The Mid-Autumn Festival ritualizes this insight: families eat mooncakes, lift cups, and admire the same luminous disc, making kinship visible across neighborhoods and borders. Chinese literary tradition echoes the gesture—Li Bai’s “Quiet Night Thoughts” (8th c.) links moonlight with homesickness—so Su Shi’s lines join an older chorus. Even beyond China, practices like Japan’s tsukimi suggest a broader human instinct: to gather around a sky-born emblem and feel less alone. In this way, the poem’s wish becomes cultural practice, and practice, in turn, sustains the wish. [...]
