By the Light of the Silvery Moon

I was wandering through Borders a few weeks ago, taking in a dose of air conditioning to perk me up for the walk home, when I saw the first of what turned out to be many headlines in the local health and fitness magazines on the same topic:  “How to Survive Mooncake Season.”

Mooncake season?  Huh?  I had no idea!

Mooncakes are small, round, beautiful pastries traditionally given as gifts and eaten during the Chinese mid-Autumn festival.  The more traditional ones are filled with red bean paste or lotus seed paste and sometimes yolks from salted duck eggs (which tastes better than it sounds).  However, there are literally hundreds of choices, as my daughter and I discovered when we went to buy a box to take to dinner at a friend’s house.  Not only were there an amazing number of choices (including mint chocolate chip, yam, green tea, even tiramisu), but the lovely lady selling them would not hear of us making a selection without tasting them all! 

All of this pastry eating leads up to the mid-Autumn festival, or moon festival, held on the 15th day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar, a day that generally coincides with the full moon and, in the Western calendar, the autumnal equinox. 

A joyous festival, traditionally preceded by the harvest and a settling of all delinquent accounts, the whole idea is to relax and celebrate.  It celebrates the moon goddess, Chang’e, who lives in the moon with a jade rabbit.  The stories of how she became immortal vary, and sometimes contradict each other, but most involve her unintentional separation from her beloved husband, Hou’yi the archer, and an elixir of life that was supposed to make both of them immortal, so they can be together forever.  However, vice and treachery intervene and only Chang’e takes the elixir, but the double dose lifts her toward heaven.  In one story, Chang’e decides to live in the moon because it is closest to the earth and her heart remains in the world of mortals.  In some versions of the story, Hou’yi gets to visit Chang’e each year, on the night of the moon festival.   

Down here on earth, we and many other families, gathered in the moonlight to look at the many beautiful and elaborate lanterns hung in honor of the holiday, and to enjoy the night.  Children carry their own lanterns, often lit by candles, couples snuggle on benches, and people write wishes on red ribbons attached to shiny disks and throw them into a beautiful “Wishing Tree.”

Frankly, this is my kind of holiday.  Walking in the moonlight with the people I love best, eating cake, and hoping dreams will come true.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

How Did I Get Here?

You may find yourself in another part of the world

You may ask yourself, how do I work this? 

You may ask yourself, how did I get here? 

-- From Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime”

How did I get here?  Good question!  I am a confirmed homebody.  My family had a comfortable life in the Philadelphia suburbs with good friends, good jobs, cats, a garden....  What am I doing sitting on the balcony of an apartment in Singapore, drinking coffee, watching geckos, acting like I live here?  Frankly the mind boggles.  But here I am.

I will say right up front, we are not the typical, adventurous, expat family.  My last major move was in 1985, from the house I grew up in in Colorado, to college in Pennsylvania.  I moved to the Philadelphia area after college and pretty much stayed put for the next 20 years or so.  To say that picking up and moving to the other side of the world is completely out of character would not be an understatement.  

But the truth is, from the time my husband M came home from a trip to Japan a little over a year ago with the whiff of an idea that this might be a good job for him, it just felt right to all of us on some basic level (even when we were all feeling a little queasy at the same time.)  Sure there were plenty of good reasons not to even consider it, but there was something compelling about the idea.  A chance to do something life altering not only for ourselves but for our kids who, at ages 9 and 12 seem to be a perfect age for an adventure like this.  The reasons to go for it kept stacking up.

And, of course, in the back of my head was that great Mark Twain quote: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.”  So we sailed and here we are, the kids are in school and making friends, M is buzzing along getting things done in his new job and I am...hmm, well, that is the story of this blog.

The great opportunity for me in this adventure is the chance to put aside the work I had been doing for nearly 20 years as a legal journalist and writer and find out the answer to the question:  “What would I write if I weren’t writing for money?”  The answer so far?  “Umm...do Facebook status updates count?”  (There is no arguing that cash is a great motivator.)

The good news is, I am now feeling a very strong itch to write about this exciting, strange, crazy experience.  So really, this blog is mostly for me, to get me writing and keep me writing and see where that might lead.  But I also know that on any trip, it sure is nice to have company along the way.  I am hoping a few friends will join me for the ride.

So I won’t be starting at the beginning.  All good intentions aside, that ship has sailed.  Rather, I will start where I am right now and see where this adventure leads.  The last few weeks have been dizzying at best.  Life is exhausting when every single thing you do is a new adventure, from figuring out where to buy groceries and how to get around, to learning new laws and, more practically, learning how to cross the street all over again (the cars come from the other direction here.)  But now it seems the spinning has stopped, we are settling in, making friends, there is food in the cupboards, and I have stopped nearly walking into elderly ladies on the sidewalks (somehow they always seem to zig when I zag).  I can now start looking forward from my new vantage point, 180 degrees from where I started.

In future posts, I will share my adventures at the Giant Hypermarket, encounters with monkeys who think they are people, how 20 hours (more or less) on a plane can defeat even the most ambitious plans, life with geckos, feeding hungry ghosts, eating cake in the moonlight, getting up the nerve to drive the car, the joys of Skype and Facebook, and what it really means to be a "Singapore Expat Wife."

And although I sometimes have to stop for a minute and remind myself that, yes, this is my real life, I am finding that, in many ways it is still “the same as it ever was.”