Mystery dinner guest: Meet the Hongkonger who’s treated almost 200 strangers to meals
Hong Kong Free Press
Mancy Ng’s self-styled “social experiment” started with a solitary meal in one of Hong Kong’s Yakiniku restaurants. She found it tasty and affordable but there was no one to share her dining experience with.
That sparked an unusual idea: she decided to pay for a stranger’s dinner and listen to their story. Since her first meal out with a mystery guest in May 2023, Mancy has picked up the tab almost 200 times.
The advertising professional in her early 30s took two days to set up an Instagram page called “Sister treats you a meal” and left it open for people to sign up. The idea was to meet people she would otherwise not encounter, and get to know them.
She had tried different dating apps, platforms, and even forums to meet people but found the experience superficial and unsatisfactory. The people she met could be very different from their on-screen personas.
Under her own experiment, Mancy has some house rules: there must be a conversation during the one-hour dinner; she picks the date, time, and place; she decides where to eat; she takes one selfie and does one write-up. Mancy also takes keeping her guests’ secrets seriously but is happy to feature their projects if desired.
On her Instagram page, Mancy will meticulously record the conversation and her dinner companion’s life story and aspirations, from what she can glean within the timeframe of a meal.
So far, Mancy has hosted almost 200 meals, most of which she has paid for. She plans to post about all her encounters but so far has only posted 78, and dinner appointments have been booked out for the coming 12 months.
“It was under HK$100 and something I could afford. It’s within an affordable range, and I can talk to other people,” Mancy told HKFP.
‘No one is ordinary’
Her guests came from all walks of life, including an Animal Flow fitness coach, an IT technician who is also a vegan advocate, a swing dancer who got Mancy into dancing, and an indie band lead whose full-time job is curating playlists for the wealthy. They all had something to share about their lives, and none could be described as “ordinary.”
“People are already too judgmental nowadays… I want to write down what deserves appreciation about a fellow human being. I was curious whether people would find it interesting. I would also call this the contrarian side of me, that I like to go against the flow,” Mancy said.
Po Man, the IT professional, said of his encounter with Mancy: “Honestly, it was an ordinary meal with much chit-chat, then a stroll to the pier and more chit-chat… But what’s remarkable is that you can meet someone for the second time and talk for hours!”
Also in his 30s, Po Man started his vegan journey around five years ago. He met Mancy at a coffee-tasting event she was hosting, and was intrigued by her social experiment and how it could help promote veganism. So he signed up as a dinner companion.
He sees the dinner as a first step out of his comfort zone, a way to express the values behind his lifestyle choice, and an opportunity to promote his cause.
Band lead Medius, who also runs a social media page on Hong Kong movie conservation, said: “I didn’t expect someone to buy a stranger dinner. That was a bargain I couldn’t miss.” Initially expecting just a free meal, he told HKFP via Instagram messenger that the dinner conversation captivated him. He was particularly moved by Mancy’s effort to document every guest’s story through her Instagram page.
“My band’s [Chinese] name ‘Zenegeist (識你佳)’ is a play on ‘Nice to meet you’ and could refer to anything or anyone… and Mancy is like a personification of that. Whenever I do music and feel adrift, being reminded that someone is also chasing their dream keeps me inspired.”
From diners to a community
Even with a huge backlog of diners, Mancy’s projects keep branching out. Her latest venture is the “Sister’s Romantic Umbrella” exhibition, which involved 60 people grouped in pairs – half of them former diners – and 60 umbrellas for them to draw on.
Rain, 28, Mancy’s co-organiser and an art gallery coordinator, said the umbrellas were originally planned for a wedding that Mancy attended. After seeing a dozen transparent plastic umbrellas untouched after the reception, she came up with the idea of giving them a “second life.”
Rain was one of Mancy’s dinner companions, and they clicked while discussing community projects and exhibitions. They chose romance and umbrellas as the themes for the exhibition because they saw them as the perfect canvas for creativity.
They found the results fascinating. An artist painted an underwater Hong Kong on an umbrella featuring Goldfish Street in Mong Kok. Po Man used only black outlines to illustrate all the animals he could think of, to convey the view that all animals are sentient beings and deserve love. A wordsmith used poetry and calligraphy to combine with an umbrella made of flowers.
“Some artwork I collected had very sad stories, but you can feel the bitter-sweetness in them. For example, the story that drove my desire to do this exhibition is about someone who once had a boyfriend who would hold the umbrella for her every time it rained, and half of his body would get wet,” said Mancy. The couple are no longer together but the female partner still cherishes the memory.
Rain credited Mancy’s ability to think outside the box and her personal drive in making the exhibition, which was displayed at Airside mall, a reality.
“When it first started, we didn’t have any venue support. Thanks to Mancy’s ideas and Airside’s support, the outcome was far better than expected. All artists were also dedicated to their wonderful ideas with different media, despite being amateurs. We think this self-funded event went beyond our expectations,” Rain told HKFP.
Another reason for the exhibition is a desire to destigmatise the umbrella, which became a protest symbol in the city over the past decade.
“These days, some colours, words or objects become taboo, which is detrimental to creativity. So, I want to bring up the question of whether it is us who bring out the red lines. An umbrella is just an umbrella, and it’s colourless,” Mancy said.
Even with so much spent on organising dinner meetings and an art exhibition in an upscale shopping mall, money isn’t a priority for Mancy. She joked that she could have bought herself some designer bags with what she has spent, but said her reward from hearing and celebrating other people’s stories did not compare to material satisfaction.
“Someone at dinner told me, ‘You’re amazing; you can listen to an autobiography in the time and budget of a dinner’… A lot of older people I know are sceptical and think I’m mismanaging money. But I have never thought that way, and I define whether it’s worth it,” she said.
In the future, she hopes to let her dinner guests meet up and share their life skills, eventually morphing into what her friends call “the Mancy community.”
Whatever Mancy does in the future, she said she would follow her heart and act accordingly. She cited Po Man’s words on his journey towards veganism: “Once you do well in what you do, you’ll start influencing people.”
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