Compilation

Moonlight Reminiscing

The moon is full tonight. The pearlescent orb hangs low in the canvas of night, emitting a soft silver glow amidst the glimmering stars. Stars, specks of soft light in the blackness, just like faint, flickering memories of the dark.

I think back to what my old Chinese teachers used to tell me. The moon symbolizes yearning, I recall them saying as I skim through the verses in my poetry book. Chinese poets of old often used the moon to imply homesickness, nostalgia, or yearning for family. I look up at the sky from my dormitory room, at the glittering web of lights and at the moon in all her silver beauty, and I slowly start to understand why.

My memory takes me back to my youth. In my mind's eye, there is a table of wood in the center of a small, square room. A stout, blue vase — or was it a bowl of fruit back then? I can't quite recall — balances on the table surface, and next to it, a traditional red quanhe, filled to the brim with my cousin and I's favourite candies. Behind the table is a worn, beige couch, hastily shoved in a corner of the room; and above it, a modest clock, filling the silence with its rhythmic tick-tock-tick-tock. On the right side of the room, moonlight filters through a small window — although that can't be right, seeing as the window opens up to the west, and we only ever see the moon in the east from the window. Mahogany shelves line another side of the room, bearing framed photographs of our family and relatives: Popo and Gonggong at a zoo together. My aunt and uncle on their wedding day. My mother in her youth, sitting atop a bicycle with a clueless expression across her features. My cousin and I posing with goofy grins on our faces, paint smeared over our faces. I remember all this vividly, with every feature and detail in these framed pictures etched into my memories.

My mind starts wandering. Exploring further. The sound of laughter and rowdy bickering penetrates the silence, and I find myself right there in the cramped room, seated at the wooden table near the window; the aroma of food pervades the air, wafting from the kitchen where Popo is cooking. Traditional Chinese foods on the table: lianou, soysauce pigeon, dumplings, chicken feet, tangyuan, and of course, Popo's soup, made with love and care. I remember more now — reunion dinners every Mid-Autumn festival. A celebration of winter ending, with homemade, hand-cooked feasts on the day of solstice. Family gatherings during Chinese New Year and paying respects to elders. The sound of Cantonese television playing every dinner. The dull clattering of chopsticks against plates. The clashing sound of mahjong tiles as they stack atop the table. Laughter suffuses the air. Laughter, love, warmth, family. Home. 

Home, a place I'm far from.

Soft moonlight streams through the window and dapples the floor of my dormitory room, and I find myself missing these foods, these people... these memories. This place is long gone now, along with some of the people who made up the place. Had I only taken time to immerse myself in my own culture — learned how to play mahjong properly, eaten the food I hadn't been bothered to try, appreciated my family as I should have — there wouldn't be this huge, gaping hole of guilt inside me now, regret that I hadn't lived in the moment as I should have.

Now I live in a foreign place with foreign people, full of shadows and unfamiliarity, oceans away from my hometown. There's nothing I can do except to listlessly gaze up at the moon, illuminated in bright silver and shrouded with grey, and think back on a time that once was.