The Nineteenth
Mooncakes
Sometimes people leave stuff for free in our building. When I saw the beautiful red bag featuring big flowers and stylized bunnies on the floor of our lobby, that’s what I assumed this was. No sign indicating it was so, but no names or labels indicating who it belonged to either. I picked it up and stood there for a moment, bag in one hand and the just-emptied recycling bin in the other. It took just a moment to decide it should probably go back upstairs with me. I wish I’d deliberated a moment or two longer. Really give it a good thought-session. But I did not.
Instead I came inside and presented it to my family like an ancestor from long ago presenting some particularly juicy berries or hard-to-find clutch of nuts to her loved ones. We immediately opened the bag and the box within it (and the box within that) to discover tiny little mooncakes. Yay! There was uncertainty in my wife’s eye, and a few “did you really find this downstairs?” but it didn’t stop us from digging in.
And they were… okay. Pretty good. I was more excited about all the packaging, to be honest. But still, free food is good food and interesting food is always fun and this ticked both boxes. (And the free boxes ticked a third). And it was a highlight of the evening.
Cut to the next morning and my wife is taking our kid to school and she finds a note on the building bulletin board, mere feet from where my great find— now reclassified as a shitty sort of theft— occurred. She sent me this photo and as soon as I saw it my heart sank.
I wasn’t a cool mom who took the initiative and brought something to her family. I was a thief creeping around the building, running things. We immediately tried to look up where to get a replacement. Google results were not helpful. The closest we got to finding the right brand led to a website entirely in Chinese. I think it was Chinese. The fact that I’m not able to say for sure if it was Chinese tells you how successfully I navigated their website.
ANWAY, the point is that it was beyond our ability to get an exact replacement in a timely manner. At first I thought we had a little time. The box said “mid-autumn” and I was like “well, hey, we’re not even in autumn yet, it couldn’t be that close.” This was in response to my wife expressing fear that we (I) had “ruined their holiday.” I was confident in my deductive reasoning but I searched it up anyway and…. The Mid-Autumn Festival was tomorrow! Oh no!
After dreading it all afternoon, after our neighbors got home, after dithering for too long, we figured out the best way to resolve the issue was the American way: with directness and a wad of cash in our hands.
Our oldest kid called us foolish. And that was true. We didn’t have to own up to our mistake. We could have acted like it wasn’t us. They would never have found out. But we went and confessed anyway. I guess so we could feel good about ourselves? Maybe to act trustworthy so we could assume it in our neighbors? To show our kids that we don’t ask from them what we won’t do ourselves?
The things about having kids is they will always ask you why and so often I don’t really know why. All of that stuff I said above, but that doesn’t explain it fully. It’s more like “it’s what good people do and we want to be good.” Which is just another no-answer. But it works.
In the end, they were very understanding and almost didn’t accept the money. And I almost took it back, lol. My wife literally grabbed my wrist and pulled me away by the arms as we said our goodbyes. She knows me too well. It’s probably why she came with me when she really didn’t have to. A few minutes after we got in there was a knock on the door and it was our neighbor. This time she was offering mooncake to us. Different ones and presumably not stolen. And delicious!
And after all that I realized that maybe admitting our (my) mistake was about making a connection. Having a laugh with our neighbors, bridging the gap in language and culture to say “hey, we might not be able to have long conversations with you, but you can count on us to be honest… eventually”
