Good question. I had been eating mooncakes since I was a child and had never once wondered why some of them had a salted egg yolk inside. It was just there. <\/p>\n
Now I looked at it properly. It was round, golden and right in the middle. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt looks like the moon,\u201d I said. <\/p>\n
The more I looked at it, the better my answer sounded. Mid-Autumn Festival is associated with the full moon and family reunion. Mooncakes are round, and so is the egg yolk. <\/p>\n
There you go. Thirty seconds earlier I had no idea. Now I was almost an expert. <\/p>\n
Growing up in China, I never needed anyone to remind me about Mid-Autumn Festival. Mooncakes appeared in shops, families talked about what they were doing, and everyone knew when it was coming. <\/p>\n
In New Zealand, the festival can easily pass while I am getting on with ordinary life. Sometimes it takes a mooncake at work to remind me. <\/p>\n
Sharing the mooncakes at work also meant watching other people try them. Some liked them, while others were less sure. That seemed fair enough. <\/p>\n
Our workplace is full of people from different backgrounds, so different foods often find their way into the staff room. During Deepavali, for example, there are Indian treats. I still remember my first jalebi: bright orange, crisp, sticky and much sweeter than I expected. <\/p>\n
I finished one. <\/p>\n
Sally, my Australian colleague, has strong feelings about Vegemite. She insists it is better than Marmite, while some of my Kiwi colleagues disagree just as strongly. I once listened to them debating the matter and decided to stay out of it. <\/p>\n
Then there was the egg. <\/p>\n
Another colleague had talked for some time about wanting to try balut, a Filipino delicacy made from a fertilised duck egg containing a developing embryo. He decided his birthday would be the day. <\/p>\n
He was born and raised in Rotorua and has worked here for over 40 years. Even after all that time, there were apparently still new things to try. <\/p>\n
When his birthday finally arrived, a Filipino colleague brought in some balut, and we gathered around while a few phones came out to record the moment. <\/p>\n
He cracked one open and ate it. Then he ate another. I had expected him to try one, so the second surprised me. <\/p>\n
Watching him that day, I was the one looking at someone else\u2019s food and wondering about it. With the mooncake, the positions were reversed. <\/p>\n
My colleague was looking at something I had eaten since childhood. <\/p>\n
\u201cA salted egg yolk in something sweet?\u201d <\/p>\n
Her question made me look again at the little golden centre of the mooncake. <\/p>\n
The moon had been there all along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good question. I had been eating mooncakes since I was a child and had never once wondered why…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":617587,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[28949,4444,17515,5131,191,1345,78,141882,4188,304153,304154,117,111,43,139,69,1118,119502,38715,180,1965,80,35111],"class_list":["post-617586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-chen","tag-chinese","tag-experience","tag-festival","tag-here","tag-home","tag-in","tag-lifang","tag-living","tag-midautumn","tag-mooncakes","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-remind","tag-rotoruas","tag-shares","tag-writer","tag-zealand","tag-zealander"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}