Harvest Festival often falls around the time of the Chinese Chung Yeung (‘Double Ninth’ – the ninth day of the ninth month in the Lunar calendar) Festival, which dates back to the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD) and is an occasion when families customarily gather to climb a mountain and visit the graves of ancestors to pay their respects. Growing up in Hong Kong, I would head to ancestral graves with my family to clean them, burn incense and paper offerings, and lay out food offerings which we would consume after the requisite rituals. So the combination of these two festivals is making me think of my late grandparents, and food.
My maternal grandparents lived in a village in the New Territories part of Hong Kong, right on the border to Mainland China, and were probably one of the last traditional farmers in the city – they were quite poor. Every time we visited, my grandmother would give us children pocket money, tell us to study hard at school (having not received much education and being illiterate herself), and harvest fresh yams, marrows, papayas, guavas and lychees from the garden. My grandfather would go to his pond and catch us fresh fish, and a feast would be cooked up in a massive wok (1m in diameter) over a wood-fired stove. The whole extended family would gather around a couple of round tables and share food and conversation. The harvesting, cooking and sharing of food were one of the principal channels through which my grandparents expressed their love, being of a generation and from a culture that rarely said ‘I love you’.
The Gospels record many instances where Jesus shared food and wine with others. He referred to himself as the ‘Bread of Life’, and invites us to break bread and share a cup in remembrance of him. This Harvest Festival, let us give thanks for the relationships embodied in food – with Creation, with one another, and with God, who also says ‘I love you’ through food. And I wonder how we can share food, gifts and resources and channel God’s love ever more widely, for many are hungry and many still thirst.
Ivan Yuen
