The Mid-Autumn Festival

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a Vietnamese festival in which the children carry bright lanterns and play with alacrity until the midnight. There would have been no problem with me, an eighteen year-old who just wanted to gather my team to play a zealous soccer match on that day, if the principal had not decided to hold the Mid-Autumn Festival at high school. We students felt ridiculous about the idea, and the announcement seemed to be a joke rather than a serious idea. When our head teacher came and corroborated the principal's speech, she really threw cold water upon our prediction.

"Good luck, boys," is all our teacher said to us after asking us to participate in various positions of the organizing team. That childish Festival turned out to be an interesting event, in which we students of mathematics immediately recognize some potential opportunities to "show off" our talent. As a result, my buddies and I decided to sign up for the nosh-selling position. "We are really going into business!"- said Truong, my best friend for years. Our group was so avid for doing such a significant thing.

We prepared the nosh smoothly with the help of our mothers' great cooking. However, the old saying goes: "No risk, no profit." We inevitably faced adversity: students tend to buy and eat nosh in the stores near our school, rather than buying it from the school's canteen. Perhaps they like the comfortable atmosphere in those stores, because they can gather and relax without thinking about anything that is related to the stress at school. Or perhaps, they merely prefer to choose the cheaper nosh. No matter what reason, I knew for sure that our preparation would be futile unless we could attract them to our stall on the night of the festival.

Fortunately, things did not always go wrong. A few days before the Festival, our school was inundated by posters advertising a music show, which would be held on the school-yard. An idea flashed through my mind: "A music show is obviously attractive itself, so why don't I try to attach our selling to that interesting show?" That small initiative was then immediately brought to reality. We set up our stall in front of the stage, where people could enjoy the whole show, while spontaneously buying something to eat and chatting with friends.

The "big night" finally came. That special night made us even more exhausted than playing a soccer match. However, the most important goal was reached: we were really successful. Eventually, our group's first "business" did not seem to be too bad, at least with the inexperienced tyros like us. The nosh-selling was a much noble thing than which we had expected, not because of the money we had earn, or the warm applause from our friends. Actually, that event has become a significant landmark in our lives, transforming us into the more self-motivated and confident students.