The Middle Kingdom is rocking this week.
With the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic marked by a meticulously executed massive parade, the14th such event since 1949, daily life has taken more than a few detours this week. Couple the October 1 National Day celebrations with Mid-Autumn Festival, also called Moon Festival, falling on October 3, and you end up with 1.3 billion people ready to travel or par-tay during the week-long combined celebration.
While the parade in Beijing was strictly invitation-only, Moon Festival, like most festivals, is an opportunity to stop worrying about mobility issues and the like, and have a good meal with family, friends, or colleagues. The meals of course can be a bit overwhelming. (It will take me a couple of weeks, I suspect, to recover from a Chinese friend’s 17-dish, home-cooked banquet for eight guests last Saturday night.)
But the mooncakes. Oh, the mooncakes.
Understand that mooncakes in the Chinese food pantheon are roughly equivalent to fruitcakes in the western holiday tradition, which is to say that the holiday is not a holiday without them but that discrete regifting is socially accepted. Companies give mooncakes to employees, students give mooncakes to their teachers, hotels give mooncakes to their guests, and marketing types give mooncakes to prospective customers. You can even play games with mooncakes. Mooncake mania runs rampant.
The major difficulty with mooncakes, of course, is that once eaten, they generally go to the eater’s mid-section and settle in for the duration. Alas, they can be quite tasty.
Festivals and holidays such as these are great opportunities to see different facets of culture. Issues of Chinese face, insecurity, generosity of spirit, and sense of humor manifest themselves at the national level as well as in the individuals in the workplace. That pesky global mindset stuff again.
So as those of us in China power through what remains of our holiday, many other mobility colleagues are gathering for the Worldwide ERC® Global Workforce Symposium in Chicago. Hey, folks… it’s just a short trip to Chicago’s Chinatown and some delicious mooncakes! ;-)