Playwright Hongwei Bao talks East Asian LGBT show ‘Hot Pot’: “Queerness is often wrongly seen as incompatible with East Asian cultures”

Joining the buzz of this year’s Pride celebrations, London’s Playhouse East presents this new play exploring the balance between queerness and cultural identity through a friends’ dining reunion. Guillermo Nazara chats with the author to learn more about his process noodling around themes and what the show ultimately boils down to.

How does it feel to have your play opening Auka Productions’ inaugural season?

It’s really exciting, and a great honour as well. Auka Productions and I share many things in common, including a love for language, performance, and stories that are burning to be told. We also hope to amplify marginalised voices, including LGBTQIA+ and East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) voices. This is why Hot Pot has four ESEA characters and at least two queer characters in the story. Every one of them is fully developed and all are central to the story. This contrasts with the queer and East Asian representations in some mainstream theatre, where LGBTQIA+ and ESEA characters, if existent, remain peripheral. We are proud to have a brilliant team of cast and creatives, the majority of whom are of ESEA heritage. Through the show, we hope to showcase these wonderful talents and contribute to a more diverse ecology of UK theatre.

How did the idea for the show come along?

The story of Hot Pot first took shape as a short story I wrote back in 2022 titled Reunion. I adapted the short story into a full-length play Hot Pot on the Fifth Words Playwrights programme in 2025. I submitted the script to Auka Productions in Summer 2025, and it was selected for a rehearsed reading at The Cockpit in February 2026. We applied for and were awarded funding from the University of Nottingham and the UK Research and Innovation’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Auka assembled a brilliant cast and creative team to R&D and produce the show. And we are touring the show to six places for three weeks this summer from 16 June to 5 July 2026. Given how difficult it is to have a play produced under the current economic climate, I still can’t believe this is happening! Thaks to everyone for the support!

The inspiration for the play comes from some of my own experiences as a Chinese diaspora living in the UK. I’m based in the UK and travel to China frequently to see friends and family. One of the most popular places we go for dinner is a hot pot restaurant. The hot pot is a popular food in East Asia where people throw meat and vegetable into a seasoned, boiling hot broth to have it cooked, and then help themselves and each other to the food. It is a very shared and communal dining experience. The hot pot becomes a symbol of reunion and togetherness. I thought: what if four university friends get together at a hot pot restaurant for a class reunion after a long time of separation? What would their lives look like as their life trajectories drew them apart? Would friendship, or even love, stand the test of time? All these questions feed into the play.

One of the main themes in the script is the clash between queerness and cultural background. How is that subject explored more precisely?

Queerness is often (wrongly) seen as incompatible with East Asian cultures. On the one hand, East Asian cultures are traditionally understood as privileging the family and the collective over the individual, harmony over disagreement, constraint over self-expression. This often works against a queer culture that encourages non-conformity and self-expression. On the other hand, due to the history of colonialism, rising nationalism and xenophobia, and recent developments in global geopolitics, queerness is sometimes framed as a ‘Western import’ or ‘Western lifestyle’ in Asia. This often forces queer people to choose between staying in Asia or moving to the West, and there seems no third way in-between. The tension between queerness and East Asianness is dramatised in Hot Pot in the main characters’ biographies. It becomes a motive for them to take certain actions and avoid others. For example, most of the protagonists do not talk about their sexuality, largely for fear of possible backlashes against them by a sexually conversative and heteronormative society. Their greatest fear is often their own parents, who either have no idea of their children’s sexualities, or refuse to accept them. Because of the cultural tradition of filial piety and the respect for the elderly, queer children often choose not to come out for fear of rejection. 

To what extent can these two realities coexist without cancelling each other?

To resolve the dramatic tension between queerness and East Asianness, Hot Pot turns to East Asian queer history, specifically the 17^th century Chinese story of the Rabbit God, in which a queer person is deified as the patron saint of LGBTQIA+ people after suffering from persecution. The Rabbit God story is interwoven with the four friends’ reunion story, providing a historical backdrop to the story and also functioning as a framing device. Most importantly, the Rabbit God story sheds light on the richness and diversity of queer East Asian heritage, powerfully refuting the idea that queerness is Western, or East Asian cultures are anti-queer. Indeed, the play celebrates the queer East Asian heritage by reviving East Asia’s queer history and by making it relevant to the present.

Another key subject is the complexity of identity and survival. Can you someone really live without being true to themselves? Or should someone risk their lives so they can exist truthfully?

Whether and how to live authentically as a queer person in a society where queerness is not recognised is an important topic that this play explores. The four main characters in Hot Pot must make their own choices based on their assessment of the social circumstances they are under, and each one of them seems to have made a perfectly reasonable decision. Even those who choose to remain closeted seem well justified. The audience are therefore encouraged to step into these subject positions and make their own decisions or choices in a safe environment without worrying about real-life ramifications. This is where theatre does its best: to ask a question and then provide multiple answers to inform the audience’s decision-making. The audience gains a better understanding of society, others and themselves in the process of engaging with the play.

How is the subject of friendship handled in the script?

Hot Pot puts the four friends’ friendship at the centre of the story. Although the four friends have adopted different approaches to friendship – some more idealistic and others more pragmatic – and their friendship has gone through multiple challenges, friendship is overall seen as a positive thing in their lives, and sometimes even more reliable, long-lasting and life-affirming than other significant relationships, such as the parents-children relationship or the love relationship. In East Asia, friendship, especially between people of the same sex, is often valorised and romanticised, seen as being able to transcend time, space, and material conditions. Friendship embodies queer potentials, as in the East Asian tradition of ‘sworn brothers’ or ‘golden orchid sisters’. Eve Sedgewick’s term ‘homosociality’ nicely captures the tension between friendship and queerness. In this sense, Hot Pot is an exploration of the dynamic and productive tension between friendship and queerness. In short, friendship is an intimate bond that encompasses a wider spectrum, and it embodies strong queer potentials. For queer people, such intimate social bonds are particularly important, especially when family and social support are not always available.

Are there any other themes you’ve intended to explore? If so, how?

A key theme that has been explored at length in Hot Pot is the notion of freedom. The term ‘freedom’ has always been valorised and romanticised, both in Asia and in the West. The West is often imagined as a land full of political, artistic and sexual freedom, and Asia is often imagined as its opposite. And yet what if we stop seeing freedom as an abstract concept and ask: what does freedom mean and how best to achieve it in real-life situations? In Hot Pot, freedom is discussed at multiple layers: personal, sexual, economic, social and political. For example, is the freedom of sexual expression more important than, say, financial independence and social recognition? What does artistic freedom mean for a poverty-stricken artist who constantly has to navigate structural marginalisation? Many LGBTQIA+ people aspire to leave Asia for the West in pursuit of sexual and artistic freedom. Many find themselves having to face racism, marginalisation and unemployment in the West. But when they consider going back to Asia to develop their creative career, they are faced with the challenge of having to readjust themselves to a sexually conservative culture where political, artistic and sexual censorship coexist. Obviously each person has their own values and priorities, based on which they make different decisions, as the protagonists in the play do. The play is thus an invitation to discussing these philosophical and often difficult questions rather than offering a ready-made answer.

What creative challenges have you found in this piece in particular?

The main plot of Hot Pot is structured around a single event, a hot pot dinner, where four friends arrive, eat, drink and talk, and then bid farewell to each other. It is a classic theatrical structure that lends itself to clear and focused storytelling. However, such a structure may end up with a slightly static stage presence. The audience can feel like watching a film instead of a piece of live theatre. How to make good use of the media specificity and technological affordance of live theatre and bring the theatre live is a creative challenge. For Hot Pot, this creative challenge is resolved through the following ways: (1) the present reunion scene is intercut with frequent flashbacks of the university scenes, so the play breaks up linear storytelling and gains some historical depth: (2) using the Rabbit God story as a framing device, to foreground queer people’s voices, to complement the lack of such explicit voices in the story; (3) the sound, lighting, sets, stage props, and other stage technologies combine to create multiple spaces – past and present, imagined and real. In this way, Hot Pot not only presents an interesting and moving story; it also manifests itself as a fascinating piece of live theatre, a multi-media and multi-sensory experience. All this is thanks to the wonderful work done by the fantastic cast and creative team led by the director Namoo Chae Lee.

What are the prospects for the show after this initial London run?

After the London premiere and a week run at Playhouse East between 16 and 21 June, Hot Pot will go on a UK tour to Nottingham, Leeds, Bristol, Langton Green and Derby, wrapping up on 5 July. Check out the tour schedule here. We also plan to publish the play text with Poetic Edge, a Stoke-on-Trent-based independent publisher which also published my poetry collection Self-Portrait as a Banana, so the play can be used for research, teaching, and future performance. This is why the Hot Pot book has included background materials including a short story and two poems to help future teachers, directors, and actors better understand and navigate the play. As an academic and educator, I firmly believe in the importance of using theatre for education, community engagement and public advocacy. As one of the first queer East Asian plays produced and touring in the UK, Hot Pot hopes to make a contribution to the development of queer theatre, British theatre, and East Asian theatre.

After summer 2026, we hope to have future runs, time and funding permitting. Please get in touch with Auka Productions if you are a theatre or festival programmer or if you would like to see the show happening in your area.

Are there any highlights you’d like to flag?

Hot Pot will feature the Rabbit God, patron saint of LGBTQIA+ people in East Asia, on stage. The Rabbit God will add a magical, mythical, and surrealist element to the play. I have written about the Rabbit God in my poetry collection The Passion of the Rabbit God and my nonfiction book Queering the Asian Diaspora, but could only imagine the Rabbit God through words. It is exciting to see what the Rabbit God looks like and how it is enacted on stage. 

Why come see Hot Pot?

Firstly, Hot Pot is one of the first queer East Asian plays produced and touring in the UK. The queer East Asian community is invisible and poorly understood in the UK and internationally. The play offers a complex and nuanced representation of queer East Asian culture, free from stereotypes and orientalist representations. It also showcases the talent and creative work of a predominantly East Asian cast and creative team, who are under-represented on UK and international stage.

Secondly, Hot Pot tells a beautiful, heart-warming story about friendship, love and the pursuit of an authentic identity. Its universal themes such as identity, authenticity, and the tension between the individual and society will resonate with audiences from different backgrounds. The play also has some politically engaged and socially relevant messages, told in a nuanced and yet powerful way.

Thirdly, Hot Pot is an innovative piece of contemporary theatre. It brings together storytelling with sophisticated lighting, sound and stage design. The actors are brilliant and they really bring the characters to life.

Headshot credit to Tom Morley.

Hot Pot plays at London’s Playhouse East from 16 to 21 July. Tickets are available on the following link.

By Guillermo Nazara