.)
Throughout the poem, I also included several allusions to Chinese legends. Near the end, there’s a description of the tradition of moon-gazing (賞月):
Raising our heads to gaze
At the empress in the moon
And her constant companion,
The jade rabbit—
The references are from the Mid-Autumn Festival myth. There are a lot of different versions, but they all lead to the same conclusion. In the one I know, there was an emperor who was given some immortality pills, but if more than one was eaten, there would be serious consequences. When he received the pills, he was admired throughout the kingdom and was a great ruler, but later he became corrupt. His wife knew that it would be a bad idea to let him take the pills, so instead, she took them all, and was pulled away to the moon. This story is kind of like the Chinese version of “the man in the moon,” and it’s the story every little kid hears during the Mid-Autumn Festival.
Anyways, thank you for reading! I had a lot of fun writing this poem (and eating mooncakes).