A Tanone dot Net

No, I don’t mean the Sailor Moon.

The Chinese called it Yuan Xiao Jie and it’s known as Lantern Festival in the west. It’s to mark the end of Lunar New Year holidays and it falls on the 15th day of lunar calendar. A Google search of “Yuan Xiao Jie” with quotation marks shows some 555 entries. While there are many Chinese poems praising the moon either during the Lantern Festival in the spring or the Moon Festival in the fall, I’m not sure how many modern Chinese are still watching the moon out there at the night of 15th. Like John Chow who is in Shanghai now, I bet they might have gone to enjoy good foods at a nice restaurant or watching the Lantern Festival, but I’m not so sure if any body would care to watch the moon closely.

I remember few years ago reading a Chinese poem praising the moon. A quick google search brought me to this ‘Thinking of You” by  Su Dong-po that has been translated into English and part of it is quoted below:

Why does the moon tend to be full when people are apart?
People may have sorrow or joy, be near or far apart
The moon may be dim or bright, wax or wane
This has been going on since the beginning of time
May we all be blessed with longevity
Though far apart, we are still able to
share the beauty of the moon together.

To me now, indeed this is the same moon that my siblings were seeing if they still have time to leave their TV and watch the moon. The only diffence is, while we would have looking at the same moon, we were looking at it from different places, as well as watching it at a different time too due to the fact that we are living at different time zones.

Suddenly one thing came to mind. How would you explain the time zone to ancient people where the earth was still considered flat? With this almost instant communication and computer control world, at least I could only tell my siblings, this is the moon I saw tonight. What about yours?

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