Good question. I had been eating mooncakes since I was a child and had never once wondered why some of them had a salted egg yolk inside. It was just there.
Now I looked at it properly. It was round, golden and right in the middle.
“It looks like the moon,” I said.
The more I looked at it, the better my answer sounded. Mid-Autumn Festival is associated with the full moon and family reunion. Mooncakes are round, and so is the egg yolk.
There you go. Thirty seconds earlier I had no idea. Now I was almost an expert.
Growing up in China, I never needed anyone to remind me about Mid-Autumn Festival. Mooncakes appeared in shops, families talked about what they were doing, and everyone knew when it was coming.
In New Zealand, the festival can easily pass while I am getting on with ordinary life. Sometimes it takes a mooncake at work to remind me.
Sharing the mooncakes at work also meant watching other people try them. Some liked them, while others were less sure. That seemed fair enough.
Our workplace is full of people from different backgrounds, so different foods often find their way into the staff room. During Deepavali, for example, there are Indian treats. I still remember my first jalebi: bright orange, crisp, sticky and much sweeter than I expected.
I finished one.
Sally, my Australian colleague, has strong feelings about Vegemite. She insists it is better than Marmite, while some of my Kiwi colleagues disagree just as strongly. I once listened to them debating the matter and decided to stay out of it.
Then there was the egg.
Another colleague had talked for some time about wanting to try balut, a Filipino delicacy made from a fertilised duck egg containing a developing embryo. He decided his birthday would be the day.
He was born and raised in Rotorua and has worked here for over 40 years. Even after all that time, there were apparently still new things to try.
When his birthday finally arrived, a Filipino colleague brought in some balut, and we gathered around while a few phones came out to record the moment.
He cracked one open and ate it. Then he ate another. I had expected him to try one, so the second surprised me.
Watching him that day, I was the one looking at someone else’s food and wondering about it. With the mooncake, the positions were reversed.
My colleague was looking at something I had eaten since childhood.
“A salted egg yolk in something sweet?”
Her question made me look again at the little golden centre of the mooncake.
The moon had been there all along.