Shanghai (China) Nanjing Road (map)
Saturday, 29 August 2015
There is a bakery in the pedestrian subway of Nanjing Lu in the heart of Shanghai that specialises in moon cake. Apart from all sorts of sweets it offers small Yuè bǐng with meat-filling, which are so much in demand that customers are prepared to stand in queue for a good half-hour to get them.
There are things that one cannot find again despite the Internet. Among them, peculiarly enough, are Asiatic poems that have remained etched in my memory since I first read them – even if I’m not in the position to recite them. Among these losses are a haiku about the seven wonders of a seaside landscape, a song of praise about dog meat, and a tanka dedicated to a moon cake that gleamed solitarily in a dark night. Whenever I see Yuè bǐng I try to reconstruct the piece – today, the following lines flitted into my mind: «In the dark autumn night clouds drift invisibly, no stars to see. Only the aroma of moon cakes shines through the darkness.» But that is not so: in the original the night was much blacker – and the moon cake radiated so grandly from the lines that one could really smell its crust. But, who knows, perhaps poems that one fails to find again simply have a special power.
First Publication: 4-9-2015
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