四海为家 » mooncakes

Luo Ruiya, your mom is calling you home to eat mooncakes!

Maria — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:18:35 +0000

The latest craze sweeping through the Chinese-language internet started with a simple sentence: 贾君鹏你妈妈喊你回家吃饭 (Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner). According to wikipedia, the sentence was posted in July on a forum for players of the online game World of Warcraft, and the body of the post simply said “RT”, short for 如题, “as the title suggests”. Others quickly responded, either puzzled by the very random post, or pretending to by Jia Junpeng’s mother or other relatives. Within two days the post had received more than 8 million views and 300,000 comments. The craze spread outside of the forum, as people photoshopped the sentence into various humorous backgrounds and posted their own variations on the topic.

It was later revealed that it was actually a PR company, KPMedia, that was behind the concept. Although they haven’t revealed who they were hired by, the purpose seems to have been related to online gaming, and the team took advantage of the fact that the online game World of Warcraft was down for maintenance by posting on forum for WoW users. They apparently spent two months designing the marketing plan, and used 800 online marketing members who registered 20,000 online IDs and responded to the post 100,000 times. However, once they’d gotten the fad started, the team pulled out, and theirs only accounted for around 3% of total replies to the original post.

In honor of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a friend sent me a link to a page with a series of pictures that all bear the message “Luo Ruiya, your mom is calling you home to eat mooncakes” (Luo Ruiya is my Chinese name), one of many varations on the Jia Junpeng theme. If you follow the link, at the bottom of the page you can enter your own name and create your very own version.

Luo Ruiya, your mom is calling you home to eat mooncakes

And then there’s another popular variation on the phrase, in honor of the recently celebrated Chinese national day: 台湾，你妈妈六十大寿，喊你回家吃饭 (Taiwan, your mother who is turning 60 years old is calling you to come home for dinner).

The Shanghai Mooncake Exchange

Maria — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:28:33 +0000

A few days ago, China celebrated 中秋节, the Mid-Autumn Festival, when the Chinese traditionally eat mooncakes while reciting poetry and admiring the full moon with friends and relatives. In the weeks leading up to the holiday, mooncakes are a popular gift for friends, co-workers, employees, and people with whom you’d like to have good 关系 (guanxi, a good relationship).

Starbucks mooncakes

I read an interesting blogpost that described the informal “mooncake exchange” that springs up every year in Shanghai in the weeks leading up to the holiday. Many employees apparently receive mooncake vouchers from their companies, which brokers then offer to buy at discounted prices, and in turn sell on to others who would like to give mooncakes as gifts but don’t want to pay the ridiculous prices that the major brands charge. The broker might buy the vouchers for 50% of their face value and then sell them on for 70% of the face value, for example, and the buy and sell prices probably fluctuate as the holiday approaches, after which the mooncakes lose their gift value.

Mooncake prices in themselves are an interesting phenomenon. Here in Wuhan, the cheapest cost just a few yuan, or are sold by weight at 9 or 12 yuan a 斤 (jin, equivalent to 500 g). The most expensive, fancy boxes of four or five mooncakes from famous brands, can easily cost several hundred yuan per box (I believe the Starbucks mooncake set, with four small mooncakes, costs 328 yuan — the picture on the right is from their website). Some of the price difference might be justified by better quality and taste, but most of the price is supported by the fact that everyone knows the cost of mooncakes from the major brands and the gift is valued accordingly.

And as for the taste? Maybe not worth Starbucks prices, but the “Sushi” flavored mooncakes my boyfriend got from his co-teacher were actually surprisingly good, and without even a hint of fish (Sushi was probably the bakery’s attempt to write 苏式 in English, which in this case I assume would mean Suzhou style, or possible Su family style). Definitely a tradition worth keeping.