The little plastic sample tray is empty, but the man behind the counter quickly replaces it with one full of a mooncake cut into teeny-tiny pieces. I grab a piece (okay, a couple) before the jostling crowd behind me can get to it. Samples are, after all, the only reason to visit Costco in the middle of a Sunday. There's a large display of square tins, each decorated with a painting of a Chinese man. I take one back to my mother and ask "Can we get one?"
The mooncake is traditionally only served during the Mid-Autumn Festival, on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. They're shared among family and friends as a symbol of wishing prosperity in the coming year. They'll need it, too. A box of four mooncakes generally costs anywhere between $10 and $50 (though more expensive brands can certainly be found), and my parents are usually willing to splurge on the higher end of that scale for their favorite brand.
At home, my family cuts the mooncake into wedges and we eat crowded around the kitchen counter or bent over the sink to avoid spilling crumbs. I've been eating these pastries since I can remember, and I start craving them right at the cusp of fall, as sunsets get earlier and the nights grow colder.
Mooncakes are about the size and heft of a hockey puck, with a thin crust. A dense rich filling of sweetened lotus seed paste envelops the yolk from a salted duck egg. The salty, crunchy yolk crumbles when cut and contrasts with the almost cloyingly sweetness around it. The yolk isn't my favorite part, so my mother gets most of what ends up in my portion. Mooncake fillings are almost always sweet and can be made with different nuts, seeds, or beans. There's a type known as "five kernel mooncake" which, according to my father, is the Chinese fruitcake that's often gifted and re-gifted to unfortunate recipients.
It's a pretty esoteric food (describing them to friends almost always results in furrowed brows and exclamations of "What's lotus root? Wait, a duck egg?!"), and they might seem completely out of place at an American warehouse chain. But I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, one of the United States' largest and fastest growing ethnoburbs, where many of the cities are majority Asian.
In my particular city, Asian grocery stores and businesses exist next to 7-Elevens and McDonalds on streets with names like "Las Tunas" and Del Mar." Instead of a Starbucks on every corner, we had boba – that's a Taiwanese tea drink which has chewy tapioca pearls at the bottom. (The song "Asians Eat Weird Things" was filmed in the Asian supermarket where my family shopped weekly. It's a point of pride that I can say I've eaten most of the featured foods.) It made such sense that Costco — the place where you could find almost anything — would also have mooncakes that it was almost unsurprising to suddenly find them among the granola bars and trail mix.
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