Life is bearable as long as we dream about the next dinner party

“Six is the maximum number of chairs we can put around this table.”

Said my husband, in a troubled voice. It was three years ago. We had just moved into our new one-bed flat in London, with an open kitchen and a small round dinner table. At the place we previously rented, we would use the long, low white coffee table as the dining table for parties. It could seat ten people, as long as our guests were happy to sit on the floor. Despite the new flat having a stunning view of London’s ample metropolitan cityscape, the dinner table didn’t seem to be quite as generous. Four people could sit comfortably, six at a push.

“Does this mean that we can’t host a proper dinner party?”

Even in front of this view, seeing from the skyscrapers in Shoreditch to the green hills of Dulwich and Crystal Palace, it felt like our world had just shrunk a little. There was just no way we could fit ten chairs around this tiny table. People would not fit. We resented the glass tabletop showing our fingerprints and oil stains every time we came into contact with it. Soon, we placed a tablecloth over it. Trading it for a rectangular wooden table that can retract into a square remains an ongoing conversation between the two of us. Other couples may settle into this thinking they have found their private and safe haven, but it was not a happy ending for me when we were the only ones enjoying this view over a meal.

A few months later, there were fifteen people holding bowls and sharing a hot pot at ours. People were fluid, melting into the space. We realised there has never been a need to ‘sit well’. We had just been fooled by the shape and size of the dining table. We had been limited by our own imagination of how people eat. What people desired was the gathering with chopsticks, picking up hot food from the broth, and the chats sitting side by side, whether on sofas, chairs, the floor, or sometimes even the bed.

Life is bearable when you realise you can host space for communion.

For the hot pot, you first fry up the aromatics, like ginger and onions, and various mushrooms in a lightly oiled pan. Our pot is round and shallow, with a heat plate attached to the bottom. Simply plug it in, and it starts to heat up. When the mushrooms get seared out of their succulent bodies and the onions are browned, you drop in the well-marinated chicken with cumin, soy sauce, wine and Chinese five spice. You need to resist the temptation to flip and toss the meat too early. You want to lightly burn the base so the taste of the broth can later deepen.

Once both sides of the chicken are nicely scorched, you pour in some water and top it with leafy vegetables like Chinese cabbage. Recently, Tong Ho has been my personal favourite. It is rare to find, but my friend Bella has been able to spot it without fail at a Chinese supermarket close to her place every time there is a hot pot party.

After the pot is brought to a boil, you have the first round of food and can invite your guests to pick up whatever they would like to eat. Then, you simply drop in more protein like thinly-sliced lamb or pork, fish balls, various tofu products, or vegetables like pak choy or sweetheart lettuce, to have round and rounds of hot pot. The only important thing to note is to leave the starchy ones to the end, such as noodles and dumplings, as they would leave you with a ‘muddy’ pot.

It is magic how this round and shallow pot could bend space and time in people’s busy London lives.

It is two hours before my guests arrive for another dinner party. We all work in theatre and gallery spaces, and it is a celebration for the end of a performance project, aiming to cure the post-show blues we all collectively suffer - a temporary ease from the torment of realising the bubble of dream had burst and we all landed in reality. At last, we all deserved a proper meal as we re-entered our "muggle" lives.

I employed all my kitchen appliances. A pork bone soup with lily petals and lotus seed was cooking in the Instant Pot that I bought with the first month’s salary of my new job. Aubergines with sesame oil and garlic were in the air fryer that our friends gave us when we moved in. Rice with Cantonese cured sausages was cooking in the rice cooker. On the stove was a casserole with braised pork belly and mushrooms, and a giant pot steaming a cod fish with ginger. I would like to call this ‘everyone is busy in their own rooms’.

Meanwhile, I was slicing a piece of cucumber very carefully. Only pushing the knife down through three-quarters of the vegetable, I scored vertically on one side and diagonally on the other side. The straight and hard fruit then softened and became flexible. I rubbed it with salt and let its juice leak onto a metal plate. Mixing soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar, oyster sauce, crispy chilli sauce and white vinegar, we had the most impressive cucumber salad ever.

Life is bearable as long as we get to dream about the next dinner party.

There is a tradition in our flat now: we tuck all the dishes into the dishwasher after the meal before we make dessert.

It was a crowd of twelve gathering for New Year’s Eve. We rolled out three colourful doughs made with root vegetables and tapioca starch. The white one was taro, the orange sweet potato, and blue purple yam. Making a small round dough on your palm, you dropped a scoop of black sesame paste in the middle to make a sweet dumpling. The fun activity invited guests to stand up from their seats and get their hands dirty.

The round balls got boiled in one pot, while another held a broth of brown sugar and ginger; a perfect base for the sweet dumplings that were chewy on the outside and gooey on the inside. Three to four pieces per bowl delivered the perfect ending to a dinner party.

This strategy to tuck the dinner plates into the dishwasher means this round is done, so we can empty the dishwasher after the guests leave, and put the glasses and dessert bowls in for another round overnight.

Frustrations landed when our dishwasher went out of order. It was either no water coming or the drainage not working. The engineer said it was the motherboard malfunctioning. We saw it as a sign to revert to the old days of exclaiming how washing dishes is a ‘therapeutic’ event.

Sometimes we moan about why it is that we are always the ones who host. Our flat isn’t necessarily the biggest. We would like to attend parties where we don’t have to worry about setting tables for numerous dietary restrictions. But sooner or later, we learned how much we benefit from hosting: we get to dream. People and their purposeful and joyous presence fill the room with laughter, which echoes for days after. We have a superpower called community.

Nothing can stop you from dreaming and making space when you understand how life is only bearable because we dream.

It was one minute before the clock ticked to midnight. Soon, we would enter the new year.

“Quick, we need to figure out who is kissing whom.”

Sparkles in the air. Chemicals exploding in the cold London sky.