Mid-Autumn Festival tomorrow in Chinatown

Pity the humble mooncake.

Round as a hockey puck, thick as a book, dense as a morning fog, it's the Asian version of the holiday fruitcake: too often tastier in the imagination than in the eating.

Like the holiday it honors, mooncake comes but once a year; it's available in markets and grocery stores for only the next week or so. Its arrival provokes both glee and groans, sometimes within the same household.

"We actually like mooncake," said Ellen Somekawa, executive director of the advocacy group Asian Americans United. Of course, she adds, "We don't consume big quantities. It's more like slivers."

Somekawa had better like mooncake, because she's organizing the 14th annual Mid-Autumn Festival, to be held tomorrow in Chinatown. The highlight? A mooncake-eating contest.

The winner takes home a cool $1 million in cash.

Just kidding.

Actually, the winner gets a black baseball cap embroidered, "2009 Mooncake Eating Champion." And with it, eternal bragging rights.

Because downing a mooncake as fast as possible - with your hands clasped behind your back - is no job for weaklings. It may, though, be a job for paramedics. Or cardiologists.

The mooncake's inner core can be as sticky as glue, as chewy as taffy, and as sweet as cane sugar. The thick filling of lotus, egg, dates, or bean paste is encased in a thin crust.

The mooncake also is rich in symbolism integral to the Mid-Autumn Festival, also known as the Moon Festival or Lantern Festival. The day has been celebrated in Asia for more than 3,000 years, particularly in China and Vietnam.

The holiday, roughly similar to Thanksgiving, usually takes place on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, when the moon is brightest. It's a time for family and friends to gather under the full moon.

That's why traditional cakes are round - to represent not just the lunar orb, but wholeness, and continuity, and family reunited.

It was that yearning for home and family that gave birth to the Philadelphia festival in 1996. That fall, a 13-year-old boy named Andy Zeng looked around his Chinatown community and saw people who missed the old traditions. In the rush to earn livings and support families, the holiday had disappeared.

He enlisted two friends at Asian Americans United, Debbie Wei and her husband, Ming Chau, to devise a public celebration. The first festival drew 400 people to a church parking lot. Tomorrow's event will bring 5,000 to neighborhood streets.

There'll be carnival games, kung fu exhibitions, Beijing Opera performances, even a basketball tournament. At 6 p.m., to start the evening entertainment, lion dancers will lead a lantern parade through darkening streets.

And there's the mooncake-eating contest.

Eight competitors are chosen through a lottery. They sit at a table, a single mooncake before each. At the starting signal, they lean face-first into their plates to scarf their mooncakes. The first to finish is the winner.

The whole thing is over in minutes.

"It's the high point of the festival," Somekawa said, only half-kidding.

The contest has become so popular that organizers schedule it as the evening's penultimate event, followed only by the singing of the haunting, homesick ballad, "Children of the Dragon."

This week, AAU board member Betty Lui trekked the streets of Chinatown, searching out cakes for the contest. She had plenty of choices - boxes of cakes were stacked at the door of almost every market.

"People buy the mooncake, but they're not eating it all," said Michael Chow, owner of Sang Kee Peking Duck House, where mooncake is on the menu. "Most of them use it as a gift, to send to their friends or relatives. It's like sending a Christmas card."

A mooncake can be as big as a wallet or as small as a 25-cent piece, can come from as near as New York or as far as Hong Kong. The price varies, too. A package of small, simply wrapped cakes may cost $2, and a box of four, elaborately boxed pastries can sell for $30.

Even devout mooncake-lovers admit there can be huge variations in quality, depending on the ingredients. Everybody has a story about cakes that were especially delicious or particularly inedible.

Wei, the festival cofounder, and now principal of the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School, underwent what can be described only as a mooncake conversion.

As a child growing up in Upper Darby during the 1960s, her emphasis was on adapting to American life, not embracing Chinese culture. Each fall, when her parents brought home a pink cardboard box containing four dense cakes, she and her siblings made sour faces.

"It was just another one of those weird things that my parents did," she said. "Like, Halloween made sense to me - dressing up as dead people and running around. But gathering with your family under a full moon, just to enjoy each other's company? That didn't make sense."

In 1979, after college, Wei traveled to Hong Kong, where friends took her to Victoria Park for the Mid-Autumn Festival. She saw hundreds of families sitting on blankets, watching the moon rise.

"That's when I learned what Mid-Autumn Festival was," she said, "when I realized this is really a big deal."

Her view of mooncake shifted from oddity to treat. She saw what her parents had tried to teach her, grasped the connection between cake and country.

Now she enjoys mooncake?

"Um, yeah," Wei said. "But I have to take it in small doses."

The 14th annual Mid-Autumn Festival, presented by Asian Americans United, takes place tomorrow at the Friendship Gate in Chinatown, at 10th and Arch Streets, in Philadelphia.

From 12:45 to 5 p.m. there will be carnival games, arts activities, and health screenings. The lantern parade starts at 6 p.m., with lanterns available for purchase. From 6:45 to 10 p.m., entertainment will include Chinese music, dance, tai chi, kung fu, and a mooncake-eating contest.

For more information, call 215-925-1538 or 215-569-2600.

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