Seventeen.

Seventeen is my favorite number, and 麻辣香锅 is my favorite culinary dish.

"Life is too short to not have the málà [dry] pot of your dreams." It's a text message I recently sent to the love of my life (he's going to chastise me for referring to him as such; I'm equal parts facetious and sincere). It cost him fifty dollars for his meal in total, but it's okay because, as he says, he deserved it.

I remember 麻辣香锅 making further inroads on the New York City food scene with the quiet opening of Málà Project in the East Village towards the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, whose wintry soft opening came as a welcome surprise to me because I lived, at the time, just around the block from their shop. I didn't grow up eating dry pot because my family hails from the Hunan province, as opposed to the dish's Sichuan origins, but its spicy and fragrant palate is a familiar cousin of the cuisine of my upbringing, so it's unsurprising that I immediately favored this new style of eating.

Málà dry pot is a dish best defined by its infinite potential. Dry pot, as opposed to hot pot (pick your favorite foods and boil them in a broth of your choosing), is a stir fry comprising various ingredients and, though there are many that commonly grace Sichuanese restaurant menus as tried-and-true stalwarts, virtually anything that is edible can constitute the dish. Restaurants can and do offer preselected combinations, yet the most fun is had when one chooses each individual ingredient (my own favorites include taro, roe-filled fish balls, thinly-sliced beef, mushrooms, and any of the vegetable options). In his dry pot, the love of my life racked up his bill by indulging himself, but that's entirely the point of the dish: to construct and eat precisely that which pleases you. Whatever is thrown into the frying pan, it is all laced together with an addictive spicy and tongue-numbing (and oily) seasoning prepared with chilis and, of course, 花椒 (Sichuan peppercorns).

I remember attempting a rudimentary investigation on the relative anonymity of dry pot in New York after having my first. My relatives had told me that it's long been a popular dining style (Chipotle, but Chinese and spicy) in China, but I was baffled by its lack of presence Stateside and particularly in New York, which counts at least three distinct Chinatowns. I quickly became a regular at Málà Project because it was conveniently located and the food was novel and delicious. I couldn't help myself—I was addicted, from my very first order that I couldn't eat because my dining companion was allergic to the shrimp that was tossed into our order by the generous (and very exuberant) chef, to the dry pot I'd ordered to be so spicy, as a test of my own capacity for heat, that I immediately got a nosebleed, to all the meals I ate by their open windows, during one of which my then-boyfriend randomly strolled past as I marveled at the serendipity of eating dry pot in New York. I was in love with dry pot, and I wanted to know why it wasn't a bigger deal.

It turned out that Sichuan peppercorns, the prime ingredient for 麻辣香锅, were summarily banned from the country by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) out of fears that it would carry citrus canker, a bacterial disease that decimates citrus trees (but "does not affect humans"). Slate reported that this ban was heavily enforced between 2002 and 2005, after which its importation was allowed if the peppercorns were heat-treated so as to kill any possible canker germs, which was believed to negatively impact the potency of its flavor. Either way, its ban seemed to be rather overwrought, most specifically because Sichuan peppercorns aren't imported for any use outside cooking, a process through which sufficient heat to kill the germs would be applied to the peppercorns anyways. Then, in 2016, the USDA (somewhat ironically) admitted that Sichuan peppercorns don't even carry citrus canker; it would carry a Sichuan pepper tree-specific variant, if at all. This meant that Sichuan restaurants in the United States were about to have free reign to amp up the flavor of their foods and, indeed, USDA agents by 2017 were instructed to merely "inspect and release" imported Sichuan peppercorns. New York has since seen a veritable explosion in popularity of Sichuan-style eateries.

This coincided with a demonstrable rise in China-to-United-States immigration statistics (around 56% of the current Chinese American population arrived after 2000) as well as anecdotal evidence of an increase of Chinese international students attending American colleges such as New York University, my alma mater, around which sprang thriving businesses of more authentic cooking to serve these students and their wallets. But, I too was a beneficiary: I could spend my days eating with precision, following international students to their preferred restaurants. No longer would my taste buds have to be mollified by bland, Americanized Chinese food; life is too short to not have the málà dry pot of my dreams.

For Seventeen, which is my favorite number, I wanted to talk about what the number has achieved for me and how we spend our lives. I spent the summer of 2017 frequenting málà dry pot restaurants in Chengdu, each better than the last, because I had a new mantra for life: nothing is a given, so I should live each day without regrets.

I know it's a contrived adage. I know it's been done to death by hedonists and nihilists alike, but I also thought that they had a point. I had just finished 地球往事 (Remembrance of Earth's Past), a series that was later recommended by President Obama, who I resented for his praxis diametrically opposing all the progressive political works and screeds that he'd famously studied throughout his youth, and the series' dark forest hypothesis haunted me because it seemed to be logically sound. I had studied personal agency while I was an undergraduate student, and my nascent adulthood only confirmed that my life was, in the grand scheme of things, altogether insignificant—what I did, who I was, all of that meant nothing to anybody.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, in White Nights, explored helpless loneliness, a despondence engendered by solitude. We're social creatures, and we need each other, but I had the same takeaway from White Nights as I did Remembrance of Earth's Past: my personal agency might be subject to whatever limitations, but that means that I should take every opportunity to live as I wish particularly because my time here is finite. Is life stagnant and useless? But, fears must be confronted, not appeased—so what if it is stagnant and useless? And, if God is unconcerned with the whims of an insect, what concerns should the insect have for God? Genzaburo Yoshino asks us: "How do you live?" Annie Dillard has a suggestion: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."

Seventeen brought my best friend to me, and it transported me to New York. My teenage days were spent within the seventeenth server of a multiplayer video game, where I first met my now-East Coast kin who welcomed me almost as a surrogate family when my own biological parents rejected me. Age seventeen embraced me with a suicide pact on which I later reneged, because I was able to begin living life on enough of my own terms. Because I knew life was meaningless, I ascribed to it all my invented significances, that my life would be worth living because I chose to continue living it. Nothing matters, therefore everything matters. And, if I just tell myself that I'll be having dry pot for dinner, I think that would be reason enough to go on.