Another Mid-Autumn Festival has come around. Gifts pass between relatives and friends, and mooncakes invariably take centre stage. The tins range from ornate to understated: Cantonese or Suzhou style, fresh meat or strictly vegan, handmade and organic. Here comes a venerable Hong Kong brand; over there, it’s the latest viral shop. I decline them all. Once a year, with a faintly apologetic smile, I go round explaining: “My family used to run a mooncake factory. I practically grew up swimming in them. Honestly, nothing scares me more than eating one now!” When they are about to press further, I fall silent. It is not that I am guarding any scandalous secrets about the production line. The truth is simply too complex to cram into a few casual remarks.
Yet I cannot stand the persistent questioning. Much like the filling tucked inside the pastry, the past cannot be kept hidden. Every year, there is always one friend bearing mooncakes who ends up with their hand held in mine instead, as I repay the gesture with a tale from the factory days. This year, let me share it with you.
I. From “Workshop” to “Factory”
Before our family’s food processing plant could rightly be called a “factory”, it went through a “workshop” phase. I was still young then, and the only memory I have is the sound of mooncake moulds of every size being slapped against the wooden boards in rapid succession, clattering like firecrackers. My father was still a young man then, and as the family business was in its infancy, he had to suit up in protective arm sleeves and an apron to get to work himself. I’ve always suspected that the aggressive way he later slammed the “Fa Cai” (Wealth) tile onto the mahjong table when he drew a winning hand was honed back then while pounding mooncake dough. Though, of course, the mooncakes were what actually paid the bills.
As turnover grew, assembly lines were introduced. The workshop expanded into a small factory, and we relocated from Henan to Hunan. A handful of Henan workers came with us. Each year after the Spring Festival, when they returned to the plant, they’d bring more fellow townspeople, and we collected a referral fee for every new head. It was an Anhuian family running a Henan-speaking food processing plant in Hunan. At home, we spoke with an Anhui accent; at the factory, the Henan dialect was the norm; and even the teachers at the local township primary school conducted lessons in Changsha dialect. I grew up navigating between these three tongues.
The factory mainly produced egg yolk cakes, saccharine, and mooncakes. June to September was the peak production season for mooncakes, and during the busiest periods, day-and-night shifts were required, with the production lines running almost non-stop. This period, coincidentally, was also my summer holiday. With schoolwork still light during my primary years, I especially loved running around the workshops, loafing about until I became a nuisance to everyone.
In the first decade of the millennium, mooncake automation had already become quite sophisticated. The dough was mixed by automatic machines, and the fillings were ready-made fruit-flavoured wax gourd pulp, brightly coloured and cloyingly sweet. The “mooncake wrapping” machine had a hopper on the left and one on the right: one for the dough, one for the filling. The machine automatically extruded long strands of dough encasing the filling. These passed over blades, suddenly dividing into uniform little cubes. Then, as the moulds pressed down one by one, the mooncakes emerged onto the conveyor belt.
II. Assembly Lines, Ovens, and Blisters on My Fingers
For a while, I particularly enjoyed hanging around the production line, listening to the machinery hum and the moulds clatter rhythmically, enveloped in a sense of order and steadiness. Sometimes, staring at the conveyor belt, I’d feel a sudden lightness and lift, as if I were a mooncake adrift in the Milky Way. It wasn’t until a physics lesson that I learned this was “relative motion”. Where Shen Fu, in *Six Records of a Floating Life*, smoked mosquitoes to imagine them as white cranes against blue clouds, I counted mooncakes to drift through the cosmos. In modern terms, you might call it a “flow state”. Determined to uncover what triggered this peculiar experience, I spent days on end by the production line trying to replicate it. Eventually, I found the key variable: letting my gaze go unfocused and allowing my eyes to drift slightly inward. I weaned myself off the habit just before the cross-eyed look set in, my attention having shifted entirely to baking mooncakes.
The factory ovens were upright models that looked rather like lifts, though they had a single, heavy door pulled open by hand, and were pitch black inside. The man in charge of the ovens once threatened to lock me inside if I carried on with my mischief, so I made sure to give them a wide berth wherever I went.
The mooncakes were brushed with egg yolk—the secret to a beautiful sheen—laid out in neat rows on baking trays, stacked onto racks, and finally pushed into the oven. I preferred the ones baked until slightly charred; the pastry was wonderfully crisp and fragrant. But I couldn’t stand the filling—cloyingly sweet and sticky to the teeth. So, when I ate mooncakes, I only ate the crust. Fortunately, with a family factory to call on, I could sustain this “pastime” for the time being.
On one occasion, I even used a spare mould to press out a mooncake made of nothing but crust, swapping it onto a tray alongside the regular ones. Sadly, after making its way onto the tray, up the rack, and through several cycles in the oven, it became utterly unrecognisable to me. Watching them go into the packaging machine and emerge neatly wrapped, I could only suppose some stranger would reap the reward.
In the factory’s mooncake production, packaging was undoubtedly the most labour-intensive part of the process. Each mooncake came with a square plastic liner. To save space during transit, these liners were tightly compressed, front to back, and had to be separated by hand. You’d pinch a liner between your thumb and forefinger, relying on friction to peel it free. The trick was to keep your fingers neither too dry nor too damp; much like counting banknotes, you’d lick your fingers, rub them together, and then get started. Once the weather turned properly hot, I stopped going into the workshop altogether. I’d hole up in my room watching cartoons like any ordinary primary schooler, but my hands never idle; I’d keep licking my fingers and peeling apart the mooncake liners. Full of grand ambitions, I negotiated a piece-rate pay to match the temporary packers, positioning myself at the vanguard of equal pay for equal work. For a fleeting moment, I truly felt like I was counting money. That changed when blisters formed on my thumb and forefinger, and the gold plastic foil from the liners embedded itself into my fingerprints. My stint as a temporary worker came to an end. Over the final days of the summer holidays, I’d have to use those battered fingers to finally complete an untouched page of my *Happy Summer Holidays* workbook.
III. Even the Crust Holds a Filling
Another summer holiday arrived, and the factory moved to a new park. The rent was considerably lower. It felt less like an industrial estate and more like an agricultural zone. A large sign at the village entrance declared it a “Vegetable Production Base,” and indeed, there were far more fields than factories. Our family was likely among the first to set up shop. To our left sat a factory making sofa covers, to our right a spicy gluten snack factory run by someone from our hometown. Directly opposite lay a magnolia nursery, and behind us stretched vegetable plots. Back home, winter melons sprawled across the ground in small garden patches. Here, they were trained on trellises, hanging vertically in neat rows, as orderly as the mooncakes cooling on our own baking racks.
Within days of our arrival, two notable incidents unfolded. First, the owner of the magnolia nursery opposite came to our door to lodge a complaint: the young workers from our factory were sneaking into his grove at night. Second, my father convened the inaugural staff meeting in the canteen, urging everyone to share their thoughts under the banner of “new factory, fresh start.” A young worker named Ajun raised his hand and brought up the canteen food, days off, and labour laws. That was the last staff meeting the factory ever held.
The new workshop was cavernous, filled with towering stacks of cardboard boxes that formed a ready-made maze. I spent my days playing hide-and-seek there with a new friend, the child of the family who grew winter melons out back. Once, I climbed onto the boxes, hopping from one to another, and in the farthest corner by the window, I spotted a hollowed-out space that looked like a missing block in a game of Tetris. Peering inside, I saw a set of bedding tucked away, with two pillows askew at the top. I had stumbled upon a secret, and I resolved to keep it to myself. As the Mid-Autumn Festival approached and I watched the box stacks in that corner shrink, I secretly grew anxious. Yet production was in full swing, orders never stopping, and the boxes rose and fell in a constant cycle. The adults had no time to wonder what was happening in the shadows.
A delivery lorry would make its run each day. In the afternoon, it would leave carrying mooncakes whose plastic seals were still warm, unload them at the Gaoqiao wholesale market, and transfer the cargo onto large lorries bearing out-of-town licence plates. Then it would head to the Mawangdui vegetable wholesale market to buy groceries, invariably returning with sack upon sack of Chinese cabbage and potatoes. I always wondered why we bothered buying from a wholesale market when the factory was surrounded by vegetable growers.
The closer we got to Mid-Autumn, the more returns piled up. The packers had to do more than just pack; they had to unpack too. It felt like writing out my homework only to have to rub it out and start again. The inner trays could be washed and reused. But the mooncakes that had begun to carry a faintly rancid smell no longer stood in neat rows. Regardless of flavour or size, they were dumped into a corner like a small hill. They were fed in batches into the mixer along with flour and egg wash. Chopped open, they were churned into a riot of colourful fillings, which gradually lost their distinct hues and melted into a plain, unadorned dough skin. I used to eat only the pastry skin and leave the filling. But now that I’ve realised the skin itself is ultimately just another kind of filling, I’ve stopped eating mooncakes entirely.
IV. A Brawl with the Pig Farm at the Village Entrance
After the Mid-Autumn Festival, the production lines finally ground to a halt, leaving the entire factory compound in an unnerving silence. The returned mooncakes were beyond salvage for resale, so they were cheaply sold off to livestock farmers to be used as pig feed. Halfway through, another farmer offered a better price. My father reneged on the deal and tore up what had been agreed. The original buyer was far from pleased. He rounded up people to cause a disturbance, and it ended with a small-scale brawl at the village entrance on a summer evening, involving two pig farms and the mooncake factory. By then, I had already started school. I had a vague sense that things had gone badly wrong. I was frightened, but I didn’t want to know who had won or lost. Besides, I didn’t like the new school at all. I was the only outsider in my class. I think I came down with a fever, but the adults showed little concern for me. I hid myself away in the female workers’ dormitory. Xiao Min found me, felt my forehead, helped me take a bath, and changed me into clean clothes. That night I slept in her bed. There was no pillow on her mattress, so I clung to her arm, buried my face in her shoulder, and mumbled through tears: people had mocked my “standard Mandarin”, someone had hit me…
Xiao Min patted my head, stroke by stroke, and told me not to be afraid. Her bed carried a warm, rich scent, like fresh-baked mooncakes coming out of the oven, mixed with notes of butter, fruit, flour, and soap. I gradually drifted off to sleep.
The cardboard boxes in the corners of the warehouse were finally cleared away. Slanting sunlight fell into the corners, and the concrete floor seemed almost free of dust. I half thought I had been dreaming. Until the girl from the family that grew winter melons quietly led me around to the back of the factory building. Outside that window lay a concrete-lined drainage ditch, where all sorts of discarded plastic waste had accumulated. One day after a heavy downpour, the stuff in the ditch washed out into her family’s fields. The drainage ditch was a trapezoidal concrete channel, lined on three sides, with a base nearly half a metre wide. Originally built to serve the farmland, it allowed one to cut through fields and alleys for what seemed like an endless stretch. The administrative village where the industrial park was situated was bordered on three sides by the Liuyang River. No matter which side of the riverbank you climbed up on, or which direction you headed, you would always be walking away from the village. So I cycled up onto the riverbank, rode out of the village, and began my secondary school years.
Every summer holiday remains the peak season for mooncake production, but I no longer lose myself to the rhythm of the production lines or the secrets tucked away in the warehouses, nor do I take refuge in the female workers’ dormitories when I am heartbroken. My Mandarin has slowly taken on a stiff, ‘plastic’ ring, and my life has begun to fill with academic pressures, close friends to share gossip with, and more than one quiet crush. It is only around Teachers’ Day, just before the Mid-Autumn Festival, that I would gift mooncakes to my teachers. Cycling out each morning, those factory buildings grew a little further away. Yet when I rode back down from the river embankment, they seemed to multiply. Farmland gradually gave way to industrial buildings, the former greenery replaced by grey concrete-tile roofs. The southern magnolia nursery that once stood before my home had long since vanished, yet I harbour no memory of it whatsoever.Those irrigation canals, too, were gradually squeezed between factory buildings, their function shifting entirely from watering crops to channeling industrial waste. The refuse that once littered the edges of the winter melon fields pales in comparison to the present reality—truly, minor pollution dwarfed by the greater.
V. Leaving the Mooncake Factory
When I was in senior high school, the factory’s production line was transferred to a relative, my father changed careers entirely and returned to our family home in Anhui, and I stayed behind in Hunan to pursue my education on my own. On occasional weekends, I would visit my relative; their factory remained in the original industrial park, though it now fell under a different village committee. The places were familiar, but everything else had changed. Now, only the machines on the production line felt known to me—even the workforce was mostly local. While serving myself lunch in the kitchen, I suddenly heard the Henan dialect. To my surprise, it was Ajun and Xiaomin. Xiaomin had taken two portions of food and sat facing Ajun. Spotting me, she smiled and asked, much as she used to in my childhood, “Back already?” But I could no longer bury my face in Xiaomin’s embrace as I had when I was younger. My relative later told me that Ajun and Xiaomin had tied the knot and married. The women’s toilets at my relative’s factory were three squat pans arranged side by side, with no partitions between them. I took the one at the far end, straining and breaking into a sweat, silently hoping no one else would enter. Yet of course, it was Xiaomin. She took the middle spot, our legs so close they nearly brushed. Clinging to the memory of our once close bond, I wished I were a “sensible grown-up girl,” yet here we were, sharing such an unavoidably intimate space. Xiaomin swiped open her phone and played a short clip of a child’s laughter. Just a few seconds long, she replayed it several times. Eventually, she handed the phone to me, explaining it was her child—just over a year old, weaned earlier in the year, and now being looked after by the grandmother back home.
A few more years passed, and I moved out of the province to attend university. It was from a middle school classmate that I learned the industrial park was set for demolition. My relative’s factory had relocated to another city, and now the eldest son was calling the shots at home. When I went to visit, the factory had reconfigured its production lines and no longer made mooncakes.
Ajun was still there. We merely nodded at one another. My relative quietly told me Xiaomin had gone, having ‘run off’ with a man from western Hunan who worked at the plant.
The mooncake factory my family once had is gone entirely, along with the very ground it stood on. My memories lack any tangible evidence, impossible to verify. It appears that precisely by refusing to eat mooncakes, I manage to recall and recount everything about that factory. Much like processed food, I too find myself analysing and processing my own memories.
My list of ingredients stretches on endlessly: those fleeting moments of weightlessness, the gleaming inner trays of the mooncakes, the colourful fruit fillings with their skins bitten off, the long-vanished all-dough mooncakes, the secrets hidden among the southern magnolia groves and warehouse corners, Xiaomin’s video on her phone, that hot, heavy air blending margarine, artificial fruit flavourings, flour and eggs… And then there are the expanded factory grounds, the swallowed farmland and villages, the silted canals, and the dwindling Liuyang River. And me? I am cycling along the river embankment, riding further and further away.
●2019: returning to the already demolished industrial park and climbing onto the former site of the mooncake factory. Photograph: ZT
Foodthink AuthorZhang XiaoshuA modest cultivator of images, a gatherer of words, tilling the surface here and there, half-and-half, somewhere in between, currently living and working elsewhere. Focused on topics such as artistic rural interventions, ecofeminism, and sustainable food and agriculture.
Illustrations in this article were generated by AI unless otherwise stated.
