The Mooncake Festival

Mei had been waiting for the Mooncake Festival all year. Every September, her grandmother flew over from Hong Kong with a suitcase that always smelled, faintly and impossibly, of jasmine tea and sticky-rice flour. Inside the suitcase were the mooncakes — round, golden, embossed with delicate Chinese characters — and Mei was allowed exactly one, sliced into four small pieces, after dinner.

"Why only one?" she had asked, when she was seven.

"Because the moon is round," her grandmother had said. "And because the best things should never be hurried."

Mei was eleven now, and she had stopped asking. She understood, in the careful way that children of her age sometimes do, that the rule was not really about mooncakes.

This year, the festival fell on a Wednesday, which meant that Mei would have to do her geography homework first. She sat at the kitchen table, watching her grandmother slice a mooncake into four perfect pieces with a thin silver knife. Outside, the late September sky was already darkening; a single, pearl-white moon hung above the chimneys.

"Po Po," Mei said, "what did you do for the festival when you were my age?"

Her grandmother did not look up. "I helped my own grandmother bake them," she said. "In a kitchen that was smaller than this table. We had no oven, only a steamer. The whole house smelled of sugar and lotus seeds for three days."

Mei looked down at the small wedge of mooncake in front of her. Suddenly, eating it slowly felt like the easiest thing in the world.