Making visible our connections - to the past and each other

This week, I have been munching my way through a surplus of mooncakes ?? and thinking about whether and how we make visible our connections to the past - personal and collective - and who we share that with, and how.

This month is about East and South East Asian (ESEA) Heritage Month and picking through stories from my own and collective history, I have two stories that just might be worth passing on.

Story Time: The History of the Mooncake ??

I have a surplus of mooncakes because the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival fell on 17th September this year, and it is one of two Chinese festivals (the other being the Lunar New Year) that I always celebrate here in the UK.

The Moon Festival is a harvest-type festival, it is marked by the appearance of the full moon in on the 15th day of the 8th lunar month of the year and typically, families share a celebratory meal that includes mooncakes.

These are vaguely linked to a fable about a legendary archer and his wife, Chang-e, who took a magic potion and became goddess of the moon. Want visual context? Watch the 30-second Disney version here in the trailer for their 2020 film Over the Moon ??

The mooncake also has a brilliant subversive history . For a period of time, China was ruled by a Mongol dynasty (called the Yuan dynasty) and legend tells us that a successful rebellion was incited by Ming revolutionaries who placed subversive messages inside mooncakes distributed widely to Chinese families but not their Mongol rulers. When families cut into the cakes on the evening of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, they read the messages, took up arms and successfully overthrew the ruling dynasty.

All good and fine, but why do I have a surplus of mooncakes?

Two reasons: (1) I love mooncakes, but none of my family here shares this passion. They consist of a sweet pastry outer shell with a dense, sweet bean paste inside - so far so good. But the deluxe versions also feature a cooked, salted duck egg at the centre. Personally, I think this is the best part, but for most people with Western palates, this is really just a step too far.

And (2) following Brexit, Asian foodstuffs have become more expensive and harder to buy in Scotland. Last year, there was a run on mooncakes, with price gouging in the last few days and a single mooncake going for eyewatering prices of ￡8-12 each.

So this year, I have simply bought far too many. More than anyone in my family will ever eat. Which suits me fine, because it just means - more mooncakes for me. ??????

Story Time II: The Curious History of Opium, Rhubarb and Me

Last week, in London, studying the history of colonialism with colleagues and walking the City of London, we started to speak about the Opium Wars, which were a series of wars between China, the British Empire and France in the mid-19th Century. My own father was a historian of modern Chinese history, and when we lived in China, he made a point of taking me to museums in southern China and talking me through the exhibits.

He told me that the British Empire, facing a trade deficit in China and wanting very much to find items to trade with the Chinese for tea, silk and porcelain were looking for a product that the Chinese wanted to consume. They eventually settled on opium, cultivated and exported from India - a substance which is of course highly addictive, as well as harmful, and resulted in a permanent reversal of the balance of trade, in favour of the British Empire.

If you would like to read more, here is a version of this history from the British national archives which is quite light on taking responsibility, and which justifies Britain waging a war in order to legalise the opium trade as a reasonable defense of a global interest in free and unregulated markets. (If you live in the UK, by the way, this is definitely what your kids are learning in school.)

So Hong Kong, where my mother was born and raised, became a British colony and free trading port, ceded by China to the British following its total defeat in the Opium Wars.

My grandfather, his father and his brothers, originally farmers and small shopkeepers from Southern China, emigrated to the US in the early part of the 20th century. They opened Chinese restaurants and laundromats on the East Coast of the US, eventually however, sending my great-grandfather back to China in his later years, because it had become too expensive to support his lifelong opium habit in the US - it could more easily be serviced in China.

For both my parents, then, our family's history of nationality, identity and migration - are linked in different ways to the British Empire's decision, at one point in the distant past, to start trading opium from India for tea in China.

So what about the rhubarb? Hopefully having given you quite a serious schooling on opium, I can now lighten the mood.

My father also taught me that Chinese rhubarb, for a long time, was a highly sought after ingredient for Western medicines, as the root has purgative properties, and was traded on the Silk Route via Russia and also Turkey in medieval times, fetching higher prices than precious cinnamon and saffron. When Britain opened sea trade routes to China, they also traded for rhubarb, which held its price - sometimes trading at 3x the value of opium - for a long time because it could not be cultivated successfully in Europe.

There was a period, though, during or between the Opium Wars, when the Chinese proposed a blockade of rhubarb exports to Britain . The Chinese believed, in short, that if they withheld rhubarb for long enough, British people might actually build up enough internal wind to risk...exploding. ?? Or to at least experience extreme discomfort.

They were, as we now know, mistaken. And eventually, strains of rhubarb were successfully developed to withstand cultivation here in the UK, where it now grows hardy and strong, almost weed-like, in most conditions - consigning this tactical miscalculation by the Chinese to little more than a wry footnote in history.

The stories we tell, and how we tell them ??

This week, I had wondered about whether to share how we celebrate traditions in Chinese culture, and why it might be worth doing so.

I've landed somewhere else ... in telling you a story that matters, but also in pointing out the many ways a story can be told and retold: by the victor, by the defeated, by their descendents. I'd like to share these stories with my children, who hold both Chinese and British heritage, and ask them what sense they make of such things.

Like the mooncakes, I'll expect them to know about their history, personal and collective, but will leave them to decide how to hold that history, and how and where they pass it on.

I guess I'll finish by also reflecting that I had started with the idea of making visible our connections because I hope that I've demonstrated also that "other people's" history, if you look even just a bit beyond the obvious is also your history... or maybe, all of our history.

That could be liberating if we think about it that way. It is at least the way I would like to think about it.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend, and thanks for joining me again at The Long View. I would love to hear reflections, on these stories or on how you hold traditions and pass on personal and collective histories in your families and to your friends. ????