There will be Korean drummers, Filipino folk dancers, a Vietnamese singer, a performance company composed of American girls adopted from China. Last year, the entertainment included a mariachi band, a bow to the growing number of Mexicans working in Chinatown restaurants.
"The festival is getting so big," said Ming Chau, a longtime organizer of the event.
It has become a pan-Asian bash that attracts 5,000 revelers, not just from Philadelphia but from suburbs like Cheltenham and Mount Laurel. It has grown so strong and dependable that newcomers who flock to eat mooncakes assume it has always existed.
In truth the Mid-Autumn Festival is young, not yet a teenager, built year by year, act by act, dollar by dollar.
It can't match the scope of its sister celebration in New York. It possesses neither the pageantry of San Francisco's nor the tradition of Los Angeles'. It is uniquely Philadelphian - born of longing, sustained by protest, first imagined in the mind of a boy who missed his grandfather.
A boy's vision
In the fall of 1996, Andy Zeng was 13 and wise beyond his years.
When he looked around Chinatown, what he saw unsettled him. Older people who missed the traditions of their homeland. Parents too overworked to observe holidays with their kids.
His mother and father were ghosts he passed in the morning as they left for their jobs and he headed to school. He thought of his grandfather, five years dead, and the tales the man told of life in China.
"I want the elderly to be happy," Zeng told the Daily News at the time. "When I help old people, it honors my grandfather."
Zeng began to talk about creating a Mid-Autumn Festival, carrying around his idea as if it were a charm. Chau remembers Zeng went to him and his wife, artist Debbie Wei, a longtime community activist. The more they talked, the more Zeng's dream seemed possible.
"We decided, we're just going to do it," Chau said.
