9/27/2026
We had a small family gathering on September 25 for the Mid-Autumn Festival. The baby in the family also turned two months old that day, making the day extra special. Besides dishes from a local Korean restaurant, we had dessert and mooncakes.
Yesterday, I had a piece of mooncake. 🥮 My love of sweets has been one of my weaknesses since childhood.
That simple piece of mooncake brought back a memory that my children might never know about unless I share with them.
From 1970 to 1974, I attended Tianjin Foreign Language School, a boarding school. Sometimes our breakfast consisted of mantou (馒头), steamed bread, and xiancai (咸菜), salted vegetables. I preferred something sweet.
I would take a steamed bun back to the dormitory and eat it with sugar that I had brought from home. Eventually, one of my classmates found out. I was publicly criticized for having a “decadent bourgeois lifestyle.”
Today, this sounds almost unbelievable. Why would eating a little sugar with a steamed bun be considered a serious problem?
To understand it, we have to remember what everyday life was like in China at that time.
During my childhood and until the early years of China's reform and opening-up, China operated a system of food rationing. Cash alone was not always enough to buy basic food. Urban families were allocated various coupons according to the size of their households.
Among them were:
粮票 (liángpiào), grain coupons. These were needed, along with money, to purchase staples such as rice, flour, and other grains. Without grain coupons, having money was not enough to buy them through the ration system.
油票 (yóupiào), cooking-oil coupons. These allowed families to purchase a limited amount of cooking oil according to their monthly allocation.
副食本 (fùshí běn), a non-staple food ration book. It was used to keep track of purchases of foods such as eggs, meat, sugar, and tofu.
Families received limited amounts based on their household size. These coupons and ration books were part of everyday life for many urban Chinese families.
China experienced serious shortages of consumer goods, and the rationing system was intended to distribute scarce necessities and ensure that people had access to basic food.
My father was in the military, and military families had a somewhat different supply system. As a result, we sometimes had access to things that were harder for other families to obtain, including sugar.
That difference made me stand out from some of my classmates. What seemed normal to me—sandwiching sugar in a steamed bun—could look like a sign of privilege to others.
And so I was criticized for it.
Looking back from 2026, the memory feels almost surreal.
Today, a child can walk into almost any supermarket and see shelves filled with cookies, cakes, candy, ice cream, and dozens of kinds of sweet drinks. A mooncake, once a special seasonal treat, is now available in countless varieties.
My childhood was almost the opposite. Some things that we take for granted today were precious because they were scarce.
In an unexpected way, that scarcity may have protected us from something that is difficult to avoid today: too much.
I certainly don't think rationing was a good thing. But there is one lesson we can take from that period.
Sometimes having less teaches us to appreciate what we have. Having more gives us freedom, but it also requires more self-control and wisdom over the freedom that we have.
From a mooncake in America in 2026 to a steamed bun in a boarding-school dormitory in Tianjin more than half a century ago—what a journey, and what a change!
The baby who turned two months old at our family gathering will grow up in a world of abundance that I could not have imagined when I was his age.
Perhaps one of the gifts we can give the next generation is the stories of what life was like when we had much less.