It is an old neighborhood, old in the sense of the rusty storefront tablets and golden bracelets, the aged pedestrians’ Chinese dialects that your grandma used to mumble, and the scents of braised duck feet that you remembered as a child.
It was Sept. 26, five days before the Chinese Moon Festival. Outside the Taipan Bakery on Main Street, several people lined up shortly in front of the grime-thickened glass door in thin sunlight. Inside, two crammed shopping paths, one for mooncakes and another for other bakeries, intersected, then separated.
The Moon Festival on Wednesday is a time when the moon is supposed to come full, and families are supposed to come together. While the weather forecast already declared Wednesday night to be rainy and the moon to be engulfed by clouds, no one knew if the night for that petite, wrinkled women waiting in the mooncake line will be about family reunion and festive blessings.
She wore an azure shirt and black pants with hair braided into a loose bun — a quintessential image of an aged Flushing woman. She leaned forward, pressing her body against the mooncake counter. Without a second of real observation, however, she swiftly leaned back again and swayed her head slightly to peer what other customers had bought. Another typical image one would recognize from their small town relatives’ shopping habits.
It seemed that she liked talking, at least to the young Chinese couple behind her. But it was one-way outputting instead of communicating, merely an act of opening her mouth and making some sounds that never echoed back.
“The fruit flavor mooncake bundle should be nice,” the young couple discussed. “But wouldn’t eight pieces be too much?”
“There are other bundles down there,” the women pointed to the lower section of the mooncake menu, turning around to the couple but holding her head low as if she was only muttering to herself.
The couple responded with a prolonged sound of “eeemm,” but the women went on murmuring about the flavors, the prices, and her recommendations for the young’s mooncake choice.
When it was her turn, the mooncake expert only bought one — a single, large, typical mooncake. As she walked out and disappeared into the street, the shopping throng moved a step forward.
It is Flushing in Queens, a place where the young only show up as night falls, shopping or eating or drinking, while the old ones stay, under the daylight.
