Colorful celebration
Autumn Moon Festival attracts thousands to S.F.’s Chinatown
Chinese lions that couldn’t wait for Chinese New Year did their Chinese lion thing down Grant Avenue on Saturday to kick off a festival that tries just as hard as its big brother to be fun and frantic.
It was the opening day of the weekend Autumn Moon Festival and thousands of festivalgoers crowded shoulder to shoulder amid the booths, dancers, beauty queens and vendors on Grant Avenue, there being no other way for thousands of people on Grant Avenue to fit.
Greg Wai, whose job was to be at the front end of a two-man costumed lion that danced its way down the thoroughfare, said it’s a big responsibility to be a lion’s head.
“You’re portraying curiosity, fear, joy, hunger, playfulness,” he said. “And you do it in time to the drum, the cymbals and the gong. There is structure to being a lion and there is freedom. It isn’t easy.”
Wai has worn the lion head for 17 years on behalf of the Yau Kung Moon sports association. When he was breaking into the craft, he played the lion’s rear end, the traditional butt of jokes as well as of lions. Wai is beyond all that.
“If there were no rear end,” he said, “there could be no front end.’’
Tourists snapped pictures and snapped up souvenirs. Also for sale were moon cakes, the traditional confection of the moon festival. Like the moon, it’s round and, unlike the moon, it has bean paste inside.
At the Koi Palace bakery booth, vendor Matt Ng was selling large moon cakes for $8 and small ones for $3. He had 4,000 of them, because it’s bad luck to run out of moon cakes at the moon festival.
“Ours are low in sugar, with no pork fat,” he said. “They’ll keep in the refrigerator for six months.”
But, he said, the best time to eat an autumn moon festival cake is autumn, not six months after autumn.
At another booth, Kelly Tan from the Community Youth Center was helping kids make Chinese lanterns by folding red paper rectangles into quarters and fastening them together with staples and Scotch tape. Chinese paper lanterns are millenniums old, she said, even if staplers and Scotch tape aren’t.
“A stapler lets you do it faster,” she said.
The red paper rectangles turned out to be leftover money envelopes from Chinese New Year. At that holiday, people give each other money in small red envelopes. But there are always leftover New Year’s money envelopes to turn into lanterns at the moon festival, Tan said, because giving away money isn’t something everyone is in a position to do.
Chinatown regulars stopped by other booths to spin lucky prize wheels. There was no shortage of lucky wheels to spin. The cops had one, the auto club had one, a radio station had one and two casinos had one apiece. The prizes were key chains, whistles and stickers, and the lines to spin the wheels stretched down the avenue and around the corner. A young woman whose sash said she was Miss Asian Global stood around, posing for pictures and smiling nonstop, even though she had yet to win a key chain or sticker.
Nearby, a traditional Chinese fortune teller named Wanugee was giving away free fortunes. Take a seat and pick out seven small mahjong tiles, he said, and all will be revealed.
A reporter picked out seven tiles and Wanugee looked at them, frowned and said the reporter’s hopes and desires were unrealistic and that January would be very tough, because of the north wind tile he had selected.
“Better pick another tile,” Wanugee said, which seemed like doovers but, when the pearl tile came up, Wanugee said January might work out after all.
On Saturday, festivalgoers had their choice of a half-dozen dance groups from China, Indonesia and Hawaii, along with a dragon. On Sunday, the festival will conclude with spiritual music, more lions, some taiko-drumming grandmas — and another dragon.
Throughout the daytime Moon Festival proceedings, the star of the show — the moon — was absent.
“Technically the moon is there,” said Lisa Kwong, who was handing out stickers at the San Francisco Fire Department booth. “You just can’t see it. But it’s up there all right.”