Monday, Oct. 6, the 15th day of the eighth lunar month, is the Mid-Autumn Festival, the second most important festival for Chinese all over the world (the most important is, of course, the Lunar New Year or the Spring Festival). It is also a festival celebrating the moon, which is at its fullest and brightest on that night.
In ancient agricultural China, the post-autumn harvest was a time of plenty, a time to thank the gods for a good yield of crops. The term Mid-Autumn (zhong qiu or tiong chiu in Hokkien) first appeared in the Confucian classic Rites of Zhou and the custom of the Mid-Autumn Festival took root in the Tang dynasty. It was in the Northern Song dynasty that the date for the festival was fixed on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month. The mooncake, on the other hand, first appeared in the following Southern Song dynasty.
Central to the Mid-Autumn Festival is the mooncake (so some people call it the Mooncake Festival), a round pastry filled with lotus paste or bean paste, embellished with a salted egg yolk (or two), nuts and butong pakwan (thus the urban legend of the old aunties on the second floor of the bakery cracking watermelon seeds with what teeth they still have).
A popular legend has it that during the Yuan dynasty, rebel leaders hid messages inside and distributed mooncakes to call on the people to ‘rise up and revolt’ against the Mongol overlords.
These days mooncakes have become quite fancy with flavors like ube, cheese and even truffle and, since these are often given as gifts, come in ornate containers that can double as jewelry boxes. The traditional bakeries still use the old tin boxes though.
Since the Tsinoy community is predominantly Hokkien from Fujian province, the dice game or pua tiong chiu has taken root here. The game supposedly dates back to the 1600s, invented by Koxinga (an honorific title meaning ‘Lord of the Imperial Surname’ given to the general Zheng Chenggong) to boost the morale of his homesick troops during the Mid-Autumn Festival, since they were stationed in southern Amoy (now Xiamen, in Fujian) to retake Formosa (Taiwan) from the Dutch.
When we were kids we’d hie off to my Amah (grandma)’s house to pua tiong chiu. The game involved six dice and a large bowl (if one of the dice jumps out of the bowl you lose your turn), and a rule book tells you what dice combinations get you what prize. Traditionally, prizes were different sizes of hopia mongo, starting from the smallest at about an inch and a half in diameter to the full 12-inch one. A set consists of 63 hopia in increasing sizes – 32 of the smallest, then 16, eight, four and two, until the Big Kahuna or tsiong guan.
The problem was what to do with all that hopia after the game; the entire household had hopia for merienda for two days (by the third day the mongo filling became dry and hard). So the modern iteration of the game involves prizes other than hopia – anything from candy, toys and trinkets to appliances (I once won a toaster oven) and jewelry to cash. But I haven’t yet heard of any family or group that had a suitcase full of cash as the tsiong guan – but then I don’t move in the circles of contractors and congressmen.
The sums are jaw-dropping. It is mind-boggling how amounts like P125 million, P3.6 billion are so casually thrown around, like P36 or P125. So even if their share is only – ONLY – two percent, it’s still a pretty penny. No wonder they can afford Rollses and Lambos, Ferraris and Benzes – paid for in cash – while the salaried worker has to shop around for the best financing deal to buy a Toyota, which will not be able to go through the lampas gulong floods because the pumping station is not working and the obstructed creek was not dredged and has overflowed.
I still can’t wrap my little round head around how P457 million can be withdrawn from one bank in one day – how many Rimowa suitcases or duffel bags and how many vehicles did it take to transport all that moolah to.whose house? Or shouldn’t I ask?
At the rate top government officials are being implicated in this grand thievery – where there’s smoke there’s fire, right? – the ranks of government, especially the legislature, could be seriously depleted, which might actually be a good thing, one positive to come out of this gargantuan mess.
Although, of course, at this point nobody is guilty; all of the accusations are baseless, politically motivated demolition jobs meant to tarnish reputations. And all charges will be answered in due time, at the proper forum – which I interpret as guilt-speak for ‘give me time to come up with a plausible explanation as I consult my highly paid crisis PR consultant and lawyers.’ There are a few mea culpas – undersecretaries, district engineers – but I’m waiting for the catch of the day, the Big Fishes.
These shenanigans have been going on for years, decades even, with the cast of unsavory characters changing with each change of administration (tenured civil servants are not affected by such changes). Many have said the problem is systemic, meaning it’s ‘rooted in the fundamental structure of the organization or society, such as a corrupt government system, rather than being a problem caused by a few bad individuals.’
Thing is, it’s looking like ‘bad individuals’ have infiltrated the entire system, controlling large parts of it in fact. So who’s going to fix the system? How do we fix the system? The ‘bad individuals’ will corrupt any system that’s put in place; we got rid of PDAF, only for it to be replaced by congressional insertions.
The Queen of Hearts – from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – may have a solution: ‘Off with their heads!’