Stories and Mooncakes

September 30, 2024 by Maria

The Mid-Autumn Festival is an Asian harvest time celebration of gratitude and family togetherness. The author, Grace Lin, describes this holiday as an Asian Thanksgiving.¹ My husband is Asian American, and I love learning more about Chinese culture and sharing that enthusiasm with my kids. Today I’m sharing some books about this holiday, but first I will delve a little further into what makes this day so special. The Mid-Autumn Festival is a time for families to come together, share a meal, and of course a mooncake. The holiday follows the lunar calendar.² This year it fell on September 17th. During my research I learned how each country has its own unique traditions and names for the day.  In Japan it is called Tsukimi and in South Korea it is called Chuseok.³ Here in America the day is celebrated as well. The Mid-Autumn Festival is another Asian holiday to enjoy besides the Lunar New Year. Local communities will sometimes hold lantern festivals and sell mooncakes to celebrate the day. 

Mooncakes are small pastries traditionally served for the festival and commonly eaten while gazing at the moon. Mooncakes come in a variety of flavors and more contemporary versions are made every year. One of the most well-known types is the Cantonese style mooncake, a baked pastry filled with lotus paste and at the center a salted egg yolk, representing the moon. There are stories that during warring times, secret messages were even hidden inside of mooncakes.⁴ A few years ago, I tried making mooncakes. I can’t say it was easy, but it was fun and delicious and became one of our favorite things about celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival.

A couple of years ago, I knew very little about this holiday so of course, I turned to the library database and the internet. I found new books beyond the one or two I already had, and many of them have become our favorites that we read year after year.  Since we read so many different books, I had the opportunity to sneak in some compare and contrast discussion about our reading. Authors have varying versions of the Chinese legends, which prompted the kids’ organic discussion of their differences. I will write more about these myths and legends in a future post. This article will begin a short series of posts I will publish for the Mid-Autumn Festival.

First, I want to introduce Grace Lin, the literary queen of Mid-Autumn Festival books. Grace Lin is an Asian American author and illustrator and an advocate for diversity in children’s literature.⁵ She has written several picture books and novels packed with moon themes and Chinese moon-related myths. Her books teach about Asian culture and also include racial diversity in the people depicted in her picture book illustrations. Grace Lin’s diverse illustrations make me think of Gyo Fujikawa, who broke the ground for racial diversity in picture book illustrations for American literature.⁶ Diversity not only in text, but also illustration is so important for children’s literature.

Thanking the Moon is the first picture book I read about the Mid-Autumn Festival. This book is part of a series Grace Lin wrote based on her life as a middle child in a Chinese American home. Lin loves exploring Chinese culture and folklore in her writing. She writes books that also examine American Chinese culture and its uniqueness. I love this about her books. They are the perfect fit for our culturally mixed family. Thanking the Moon is about a little girl (the middle child) and her family as they set up their Mid-Autumn Festival picnic. It is a beautiful and uncomplicated text that emphasizes family togetherness and shares the traditions and foods of the holiday. The girl refers to her family members by their titles in Mandarin (“Jiě Jie” for “big sister,” “Bàba” for “dad”). Grace Lin’s focus in this book is on togetherness, thankfulness, and simple family traditions. This is the perfect book to explain the holiday to a small child. 

If you enjoy Thanking the Moon, check out Lin’s other books in this series, including Bringing in the New Year and Dim Sum for Everyone. Another book I read over and over with my kids when they were very young was Round as a Mooncake. Round is a Mooncake: A book of Shapes is written by Roseanne Thong and illustrated by Grace Lin.  In this book, an Asian girl leads the reader through her urban neighborhood identifying shapes along the way. The book’s rhyming lyrics are fun to read aloud and teach some elements of Chinese culture. Thong and Lin also compiled a book of numbers and colors. These books are engaging and perfect for little ones. 

Grace Lin’s book, A Big Mooncake for Little Star, is a whimsical view of lunar phases. A caring mother makes an enormous cake and warns her daughter not to eat it all. The little girl wakes up night after night to nibble away at the giant mooncake in the sky until there is nothing left and it’s time to make a new one. Grace Lin’s illustrations are beautiful in this book! I love the simplicity of the figures on the black background. Her painting style here changed from many of her earlier books, like Thanking the Moon. Pay close attention to the details in the kitchen scene. We had so much fun finding various hints of other moon and star-related myths and even the constellations. In the endnotes, Grace Lin said this story is not based on mythology but arose from her imagination and sharing her love for the Mid-Autumn Festival with her daughter. (The Moon Book by Gail Gibbons works well as a scientific read to par with this book. I enjoy incorporating a moon unit study in science with the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations).

Take some time to share the Mid-Autumn Festival with your families. Look up at the sky tonight and search for the lady and rabbit on the moon. Mooncakes might still be on the shelves in your local Asian market. I hope you have fun exploring some of the books I wrote about today. Come back for more Mid-Autumn Festival books soon!

1. Grace Lin youtube ↩︎
2. Chinese Calendar ↩︎
3. How Different Countries in Asia Celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival ↩︎
4. The Rebellious History of Mooncakes ↩︎
5. Grace Lin ↩︎
6. Gyo Fujikawa ↩︎