Shanghai Mooncakes

This slightly melancholic mid-autumn poem is on the surface, lamenting a million-mile distance from one’s lover and the solace of gazing at the same moon, but actually it’s a very clever metaphorical reflection on how life itself, and by extension the history of mankind is an ancient and unchangeable series of coming together and apart, happiness and sadness waning and waxing like the shadows and imperfect wholeness of the moon. 

It’s so appropriate that I last quoted this in 2020 to describe my own feeling, when the world was torn and held apart by Covid and it is fitting again now that the pendulum has swung the other way, when back-to-office and travel reopening, somehow has compressed time into a blur of early starts, hourly meetings, reunion dinners and night calls. 

 It is the busyness of coming together that feels overwhelming and it was lovely to finally have an unharrid weekend with the kids to do some baking and turn our urban farm spoils into fresh duck egg pasta. That being said, what do you call making Shanghainese mooncakes with four kids? Chaos!