Chinese American Museum Mooncake Festival and Other Delights
Report and photos by Phil Pasquini
Washington: The annual Mooncake Festival, Zhongqiu Jie ( 中秋 节 ) in Chinese, is a mid-Autumn harvest festival that was celebrated on September 30 at the Chinese American Museum (CAMDC) in Washington. The festival is one of China’s biggest holidays that brings together families along with the ever-popular mooncakes, paper lanterns and parades in its celebration.
The museum’s all-day festival offered several events and activities including a paper lantern making session, a Tai Chi workshop, a book reading by Amy Tan and Mooncakes with tea and chi. Several children’s activities were also included throughout the day.
Visitors were also able to view firsthand the museum’s excellent special exhibits currently on display along with numerous historical artifacts interspersed throughout in telling of Chinese American history with a special section dedicated to Bruce Lee.
“Fashioning Identity in Qipao, The Image of Modern Women” an exhibit on women’s dresses, was a visual delight along with an explicative in-depth history of the iconic slim, figure hugging, long length, high-collared silk haute couture dress that blended traditional Chinese and Western fashion into a new modern statement.
The elegant dresses in their myriad of patterns are attributed to Shanghai, the “Paris of the East,” where “Women’s quest for equality and independence during China’s rapid modernization and urbanization in the early 20th century” was expressed through fashion. The design’s inspiration was influenced by a fusion based on both men’s traditional long robes (Cheongsam in Cantonese) and dresses worn by Manchu women during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1922).
From its earliest inception in 1912, it soon became quite fashionable in the city. In the 1930s through the 1940s the style reached new heights with the invention of machine-woven artificial silk and printed patterns that allowed designers to produce lavish patterns in creating innumerable designs. Advertisers in the city soon began featuring elegant models clad in the dresses along with department stores who featured them in their advertisements, all of which made the dresses a desirable and modern necessity for one’s wardrobe.
Hollywood’s influence through films featuring Chinese American star Anna May Wong, who preferred Qipao dresses, helped popularize the fashion in the US and across the world.
Another display of historical artifacts from the first transcontinental railroad contains a section of the steel rail along with hardware from the tracks. The modest display reminds viewers of the approximately 15,000 Chinese laborers who constructed the railroad through 690 miles of granite across California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Many workers had to tunnel through solid granite in places in the high mountains to complete the railbed. As a result, approximately 1,300 workers died during various phases of the project.
The engineering marvel of almost impossible feats came at a great cost to Chinese laborers. In the racist era in which the railroad was constructed, a further affront to Chinese laborers occurred when the two ends of the railroad met at Promontory Point in Utah in 1869. The memorial photograph taken by Andrew Russell celebrating the railroad’s completion excluded the Chinese laborers from those gathered along with dignitaries and their golden spike.
Chinese American photographer Corky Lee who died in 2021 during the COVID pandemic corrected that affront in 2014 by creating a reenactment in which he posed descendants of the Chinese workers at the site. In a posthumous photo exhibit of his work, titled “Thank You, Corky Lee” now on display, Lee explores Asian communities across America. Lee, who is considered “The Unofficial Photographer Laureate of Asian Americans,” used his camera to tell their story to “un-erase” the untold history. In turn, the exhibit notes that Lee’s activist works has inspired thousands of “new activists.”
Anyone interested in uncovering the little known, underappreciated and excluded Chinese American history owes it to themselves to pay a visit to the museum where they will be amply rewarded by the wealth of information and excellent rotating exhibitions on display there.
(Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer. His reports and photographs appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.ink. He is the author of Domes, Arches and Minarets: A History of Islamic-Inspired Buildings in America.)
