The Old Mid-Autumn Moon Tray

Coi cũng đẹp. Those three Vietnamese words mean "nice enough to look at." More than a hundred years ago, one man gave exactly that praise to the feast trays of the full-moon night in the eighth lunar month. The young women of the town streets set them out. The young women competed to see whose hands were the most skillful. Papayas passed through their hands and came out carved into flowers, one kind of flower after another. Dough was molded into shrimp and fish. For all that rivalry, the praise was only three words: coi cũng đẹp.

At the head of the tray stood the mooncake. Around it lay all sorts of cakes and fruits, dyed one color and another to make them as bright as possible. Green, red, white and yellow crowded together on a single tray, as lively as a festival.

On that full-moon day, the feast was laid out twice. By day, families prepared a feast as an offering to their ancestors. Only in the evening came the moon-viewing feast, a tray set out for sitting and gazing at the moon. People usually called the full moon of the eighth month the children's festival. Even so, some households spent a great deal on it.

The festival toys of those days were all made of paper pasted in layers. Elephants and horses, qilin, lions and dragons, even butterflies and praying mantises, every creature came out of paper. Paper was also built up into loofah trellises, into communal houses and pagodas, into spinning lanterns and slotted lanterns. Among all those toys sat a little clay scholar, an ông nghè.

In a single festival season, some households sold such toys for as much as a few hundred in silver. Even then, there were new kinds of toys. They were made of tin plate, as thin as a leaf. When the man recording these customs set down his pen, people had been making them for only ten years.

The man who gave those three words of praise was Phan Kế Bính. He was a licentiate of the old examinations, well versed in classical Chinese. He translated books, wrote for newspapers, and studied the way his own people lived. Nearly a hundred customs he wrote about were later gathered into a book called Vietnamese Customs, and the Mid-Autumn Festival is only a short entry in it. Yet thanks to that short entry, the feast trays of his day still keep their bright colors now.

As for where the custom of hanging lanterns and setting out feasts came from, Phan Kế Bính could only guess. He suspected it began with Emperor Đường Minh Hoàng, an emperor of the Tang dynasty in China. The tale goes that on the emperor's birthday, lanterns were hung and banquets laid out everywhere. The Vietnamese then followed suit, and it became a custom. That was only his guess. No one knows for sure when the Mid-Autumn Festival itself began.

On that full-moon night in those days, the streets seemed to belong to the children. They poured out into the streets in troops and bands. In the middle of the road, one group played tug of war, another paraded lanterns, and another paraded a lion. Drums went tùng tùng and gongs went phèng phèng, ringing down the whole street, mixed with shouts and noisy laughter. Elsewhere came the sound of hát trống quân, a kind of sung exchange. Two sides sang back and forth in reply, with a drum keeping the beat.

More than a hundred years later, it is once again a full-moon night of the eighth month on a street like that. Feast trays today are often set out in an open spot for moon viewing, a shared courtyard or a stretch of sidewalk. In apartment blocks, the tray goes down in the courtyard or up on the top floor. But to see the moon, everyone heads up to the roof together.

In many places, neighbors on the same block or in the same apartment complex join in to set out one shared tray. Imported apples, pears, grapes and oranges lie beside the autumn pomelos and persimmons. The young women and mothers of the neighborhood still show off their skill, carving fruit and vegetables into animals and flowers. No tray is without a bright star lantern. Inside each home, many families still set out a tray of their own. These days, arranging a feast tray takes less than half a day, sometimes with no trip to the market at all.

The heart of the tray is still bánh nướng, the baked cake, and bánh dẻo, the soft cake. People also call them mooncakes. Their fillings now include salted egg, green tea, even coffee. The cakes come in new shapes too. Some are shaped like a fish, and some like a whole family of pigs, a sow with her piglets. The crust is no longer only the brown of the baked cake. Magenta plant leaves dye it purple and butterfly pea flowers give it a deep blue. Dragon fruit and green tea powder each add a color of their own.

The slotted lantern, also called the running-horse lantern, is long gone and now lives only in books. In the old days, heat rising inside the lantern made its canopy turn. As the canopy turned, little levers inside pushed the figures in and out through the slots. They looked like actors coming and going on a tuồng stage. Tuồng is a traditional form of Vietnamese theater.

Back then, tin toys were the new toys, the toys of well-off families. Today, only one of them survives: the steamboat. It really runs, going tạch tạch like a real boat. But even that boat is growing scarce, because almost no one makes it anymore. The children of today still have the star lanterns and masks, the lantern processions and the drums of the lion dance.

At the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, one recent Mid-Autumn season, folk artisans showed children how to make familiar toys with their own hands. There were tò he and little dough animals, star lanterns, masks of pasted paper, and a paper doctoral laureate too. Doctoral laureates were scholars who passed the royal examinations. That season, the museum's moon-viewing tray also displayed children's toys, right beside the fruit and cakes. People affectionately call that paper doctoral laureate an ông nghè. So the clay ông nghè of long ago has a namesake on today's feast tray. By setting him on the tray, parents send along a wish that their children will study hard and do well.

Tonight, around the shared tray, the neighbors sit chatting and wait for the moon. The cakes and fruit still lie whole on the tray. Only when the moon rises at its roundest and most beautiful will everyone eat the cakes and fruit together. At the end of the street, the lion-dance drums have already started their tùng tùng, and a band of children goes by carrying lanterns.

While they wait, the papaya flowers of long ago seem to bloom again among tonight's animals carved from fruit. The shrimp and fish of molded dough seem to swim over and lie right beside the fish-shaped cake. Green, red, white and yellow spread into the purple and deep blue crusts. Only the slotted lantern could not come along. It stays behind in the books, while star lanterns shine all along the street. The animals and flowers carved tonight by the women of the neighborhood surely deserve more praise than three words, coi cũng đẹp.

On the tray tonight there is still the round cake that bears the moon's name. One round moon rests on the tray, another round moon is rising over the rooftops, and the whole neighborhood gathers between the two. No one has yet reached out to break into the feast.