The Mooncake Factory Kid Doesn’t Eat Mooncakes

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Once again, Mid-Autumn has arrived, and among the gifts passed between relatives and friends, mooncakes reign supreme. Gift boxes ornate or plain, Cantonese-style or Suzhou-style, fresh pork or purely vegetarian, handmade and organic—this side brings a venerable Hong Kong brand, while over there a buzzy new internet-famous new shop appears… Yet I refuse them all, offering my apologetic smile each year as I explain, one by one: “My family used to run a mooncake factory. I truly grew up buried in a pile of mooncakes—the last thing I want is to eat one!” When people press further, I fall into a coy silence. It is not that any scandalous secret lurks in the factory—only that no few words could ever do it justice.

But I cannot withstand the repeated pressing. After all, even mooncake pastry hides its filling inside; a secret, kept too long, will out. Every year, some friend handing me a mooncake box ends up with their hand seized in return, trapped in a corridor of factory memories. This year, then—let me tell you once more.

I. From “Workshop” to “Factory”

Before our family’s food-processing plant could earn the title “factory”, it had its “workshop” phase. I was barely old enough to remember anything, except the relentless slapping of mooncake moulds—big and small, one after another—against the kneading board. Crack, crack, crack, like a string of firecrackers. My father was still a young man then; everything was in its infancy. He too wore oversleeves and an apron when he worked. I have always felt that his later habit of slamming a good mahjong tile—”Fortune”—down on the table with such force was simply what all those years of pressing mooncakes had trained into him. Only now it made money.

In time the output grew, and with it came a production line. The workshop became a small factory, and the whole thing relocated from Henan to Hunan. A handful of Henan workers came along too, and each year after the Spring Festival they returned to the factory bringing more of their fellow villagers, paid a bonus per headcount for every introduction. So here was a Hunan food-processing factory run by an Anhui family, speaking Henan dialect. At home we spoke with an Anhui accent; at the factory, a Henan one; and the township primary school, teachers included, all spoke in Changsha dialect. I grew up switching between these three tongues.

The factory mainly produced Egg Yolk Pies, Sachima and mooncakes. June to September was the busy season for mooncakes, and at the peak, shifts ran day and night—the production line barely paused. And those weeks were, of course, exactly when my school holidays fell. I had never been a diligent student, and I loved nothing more than to tumble into the workshop, a nuisance no one could bear.

That was the first decade of the millennium, and the automated mooncake machinery was already highly developed. The pastry had a mixing machine; the filling came ready-made as coloured winter melon paste in fruit flavours, vivid in hue, cloyingly sweet. The “mooncake-forming” machine had two hoppers on top—one for pastry, one for filling. It squeezed out a long strip of filling swaddled in pastry, which passed over a blade and split into perfectly uniform little squares. Then the moulds pressed down, one by one, and out slid the mooncakes on the conveyor belt.

II. The Production Line, the Oven, and Fingers Blistered by Friction

For a while I particularly loved to stand beside the production line, listening to the mechanical hum and the rhythmic thud of the moulds, feeling everything so orderly, so safe. Sometimes, watching the conveyor belt, I would drift out of my body and feel weightless, as though I myself were a mooncake drifting through the galaxy. Only when I took a physics lesson did I learn the proper name—“relative motion”. In Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life, the author sees mosquitoes as blue clouds and white cranes in a cloud of incense smoke; I counted mooncakes sailing the Milky Way across the great void. In today’s parlance, I suppose I had entered a state of “flow”. And so, determined to find the mechanism behind this wondrous sensation, I ran to the production line day after day trying to replicate it. At last I discovered the key variable: my eyes must be slightly unfocused, and I must tilt my gaze into a gentle cross-eye. Just before those crossed eyes could freeze into a permanent condition, I quit the habit; my interest had shifted to baking.

The ovens in the factory were upright, shaped like a lift—only with a single hand-pulled door, terribly heavy, and a pitch-dark interior. The male worker in charge of the oven used to threaten me: keep making trouble and he would lock me inside. So even when I was rampaging everywhere, I still skirted around the oven.

The mooncakes, brushed with egg yolk (the secret to a beautiful golden crust), lined up in neat rows on baking trays, which were slotted into racks, which were then wheeled into the oven. I liked the ones baked just a shade too dark—the crust was gloriously crisp. But the filling? Sickly sweet and sticky on my teeth. So when I ate a mooncake, I ate only the pastry. Fortunately, having a factory in the family meant I could support this “hobby” for the time being.

In fact, once I even used a spare mould to press myself an all-pastry mooncake and slipped it among the regular batch on the baking tray. Alas, once that pastry-only mooncake had entered the rack and made its circuit through the oven, we were strangers. Watching them feed into the packaging machine and emerge fully dressed, I could only think some lucky stranger had gotten themselves a little windfall.

Of all the steps on the mooncake production line, packaging demanded the most manual labour. Each mooncake sat in a square plastic inner tray. For transport the trays were packed tightly front to back to save space, so they had to be separated by hand. You pinched the tray between thumb and forefinger and used the friction between your fingertip and the plastic to ease it out. The trick: your fingers could not be too dry or too damp, so—just like a cashier counting banknotes—you licked them first, rubbed them together, then got to work. If the weather turned any hotter, I stopped venturing into the workshop. I would hole up in a room like any ordinary schoolgirl, watching cartoons, yet my hands never rested—I kept licking my fingers, peeling trays one by one. I had set my sights high, negotiating for myself the same piece-rate pay as the temporary workers in the packaging room, leading the charge for equal pay. For a while I felt I was truly counting banknotes. Then my thumb and forefinger blistered, and fragments of the golden plastic foil from the trays worked their way into my fingerprint ridges. My stint as a short-term worker was over. And in those final days of summer, I had to finish a page of Happy Summer Holidays—untouched so far—with my wounded fingers.

III. The Mooncake Pastry Has a Filling of Its Own

Another summer arrived, and the factory moved to a new industrial park. The rent there was far cheaper, and rather than an industrial park, it felt more like an agricultural one. On the way into the village hung a large sign that read, in effect, “Vegetable Production Base”, and indeed, farmland outnumbered factories. Our family’s factory was among the earliest to move in. To the left sat a sofa-cover workshop; to the right, a latiao factory run by a fellow Anhui countryman; opposite, a nursery of southern magnolias; and behind us, nothing but vegetable plots. At our old home, winter melons sprawled along the ground in the kitchen garden. Here they were trained on trellises, hanging in neat vertical rows like the mooncakes on our baking racks.

In those first days after the move, two things happened—not quite trivial, not quite momentous. First, the owner of the southern magnolia grove across the road came knocking, accusing our young workers of sneaking into his magnolia wood at night. Second, my father convened the factory’s inaugural workers’ meeting in the canteen: new premises, new spirit—everyone, please put forward your suggestions. Young Ajun raised his hand and brought up the food, the rest days, and labour law. The workers’ meeting was never held again.

The new workshop was larger, and cardboard boxes were stacked in piles—a ready-made maze. The neighbour’s child who grew winter melons behind us had become my new friend, and we played hide-and-seek there all day. Once I climbed to the top of a stack, jumping from box to box, and in the very back corner, near the window, I spotted a gap in the wall of boxes, as though a Tetris block had been left out. I peered inside: wedged into the bottom was a mattress of modest size, two pillows askew on top. I had discovered a secret, and I resolved to keep my mouth shut. As Mid-Autumn drew near and the pile of boxes in the corner shrank lower and lower, I secretly fretted. That year, though, orders were relentless and production frantic; the boxes went down and up, up and down, and no adult had time to mind the corner.

The delivery van went out once a day, loaded in the afternoon with mooncakes still warm from the plastic-wrapping station. It unloaded at Gaoqiao Wholesale Market, where the goods were transferred onto large trucks bearing plates from other provinces. Then it would drive on to Mawangdui Vegetable Wholesale Market to buy groceries—always sacks and sacks of Chinese cabbage and potatoes. I could never fathom it: all around the factory grew vegetables, yet we still drove to the wholesale market to buy them.

The closer we came to Mid-Autumn, the more returns came back. The packaging workers now had to unwrap as well as wrap—like finishing a homework exercise and then erasing it all to start again. The plastic inner trays were collected for reuse. But the mooncakes, already carrying a faint rancid oiliness, no longer kept their orderly rows; regardless of flavour or size, they piled into a small hill in the corner. They were tossed in batches into the mixer, combined with flour and beaten egg, torn open and churned into a riot of coloured fillings—until the colours faded and it all became a plain, unadorned mass of dough. I had never eaten mooncake filling, only the pastry. But that day I discovered that the pastry, too, had a filling of its own. From then on, I would not eat mooncakes at all.

IV. A Brawl at the Village Entrance with the Pig Farm

Once Mid-Autumn passed, the production line ground to a halt at last, and the whole compound fell so still it made me uneasy. The returned mooncakes could not be rehired at their old post; they had to be sold cheap to livestock farmers as pig feed. One farmer then offered a higher price, and Father went back on his word, tearing up the deal already agreed. The original buyer was not pleased—he called people over to make trouble—and in the end, two pig farms and one mooncake factory clashed in a small-scale brawl at the village entrance on a summer night. By then I had started at the new school. I sensed dimly that something had gone wrong; I was frightened, but I did not want to know who won. And I did not like my new school. I was the only outsider in the class. I think I had a fever, but the adults did not seem to notice. I crept into the women workers’ dormitory. Xiaomin found me there. She felt my forehead, drew me a bath, changed me into clean clothes. That night I slept in her bed. Her pillow was gone; I held her arm and buried my face against her shoulder, tear-streaked and rambling: someone had mocked my “standard Mandarin”…someone had hit me…

Xiaomin stroked my hair, slow and steady, telling me not to be afraid. Her bed smelled warm and sweet—like a mooncake fresh from the oven, mingling butter, fruit, flour and soap. I drifted off.

The cardboard boxes in the back corner of the warehouse were finally cleared out. Sunlight slanted across the wall; the cement floor seemed to hold not even a speck of dust. I almost believed I had dreamed it all. Then the girl from the winter-melon plot quietly led me around the back of the building. Outside the window ran a concrete drainage channel smooth on all three sides, littered with a long-accumulated hoard of plastic waste. One day a heavy rainstorm sent the channel’s contents tumbling onto her family’s fields. The three-sided, inverted-trapezoid concrete channel was nearly half a metre wide at the base, originally part of the farmland’s irrigation system. Follow it along and it threaded through fields and alleys without seeming to end. The administrative village where the industrial park sat was bordered on three sides by the Liuyang River. No matter which bank you reached, no matter which way you walked, you always ended up heading out of the village. I pedalled my bicycle up onto the river embankment, riding outward, away from the village, and began 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 away in the women workers’ dormitory when sadness caught up with me. My Mandarin gradually acquired a “plastic” artificiality. Schoolwork weighed on me, I found a best friend for swapping gossip, and I developed more than one crush. Only on Teachers’ Day, just before Mid-Autumn, would I take a mooncake as a gift for my teachers. Every morning as I cycled out, the factory buildings seemed to sit a little further away. And when I pedalled back down from the river embankment, more factories appeared. Over the farmland, sheds went up one by one; the old green gave way to a haze of grey corrugated sheet roofing. The southern magnolia nursery in front of our gate had long since disappeared, yet I had not the faintest memory of when or how. And the drainage channels were gradually hemmed in by factory walls, their function shifting entirely from irrigation to waste discharge. The refuse that once lined the edges of the winter-melon fields, set beside the state of things now, was truly “small pollution meeting great pollution.”

V. Leaving the Mooncake Factory

In high school, the factory’s production line was transferred to a relative, Father changed careers entirely and returned to our old home in Anhui, while I stayed on in Hunan for my studies. On the occasional weekend I would visit the relative’s factory—it was still in the same industrial park, only belonging to a different village group now. Truly, the scenery remained but the people had gone. Now only the machines on the line were familiar to me; even the workers were mostly locals. One midday, fetching lunch in the kitchen, I suddenly heard Henan dialect—it was Ajun and Xiaomin. Xiaomin had collected two portions of rice and sat facing Ajun. Seeing me, she smiled and asked, as she once had when I was small, “You’re back!” But I could no longer bury my face in her arms as I used to. The relative told me that Ajun and Xiaomin had tied the knot. The women’s lavatory at the relative’s factory was a row of three squat toilets with no dividers between them. I chose the one farthest in, sweating buckets from constipation while silently praying no one else would walk in. But of course it was Xiaomin who entered. She squatted in the middle stall, our legs almost touching. I clung to the memory of our private closeness, willing myself to be a “proper, grown-up young lady,” yet here we were—so intimately sharing that same narrow space. Xiaomin slid open her phone and played a short video: the sound of a baby laughing. The clip was only a few seconds long, and she replayed it again and again. At last she handed me the phone. “That’s my baby,” she said. “Just over a year old, weaned in the new year. Grandma is looking after them back home.”

A few years later I went to a university in another province, and I heard news of the park’s demolition from a junior-high classmate. The relative’s factory had relocated to a different city. The son was running things at home now. I visited once; the production line had been reconfigured, and they no longer made mooncakes.

Ajun was still there. We simply nodded to each other. The relative whispered that Xiaomin had left—she had “run off” with someone from Xiangxi who worked at the factory.

My family’s mooncake factory was completely erased, the site itself no longer existing. My memories had no evidence, nothing to verify them against. I suppose it was by refusing to eat mooncakes that I recalled and retold everything about the mooncake factory. I, too, was processing my memories as one processes food.

My ingredient list stretched on endlessly: those weightless moments, the gleaming plastic inner trays, fruit-flavoured fillings nibbled free of pastry, the vanished all-pastry mooncake, the southern magnolia grove and the secret in the corner of the warehouse, Xiaomin’s phone video, that smoky warmth of margarine, fruit essence, flour, and beaten egg… And then the expanded factory compound, the farmland and villages that vanished, the silted-up drainage channels and the drying Liuyang River. And I—pedalling my bicycle along the river embankment, riding further and further away.

● In 2019, I returned to the demolished park and climbed up to the former mooncake factory site. Photo: ZT

Foodthink Author
Zhang Xiaoshu
A small tiller of moving images, a fisherwoman of words, ploughing shallow furrows here and there—half X, half X. Currently working and living elsewhere. Interested in art in rural spaces, ecofeminism, and sustainable food and farming.

 

 

 

All illustrations in this article are AI-generated unless otherwise noted.

Edited by: Yuyang

Published by Foodthink