The second most important holiday in China, after the Lunar New Year, is the Mid-Autumn Festival. It celebrates the harvest and, as you might expect, is scheduled according to the lunar calendar, meaning it changes every year. Though no longer harvest oriented for most Chinese, it’s still an important holiday and is probably best known for marking the occasion when Chinese eat copious amounts of moon cakes.

In addition to moon cakes, Chinese also eat a lot of just about everything else during the Mid-Autumn festival. The above picture shows half our spread (the other half we already ate and the plates were taken away). Instead of being fed as if she were an offensive lineman, now Cindy is close to actually becoming an offensive lineman.

After our enormous lunch, we headed to the National Museum. It contains Chinese art and artifacts from paleolithic to modern times, including all the Communist memorabilia. Unfortunately, weighed down by our lunch as we were, we arrived only a few hours before closing time and weren’t able to see it all. We were standing in front of the Chinese flag raised by Mao on 1 October, 1949 (the founding of the People’s Republic of China) when we were ushered towards the exit.

Museum entrance

Heh heh heh

That evening, we took a walk around my grandma’s neighborhood. First, a little context. My grandma is almost 91. She was 19 when she fled from the Japanese. After everything had settled, she moved to Beijing. She has been living in the same apartment for 55 years.

My grandma’s courtyard

Entrance to my grandma’s apartment building

When I last visited my grandma, we also took walks at night. The surroundings looked pretty similar to my grandma’s apartment. There were some food stands, old men smoking and playing Chinese chess on the street, and guys selling beer off the backs of their bikes. You know, it was Beijing. At least it was the Beijing I remember.

This is now an eight minute walk from my grandma’s

I’m so confused

My family, walking eight minutes from my grandma’s

That Times Square looking area is called Sanlintun. Technically it encapsulates an entire area of the city, including my grandma’s. But it’s now specifically associated with the shiny, bright, expat-heavy area that I walked through with my family. I mean, there’s a street called “Bar Street.” My dad, uncle, and aunt all went to elementary school five minutes from Bar Street (the school is still there).

This morning, while we were having breakfast at my grandma’s, we were interrupted by the unmistakable sound of apartment building renovations. Her neighbor downstairs was gutting his place and installing new fixings. Many of my grandma’s neighbors have passed away. Their apartments were sold by their families or are being renovated, likely for future sale. Basically, my grandma is quickly becoming the guy from Up.

The type of development that Beijing experiencing isn’t necessarily bad, and it’s pretty inevitable. It’s also very sudden and very dramatic. It’s a lot to take in for a woman who was already 19 when she fled from the Japanese during WW2.