Fashion for Writers

When I was seventeen, I left New York and moved to California for college, and haven’t properly lived in New York since. For the past nine years, I would have weirdly earnest conversations with the moon on the night of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, which follows the lunar calendar and occurs once a year in the Fall on the day that the moon is supposed to be the roundest and the fullest. There’s a lot of confusing and conflicting mythology about the holiday, including one about the archer Houyi, who shot down nine of the ten suns to relieve the people, flora, and fauna from the scorching heat, and was given a pill of mortality as a reward that his greedy wife Chang-e promptly swallowed behind his back, which caused her to float into the heavens and land on the moon, and another one about the same beautiful wife taking the pill of immortality because her archer husband had become a terrible despot, and she wanted to deprive him of immortality in order to relieve the people’s suffering.

My mom told me a version that was about love torn asunder by Chang-e’s foolishness and a clever swindling sorceress, and another one where Chang-e begins to ascend into the clouds and in a panic she grabs a rabbit and takes him with her into the moon. In a lot of other versions, the hare was already in the moon and when Chang-e finally landed on the moon, she was kind of excited that she at least had a hare companion, but in other versions, she was even more depressed that her only friend was this super hardworking rabbit. In any case, if you looked up at the moon yesterday, you probably would have seen a very chill hare bent over, pounding various alchemical substances into a perfect pill of immortality that can never be, and a weepy-ass beautiful maiden with angel sleeves banished to an unhappy immortality.

On the day of the festival itself, everyone is supposed to eat mooncakes and have a big, bloated, and delicious meal with their family (sort of like American Thanksgiving.) If you can’t be with your family, you’re supposed to go outside and look at the moon and send your family messages of love and care. The past nine years, I’ve been away from my family on the day of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, and I usually end up eating a slightly depressing non-Chinese meal with my friends and my boyfriend, all the while feeling sad that I didn’t get to eat my favorite foods or be with my family, who are all scattered around the globe.

I was happy yesterday to be in New York with my family. We went to Flushing and had dinner at Duoyi, a Sichuan restaurant so busy that they put us in the storage room. I was kind of excited about that too. My dad and my brother got their hair done earlier at a Chinese barber shop my whole family has gone to for years (except me because I’ve walked out of there many a time with a bowl cut or mullet disaster,) where we ran into an old friend of my parents, who has had the roughest life ever. He was stalled on his way to America, and ended up trapped on a Caribbean island for fifteen years, away from his wife and son, who were unable to leave China. He used to teach his son English over the phone, which he himself learned by memorizing Chaucer, and was only recently reunited with his family a few years ago. When he was younger, his legs were crushed by a friend who was backing a car out of a driveway and forgot to put the car in reverse… And that’s just the tippity ice berg tip.

For dinner, I accidentally was matchy-matchy with my dress and shoes, the former of which is an old Corey Lynn Calter dress I wore to a lot of family dinners, and the latter of which are Jeffrey Campbells and also the first time I’ve ever worn a wedge that wasn’t an espadrille.

By the way, a tip for those of you are who are the hunt for a good Sichuan restaurant–if you go to a Chinese restaurant that doesn’t have a separate menu in Chinese and all the Sichuan dishes are spelled ‘Szechuan,’ chances are that restaurant is to actual Chinese food as the Olive Garden is to Italian food or Taco Bell is to Mexican cuisine. Also, broccoli is not a plant native to China, although disturbingly, China does export frozen broccoli to America, a food that is so associated with Chinese cuisine in America, but was never eaten at all in China until the grossness of American-Chinese food became super popular. (My brother’s best friend in fourth grade wished ‘to eat Chinese food every single day,’ and my brother was all like, ‘Um, why?’ because my brother’s wish at the time was to eat Taco Bell every single day.)

I’m trying to gorge on delicious Chinese food while I’m in New York, because I have a feeling there won’t be any Chinese food in France, because the last time I was in Paris, the only Chinese restaurants I found were fast food ones that served everything in a revolting red sauce that tasted like MSG and high-fructose corn syrup, I mean, sweet & sour sauce. The aforementioned gorging led to this:

Love, Jenny