Letter from Boston Moon Festival By MASAKO YAMADA	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
中華街のムーンフェスティバル 学部時代の友人たちと食事をしようとボストンの中華街で待ち合わせした雅子さんは、中華街の秋祭りに遭遇しました。地元の祭りながら、大統領からも祝辞が寄せられるなど、かなり大がかりなもののようです。では、どんなイベントだったのか見てみましょう。

On Aug. 16, Boston Chinatown celebrated its 29th annual August Moon Festival. This holiday, which is also called the mooncake festival or midautumn harvest festival, is a traditional Chinese holiday in which people gather together and celebrate the harvest. Unsurprisingly, the moon is the central symbol, and it's common for families and friends to eat sweet mooncakes and moon-shaped fruits such as apples, peaches and pomegranates, while looking at the moon. There are many legends associated with the holiday, and there seem to be many variations in the details of the stories.

This year's festival was a truly grand production. The organizers, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, had obviously done a good job in bringing together small groups within the local community. However, they also got together an impressive list of corporate and private sponsors to help finance the event. They even got some very prominent politicians in on the act.

The festival pamphlet almost went overboard with its display of impressive mug shots and names: President Bill Clinton, Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci and Boston Mayor Tom Menino all signed their names in celebration of the event. Mayor Menino wrote a letter to the organizers in praise of their contributions to the cultural life of Boston, and both he and Governor Cellucci were invited to give speeches at the opening ceremony. Although the flavor of the event was undeniably local — I couldn't read even half of the festival pamphlet because of the Chinese text — it was open to all.

I happened to discover this festival while meeting up with a group of old college friends. We had agreed to meet for a dim sum brunch and were met with a throng of people in the streets. Boston Chinatown covers only a few blocks, and it seemed that all of those blocks were packed with people. Many store owners hawked their goods in the streets. Most of them were selling cheap trinkets, household appliances or food, but I noticed that some of them were selling large, leafy stalks that looked a bit like bamboo. I was sorry that I wasn't able to get an explanation of these plants in the festival pamphlet (nor was I able to get one via a quick Web search), because it seemed that many of the festival-goers were buying them.

There were two large stages with fancy sound systems set up in Chinatown, and there were back-to-back performances throughout the day. The performances ranged from Chinese gospel to Italian opera (by Chinese singers) to martial arts. Some of the performers were clearly amateurs from local churches or kung fu clubs, but others had a more polished air about them. Some of the performance groups had many non-Chinese people in them. Even though this shouldn't surprise anybody who's been living in the States for long, I was still a bit startled to see a couple of African-American guys doing a classic Chinese pantomime. The organizers certainly did a good job in diversifying what could otherwise have been an exclusive event.

I found it interesting that there were many charity booths set up among the street shops. A few of the groups collected money for flood victims in mainland China. One of them collected petitions against the violence against ethnic Chinese in Indonesia on a large, white piece of cloth. The cloth was filled with names in both English and Chinese, and my friends and I added our names to the sheet. One of the local Chinese churches took the opportunity to preach the gospel (while also giving out balloons). All of these serious booths looked like they were getting plenty of attention, even though the overall mood of the festival was light. They certainly chose the right place to try to reach a lot of people.

I was looking at the list of volunteers who helped oversee this event, and I noticed that many of them were not big local figures. As a matter of fact, there was a long list of high school students from local public high schools. It's true that fancy names lend a certain credibility (not to mention real dollars) to such an event, but it's probably safe to say that its success was the result of the hard work of the volunteers.

Shukan ST: Aug. 28, 1998

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