On a hot hot night, I had a jalan-jalan cari makan adventure with my housemate, Aye. We stopped by a Thai restaurant near the Danau Kota Uptown, Setapak. It was nearly midnight, so I wanted to order something light. There was a thing that caught my eyes.

Yee Mee Hot Pot.

That is really tempting, I thought. Well, I am not really a Hot Pot person, but what the heck, why shouldn’t I just allow myself to taste something else besides nasi lemak or nasi kerabu or nasi dagang and all that? Sure this hot pot wouldn’t harm me, would it? So, I ordered one Yee Mee Hot Pot. While waiting for the pot, I recalled one of my reading classes where I informed my students about the history of hot pot, where it evolved in the early 20th century among coolies whose back-breaking labor involved tugging riverboats upstream against the strong current of the Yangtze River. Underpaid and overworked, these coolies could afford little for meals and often gathered around a fire and a common pot, into which they dipped any food they could get their hands on. This was how hot pot started. For me, this sounded like how Muslims’ Asyura began during the times of critical hunger and emergency when these poor muslims gathered all sort of foods and lumped them together into a big pot and produce a culinary masterpiece called Asyura. Hmm.

Back to hot pot business, I couldn’t help smiling when I remembered my students’ daunting expressions when I told them about the bizarre choice of edibles at any traditional hot pot which include calf’s liver, pig’s brain and cow’s throat. It is delicious, I said jokingly, and they would moan and groan, erk, uwek, yuck, disgusting. I went on telling them about one extraordinary fact of China – the hotter the weather is, the more people here like to eat the hottest food imaginable, and they believe that if they want to stay cool, they have to get hot!

What an eccentric principle of living.

Oh, my Yee Mee Hot Pot was now ready in front of me. It looked so yummy, and I couldn’t wait to have it, but after few minutes of deliberate attempts, I couldn’t stand the heat – it was too darn hot! So I gave up and asked Aye to finish it. Take it, it is too hot, I don’t need this kind of hotness on a hot night, so you can enjoy this hot pot because I think you are very hot, I said to Aye. He ate it religiously until I realised that he had in his mouth all the things that I wanted – prawns, meets, fish balls, chicken, and all the edibles that I longed to have, and I couldn’t see them before because they were hidden right under the hot Yee Mee! If only I had been a little more patient and stronger, I could have savoured all those things. I felt like telling Aye, Stop it! Stop it! Goddammit. Give it back to me! It is my damn hot pot. I paid for it. But of course I didn’t say these because everything had just gone, glowing right into the famous hallway of my housemate’s stomach.

After some time, I smiled at myself because this Yee Mee Hot Pot experience taught me a very important lesson - it was not about the hot pot, it was more than that. I have always known the fact that hot pot is definitely hot and potentially detrimental, so I have to expect this tricky fact beforehand and be ready for all the possible consequences, and if I am tough and resilient enough to bear with all these pressures and challenges, I will be surprisingly rewarded with unexpected things towards the end of the trials and tribulations, because no matter how hot the hot pot is, it is worthwhile.

So is life.