Eating 麻糍

The Chinese New Year lasts for 15 days on the Lunar Calendar and during this festive season, traditional food seems to abound in my house. I am eating 麻糍 (pronounced ma ci in Hanyu Pinyin) or machi or mua chi in the part of China my ancestors came from. What amuses me is when people tell me I am eating the Japanese mochi.

Like anything Japanese (including a large part of the Japanese language and its writing system), the Japanese mochi was borrowed from the Chinese a long time ago. Sadly, China has always been rather reclusive and in the 20th century, it  became Communist and it isolated itself even more from the rest of the world just as Japan started opening up especially after the Meiji Restoration. Japan soon became an expert at repackaging things that they didn't invent to make them theirs. The car industry is just one example.

Today, you are more likely to come across the Japanese mochi in any supermarket than the original Chinese 麻糍 which is hardly marketed and is usually prepared at home.

I never fail to be tickled when I am eating 麻糍 and I am asked if it's the Japanese mochi especially when the person asking me is himself an ethnic Chinese. I suppose it's a little like if you are driving a really cool car and you are asked if it's a Toyota. No, I'm wrong. It's not the same thing. That's because the Japanese are innovative and it's their mochi that is really the cool thing today. Their mochi now comes in a variety of flavours. I've even seen a chocolate mochi. I've never known the Chinese 麻糍 to contain anything other than sesame seeds and peanut. It's made by mothers usually in the spring and it  gets nowhere and nobody knows about it unless he's been brought up to eat it  and frankly,  if I didn't take this pic, my readers probably wouldn't even know the  麻糍  existed.