As Hong Kong hits another turning point in history, artists look to the past for an answer to the city’s future
You are what you eat, and my insatiable crave for spicy food over the past year tells me that something inside me might not be quite right. The idea of having a burning sensation lingering at the tip of my tongue was never my definition of enjoyment. The traditional Hong Kong-style Cantonese cuisine my mother cooks is all about the freshness of ingredients, a sense of harmony cultivated by the complexity of flavours. My food has always been about restoring my inner balance and nourishing my soul, not causing shock or excessive stimulation.
But this has changed dramatically in the span of merely 12 months. Now I have an appetite for excessively piquant dishes. The more fiery it tastes, the better. If it’s not a cooked dish, spicy crisps and canned sardines soaked in chilly oil also do the trick. My body needs the tongue-numbing spices not only to paralyse my taste buds temporarily; I need them to numb my feelings of despair and my uncontrollable anxiety over an uncertain future, to hold me back from spiraling downward into an emotional blackhole.
