09/21/2026
Celebrate the Chinese Mooncake Festival with Chinese Literature 🥮 🇨🇳
What better way to join the city of Carmel in celebrating the Chinese Mooncake Festival than a great work of literature? From an eighteenth-century masterpiece to a beautiful translation of a modern classic newly available to English speakers, here are four books we recommend:
The Dream of the Red Chamber — Cao Xueqin
Written in the eighteenth century, Cao Xueqin’s sprawling family saga follows the rise and decline of the aristocratic Jia family through love, marriage, poetry, duty, faith, and loss. It’s an intimate portrait of a vanished world and a remarkably poignant meditation on how quickly even the things we love most can pass away.
Rickshaw Boy — Lao She
In 1930s Beijing, the hardworking Xiangzi wants something wonderfully simple: to earn enough money to own his own rickshaw and build an independent life. Again and again, circumstances threaten that dream. Lao She’s classic is funny, tragic, humane, and deeply concerned with work, dignity, and what happens to a person when society makes an honorable life increasingly difficult.
To Live — Yu Hua
Fugui begins life as the spoiled son of a wealthy family and proceeds to squander nearly everything. What follows is a story of repentance, suffering, family, endurance, and an increasingly profound gratitude for life itself as Fugui lives through some of the upheavals of twentieth-century China. Devastating, but deeply human.
The Last Quarter of the Moon — Chi Zijian
Newly published in the U.S. in 2026, this gorgeous novel follows a ninety-year-old woman looking back upon her life among the reindeer-herding Evenki people of northeastern China. Through family, births, deaths, war, faith, nature, and modernization, she watches an ancient way of life slowly disappear. A beautiful novel about tradition, memory, community, and what we owe the generations who came before us.
Happy Chinese Moon Festival from Stella House Books! 🏮
