Another Mid-Autumn Festival has arrived. When relatives and friends exchange gifts, they are mostly mooncakes. Some boxes are lavish, others simple; Cantonese or Suzhou style, savoury meat or purely vegetarian, handmade or organic. One might be from a prestigious old brand in Hong Kong, while another comes from a trendy new boutique… As for me, I turn them all away. Every year, with an apologetic smile, I explain one by one: “My family used to run a mooncake factory; I practically grew up in a pile of mooncakes, so the last thing I want is to eat one!” Just as people are about to press for more, I keep a tight lip. It is not that there are some scandalous food-processing secrets to hide, but rather that a few words simply cannot do the story justice.
Yet, I cannot withstand further questioning. After all, a mooncake crust always holds a filling; some things simply cannot be hidden. Every year, there is always a friend offering mooncakes whom I end up stopping, returning the gesture with a tale from my days at the factory. This year, let me tell it to you.
I. From “Workshop” to “Factory”
Before our food processing plant could be called a “factory”, it went through a “workshop” phase. I was very young then, and I remember only the sound of mooncake moulds of all sizes clattering one after another against the workbenches—*clack-clack-clack*—like firecrackers going off. Back then, my father was still a young man, and the family business was in its infancy; he had to work wearing protective arm-sleeves and an apron. I always felt that the momentum he later had when playing mahjong—slamming a “Prosperity” tile onto the table upon drawing a winning hand—was a skill honed from slamming those mooncakes. The former, however, was the one that made money. Eventually, as the volume increased, we got an assembly line. The workshop became a small factory and moved from Henan to Hunan. We brought along a few workers from Henan, and every year after the Spring Festival, these workers would return with more fellow villagers in tow, earning a referral fee for every head they brought in. We were Anhui people running a food processing plant in Hunan where they spoke the Henan dialect. At home, we spoke with an Anhui accent; in the factory, it was the Henan dialect; and at the local primary school, even the teachers taught in Changsha dialect. I grew up switching between these three tongues.
The factory mainly processed egg yolk cakes, sachima, and mooncakes. June to September was the peak season for mooncakes; at the busiest times, we worked day and night shifts, and the production line almost never stopped. Coincidentally, this was also when I had my summer holidays. I was never particularly diligent with my primary school studies, so I loved running around the workshop, becoming a nuisance to everyone because I was so bored.
It was the first decade of the millennium, and mooncake automation was already quite sophisticated. There were machines for automatically mixing the crust, and the fillings were ready-made fruit-flavoured winter melon pastes—bright in colour and cloyingly sweet. The “mooncake-wrapping” machine had a hopper on the left and one on the right: one for the dough and one for the filling. The machine automatically extruded a long strip of dough-wrapped filling, which then passed through a blade and was suddenly sliced into uniform small squares. Then, the moulds pressed down one by one, and mooncakes emerged from the conveyor belt in a steady stream.
II. Assembly Lines, Ovens, and Blistered Fingers
For a while, I particularly loved standing by the assembly line, listening to the humming of the machinery and the rhythmic thumping of the moulds; everything felt so orderly and secure. Sometimes, staring blankly at the conveyor belt, I would experience a sensation of weightlessness and flight, as if I were a mooncake drifting through the Milky Way. It was only after I took physics classes that I learned this was “relative motion”. In Shen Fu’s *Six Records of a Floating Life*, the author imagined mosquitoes as white cranes in the blue clouds; I, meanwhile, counted mooncakes drifting through the cosmic void. In modern parlance, I suppose I was experiencing a “flow state”. To discover the mechanism behind this strange experience, I spent days on the production line trying to replicate it, eventually discovering that the key variable was to defocus my eyes and slightly cross them. Just before my crossed eyes became a permanent fixture, I quit this habit, and my interest shifted to the baking process.
The ovens in the factory were vertical ones, looking like lifts, though they had heavy, single manual-pull doors and were pitch black inside. The male worker in charge of the ovens used to frighten me, saying he would lock me inside if I kept misbehaving, so even though I roamed everywhere, I always gave the ovens a wide berth.
After being brushed with egg yolk (the key to a beautiful colour), the mooncakes were arranged in rows on baking trays. The trays were slid into racks, and the racks were pushed into the oven. I liked the mooncakes that were slightly overbaked; the crust was fragrant and crisp, but I hated the filling in the middle—cloyingly sweet and sticky. Therefore, when I ate mooncakes, I only ate the crust. Fortunately, since my family owned the factory, they could temporarily indulge this “hobby” of mine.
Once, I even used a spare mould to make a mooncake consisting of purely crust and swapped it with a regular mooncake on the baking tray. Unfortunately, after this crust-only mooncake had been trayed, racked, and spun a few times in the oven, it became completely unrecognizable to me. Watching the mooncakes go into the packaging machine and emerge neatly dressed, I felt only that some stranger had got a lucky break.
In the assembly-line processing of mooncakes, the most labour-intensive part was arguably the packaging. Each mooncake had a square plastic inner tray. To save space during transport, these trays were pressed tightly together and had to be separated by hand. You would pinch a tray between your thumb and index finger, using the friction between the finger and the plastic to slide the tray out. The secret was that your fingers couldn’t be too dry or too wet; so, like counting banknotes, you had to lick your finger and rub it before starting. When the weather got hotter, I stopped going into the workshop. I would curl up in my room watching cartoons like any other primary school student, but my hands never stopped; I would lick my fingers and slide out mooncake trays. Full of ambition, I negotiated a piece-rate pay for myself, the same as the temporary workers in the packaging room. I felt I was at the forefront of “equal pay for equal work,” and for a moment, I imagined I was actually counting banknotes. This career as a temporary worker ended when blisters formed on my thumb and index finger, and the golden plastic foil from the trays became embedded in my fingerprints. In the final few days of the summer holiday, I had to use my injured fingers to finish a blank page of my “Happy Summer Holidays” workbook.
III. The Crusts Also Had a Filling
Another summer holiday came, and the factory moved to a new industrial park. The rent in the new park was much lower; it was less of an industrial park and more of an agricultural one. At the entrance to the village, there was a large sign for a “Vegetable Production Base”, and indeed, there were more fields than factories. Our family was among the first to move in. To the left was a sofa cover factory, to the right was a spicy strip factory run by a fellow townsman, opposite was a magnolia nursery, and behind us were vegetable plots. In the small plots of my hometown, winter melons grew flat on the ground, but here they grew on trellises, hanging in neat vertical rows, just like the mooncakes on our baking racks.
In the first few days of the move, two incidents occurred. First, the owner of the magnolia nursery came to complain that some children from our factory had sneaked into his woods at night. Second, my father convened the first employee meeting in the canteen. With a new site came a new atmosphere, and he asked everyone for their suggestions. A young man named Ah Jun raised his hand and brought up the quality of the food, rest days, and labour laws. From that day on, the factory never held another employee meeting.
The workshop in the new building was larger, with piles of cardboard boxes forming a ready-made maze. I spent my days playing hide-and-seek there with a child from the family who grew winter melons behind us. Once, I climbed to the top of the boxes, jumping about, and in the furthest corner of the warehouse by the window, I spotted a hollowed-out section, like a missing piece in a game of Tetris. Peering inside, I saw a quilt tucked in there, with two pillows lying askew. I had discovered a secret, and I decided to keep it to myself. As Mid-Autumn approached and I saw the piles of boxes in the corner getting lower, I secretly worried for them. However, that year was exceptionally busy with a constant stream of orders, and the boxes went from low to high and back again; the adults had no leisure to investigate the corner.
Trucks came and went once a day. In the afternoons, they carried away mooncakes whose plastic packaging was still warm from the cut, unloading them at the Gaoqiao wholesale market before they were transferred to large lorries with out-of-town plates. The trucks would then drive to the Mawangdui vegetable wholesale market to buy produce—sacks upon sacks of cabbage and potatoes. I found it strange that we had to go to a wholesale market for vegetables when we were surrounded by them.
As the festival drew nearer, so did the returns. The packers didn’t just pack; they had to unpack, much like how I would have to erase and rewrite completed homework. The inner trays could be recycled, but the mooncakes—now smelling slightly of rancid oil and no longer in neat rows, regardless of flavour or size—were piled like small hills in the corner. They were thrown into the mixer in small batches, where they were ripped open and ground together with flour and egg liquid, churning out colourful fillings that gradually lost their hue, eventually becoming a plain, unremarkable mass of dough. I used to eat only the crust and leave the filling, but today I discovered that the crusts, too, had a filling. From then on, I stopped eating mooncakes entirely.
IV. Brawls at the Pig Farm Entrance
Once Mid-Autumn Festival passed, the production lines finally ground to a halt, and an unsettling silence fell over the entire factory site. The returned mooncakes couldn’t be “re-employed” on the shelves; instead, they were sold cheaply to farmers to be used as pig feed. Along the way, one farmer offered a higher price, but my father went back on his word and tore up the agreement. The original buyer was incensed and brought a crowd to cause trouble, leading to a small-scale skirmish between the two farms and the mooncake factory at the village entrance on a summer night. By then, I had already started school. I vaguely sensed that things had gone wrong and felt afraid, yet I had no desire to know who had won or lost. Moreover, I didn’t like my new school; I was the only outsider in my class. I think I had a fever, but the adults didn’t seem to care. I hid in the women workers’ dormitory, where Xiao Min found me. She felt my forehead, helped me bathe, and changed me into clean clothes. That night, I slept in her bed. There was no pillow, so I clung to her arm, burying my face in her shoulder, whispering through tears: people had mocked my “standard Mandarin”, and someone had hit me…
Xiao Min stroked my head gently, telling me there was nothing to fear. Her bed had a warm, rich fragrance, like mooncakes fresh from the oven, a blend of butter, fruit, flour, and soap. Gradually, I drifted off to sleep.
The cardboard boxes in the corner of the warehouse were finally cleared out. Sunlight fell slantedly across the corner of the wall, and the concrete floor seemed devoid of even a speck of dust; I almost believed I had been dreaming. It wasn’t until the girl from the winter melon farm quietly led me around to the back of the workshop that I saw the three-sided open drainage ditch outside the window, where various plastic wastes had accumulated. One day, during a heavy downpour, the debris in the ditch was washed into her family’s fields. That inverted trapezoidal concrete channel, nearly half a metre wide at the base, was part of the farmland infrastructure; by following the ditch, one could cut across fields and through alleys almost endlessly. The administrative village where the industrial park was located was surrounded on three sides by the Liuyang River. No matter which embankment you climbed or which direction you walked, you always ended up heading out of the village. So, I climbed onto the embankment on my bicycle and rode away from the village to start secondary school.
Every summer remained the peak season for mooncake production, but I no longer lost myself in the rhythm of the production line or the secrets of the warehouse, nor did I hide in the women’s dormitory when I was sad. My Mandarin slowly took on a “stilted” quality, and I began to face the pressure of schoolwork, the company of best friends to gossip with, and more than one secret crush. It was only on Teacher’s Day, just before Mid-Autumn Festival, that I would offer mooncakes to my teachers. Every morning as I cycled to school, those workshops seemed to drift further away. Yet, when I descended from the river embankment, the workshops seemed to have multiplied. The farmlands were gradually being covered by factory buildings, the former greenery replaced by greyish corrugated roofing. The magnolia nursery in front of my house had long since vanished, though I have almost no memory of it. And those ditches were gradually pinched shut by the factories, their function shifting entirely from irrigation to sewage disposal. Compared to the current state, the waste by the winter melon fields back then was a mere pittance of pollution.
V. Leaving the Mooncake Factory
During high school, the factory’s production lines were transferred to a relative. My father changed careers entirely and returned to our ancestral home in Anhui, while I remained alone in Hunan to pursue my studies. On occasional weekends, I would visit my relative; their workshop was also in the original industrial park, though it belonged to a different village group. Truly, things remained the same but the people had changed; now, only the machinery of the production line felt familiar, and even the workers were mostly locals. While getting lunch in the kitchen, I suddenly heard a Henan accent—it was Ajun and Xiao Min. Xiao Min had scooped two portions of food and was sitting opposite Ajun; when she saw me, she smiled just as she had when I was young and asked, “You’re back!” But I could no longer do as I did in my childhood and bury my face in Xiao Min’s embrace. My relative told me that Ajun and Xiao Min had finally tied the knot and were married. The women’s toilet in my relative’s factory consisted of three squat toilets in a row, without any partitions between them. I chose the one furthest in, sweating from a bout of constipation while praying that no one else would come in. As luck would have it, it was Xiao Min who entered; she squatted in the middle, our legs so close they almost touched. I was mindful of the private intimacy we once shared and wished I could have been a “sensible young woman”, yet here we were, sharing such a private moment. Xiao Min swiped her phone and played a short video—the sound of a child’s laughter. It was only a few seconds long, but she played it on a loop several times. Finally, she handed the phone to me and told me it was her child, just over a year old, who had been weaned at the start of the year and was now being cared for by the mother-in-law back home.
A few years later, while I was attending university in another province, I learned from a secondary school classmate that the industrial park was being demolished. My relative’s factory moved to another city, and the son was now in charge of the family. When I went to visit, the production lines had been adjusted, and they no longer made mooncakes.
Ajun was still there; we simply nodded to one another. My relative whispered that Xiao Min was gone, having “run off” with a man from western Hunan who worked at the factory.
My family once had a mooncake factory, but it is completely gone, and even the original site no longer exists. My memories are unsubstantiated and impossible to verify. It seems that it is precisely by refusing to eat mooncakes that I can recall and recount everything about the factory. Much like processed food, I am analysing and processing my own memories.
My list of ingredients is extending infinitely: those moments of weightlessness, the shimmering mooncake inserts, the coloured fruit fillings with the pastry chewed away, the vanished plain pastry mooncakes, the magnolia groves and the secrets in the warehouse corners, Xiao Min’s phone video, that stifling, warm scent of margarine, fruit essence, flour, and eggs… and the expanded industrial park, the vanished farmlands and villages, the clogged ditches, and the drying Liuyang River. As for me, I am on the river embankment, cycling further and further away.
● In 2019, returning to the demolished industrial park and climbing onto the old site of the mooncake factory. Photo: ZT
Foodthink AuthorZhang LiaoshuA small-scale farmer of images, a fisherwoman of words; tilling shallowly across many lands, a multi-hyphenate professional currently working and living elsewhere. Interested in artistic intervention in rural areas, ecofeminism, and sustainable food and agriculture.
Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations in this article were generated by AI
