What makes you feel alive when you are doing it and why?
What makes me feel most alive is hosting meals for others. My love of hosting started during my childhood, watching my Filipino grandmother prepare for family dinners. I would rush over to her house after school, put on her adobo sauce-stained apron and watch her cooking arroz caldo and lumpia. The dinner table was chaotic; Tagalog and English were spoken simultaneously, and relatives reached over each other for dishes. As my grandmother got older, my mother, aunt and I began to do the brunt of the cooking, with her guidance throughout the process.
In college, I transitioned from guest to host. In my off-campus group houses, I would cover shabby tables with South Asian fabrics and invite friends over for meals. My college houses never felt warmer than when we were all gathered together sharing homemade Filipino desserts and rice dishes, infused with banana and coconut.
When I moved to Seattle for my first job in technology, my community suddenly felt much smaller. I looked for ways to replicate the warmth of family dinners. I started a Cookbook Club: once a month, my friends and I select a cookbook from a different culture and cook a meal together. We’ve shared Korean, Iranian, Italian and Guatemalan meals, with greater or lesser culinary success. The goal is not to expand our cooking skills so much as to expand our community. Each member invites at least two people to our dinners. We started small, but after nearly four years, we’ve had dinners as large as 33 people.
Hosting these meals make me feel alive because as I look out across the dinner table, I almost feel that I am back in my grandmother’s house: I feel the same sense of calm, warmth and belonging in this ‘chaos’ of friends, old and new.