Alex Hong, Contributing Photographer

The Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated across the globe, from countries like Korea, China and Vietnam to the Yale campus. This week, students of all backgrounds enjoyed honoring their family heritage or learning about new traditions in events across the University.

On Monday, the Davenport College common room was abuzz with over 200 students for an event featuring mooncakes, a calligraphy workshop, live music and a tea ceremony.

“The whole Mid-Autumn Festival is about families getting together, so I think it’s a great opportunity for students to get together and feel like Yale is home,” Fan Liu, the Chinese program coordinator, said.

This event — sponsored by the Chinese Language Program, the Chinese Language and Career Initiative and the Ancient Chinese Traditions Club — was one of several student- and faculty-driven celebrations.

The Mid-Autumn Festival occurs on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Chinese lunar calendar. It is known as Zhong Qiu Jie in Chinese, Tết Trung Thu in Vietnamese and Chuseok in Korean, with Chuseok celebrated for three days. This year, the Mid-Autumn Festival was officially Monday, Oct. 6.

Chuseok in SSS

For Korean-American Students at Yale, or KASY, celebrating Chuseok was a multi-sensory experience –  blasting K-pop music, playing traditional Korean games and smelling and tasting delicious snacks.

About 50 students participated in a lively Chuseok celebration in Sheffield Sterling Strathcona Hall on Sunday, Oct. 5.

“Here, everyone at Yale is apart from their family, so it’s really nice to have a community like KASY where people can come to celebrate their culture,” Gloria Baek ’27, a co-president of the group, said.

Chuseok, also known as Hangawi or “Korean Thanksgiving,” is the Korean version of Mid-Autumn Festival. The event is characterized by expressions of gratitude and large family reunions.

David Yun ’28, the group’s outreach chair, echoed Baek’s statement.

“Having a Korean community while you’re in the U.S. was really important for my upbringing,” he said. “It’s been a really cool thing to be able to provide that for first years and other people at Yale.”

The group bought treats from Hanmi, a Korean market on State Street.

“In past years, we’ve had people make their own rice cake, but the taste of the rice cake was not amazing. So we decided this year we would cater,” Baek said.

Tea and mooncakes

The following day, students gathered in the Davenport common room to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival alongside Chinese organizations and professors.

Lindan Hu — founder of Lindan’s Tea Space in New Haven — brought six of her students to demonstrate tea brewing. Their table displayed a variety of tea leaves and elaborate tea kettles.

Tea has a long history of significance in the Mid-Autumn Festival. According to Hu, tea is used as an offering to worship the full moon, which is a goddess named Chang’e in Chinese culture.

Hu added that tea reunites family members. “Drinking tea and passing along tea culture gives a sense of gathering,” she said in Chinese.

Edward Kuperman ’25.5 is one of 24 students who learns tea brewing techniques from Hu at her tea parlor.

“I think tea making is a way that I try to give back to others,” Kuperman explained as he prepared tea for a small crowd of students. “It’s one way that I can use my Chinese in service.”

Erika Wang ’27, president of the Ancient Chinese Traditions Club, said this was the event’s first year having a snow-skin making workshop. Snow skin is a special type of mooncake with a glutinous rice outer layer and a filling, such as red bean. “You don’t have to bake it like traditional mooncakes,” she said. “You can directly make it and stamp it with a pattern and directly eat it.”

This celebration was especially a chance for Chinese language learners at Yale to experience Chinese culture first-hand. “Chinese-learners or heritage students, they learn a lot of Chinese culture. Now is a time to practice the culture and feel like home,” Liu said.

The moon over Cross Campus

A full moon shone brightly overhead as the Chinese-American Student Association, the Vietnamese Student Association, and the Yale Astronomical and Space Student Society co-hosted a Mid-Autumn Festival event on Monday.

“I feel like having it on Cross Campus this year feels a lot more lively, especially underneath the stars,” Sophie Nguyen ’28 said.

Club leaders set up tables with chrysanthemum tea, lantern decorating and a wide variety of mooncakes from Hong Kong market – white lotus, red bean, black sesame, date and walnut. There was also a snowskin mooncake-making station.

“It’s like being together with your family and all looking at the same moon, even if you’re in different places and not all together physically,” Vicky Tan ’28, cultural chair of the Chinese-American Student Association, said.

Valentine Van Keerberghen GRD ’26 and Lakshmi Adithi Bumanapalli GRD ’26, both international graduate students, explored the various activities. Neither of them celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival in their home countries of Belgium and India, but they enjoyed learning about these cultural traditions.

Van Keerberghen said her favorite part was eating mooncakes. “We also got to write something on a small lucky charm. I wrote ‘happiness’ but in Dutch, my mother tongue,” she said.

Around 8 p.m., Yale Astronomical and Space Student Society members set up a telescope directed at the moon. 

The moon is at the heart of Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations, symbolizing family unity and wholeness.