Chronicles of a Bubble Tea Addict

I first discovered zhen zhu nai cha, as bubble milk tea, or boba, is known in Chinese, when I was ten. It was the early nineties, and I’d been in the United States only two years, living and going to school in Connecticut towns so uniformly white that soy sauce was still considered exotic there. A few times a year, my mother and I would take the Metro-North an hour south to New York City for the sole purpose of stockpiling Chinese groceries. These were not leisurely shopping trips but carefully strategized plans of attack, during which my mother practiced bargain-hunting as blood sport. Behind her I’d trudge, up Canal and down East Broadway, a weary foot soldier weighed down by growing satchels of fish tofu and Chinese cabbage and hoisin sauce. Invariably, our last stop was Taipan Bakery, which offered an end-of-day discount on goods such as red-bean buns and sponge cake, my favorites. At some point, it also began selling a newfangled drink, served in plastic cups with jumbo straws and what appeared to be shiny marbles piled on the bottom. An order cost about three dollars, half of my mother’s hourly wage cleaning houses. Yet every time she relented and let me buy one, and the victory tasted as sweet as the drink itself.

There was only one flavor of boba back then—black tea with sweetened condensed milk and balls of tapioca—and the cups had annoyingly flimsy lids that leaked at the slightest jostle. This provided a solid excuse to sit down at one of the bakery’s unwiped chrome-rimmed tables, where I’d sip my tea and indulge in my second-favorite activity in Chinatown: people-watching. It didn’t matter that the bits of chatter I picked up were not exactly juicy—the crowd at Taipan was mostly elderly grandmas or weary parents and their children—or that I had to contend with my mother’s complaints about my indulgence. (“Why are we wasting money when I can just pour sugar and gummies in your tea?”) What I savored was the illusion, ever so rare for a bewildered young immigrant, that we, too, could afford a few pearls of leisure.

At school, a fancy one that my mother toiled to afford, we were reading “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” Betty Smith’s semi-autobiographical novel about a family fighting indigence and hard luck in early-twentieth-century Williamsburg. Francie Nolan, the teen-aged protagonist—nerdy, plain, and secretly ambitious, like me—loved the smell of coffee, one of the family’s few luxuries, but she seldom drank her serving—“at the end of the meal, it went down the sink.” It was Francie’s mother’s comment, in particular, that stayed with me: “I think it’s good that people like us can waste something once in a while and get the feeling of how it would be to have lots of money and not have to worry about scrounging.” Unlike Francie, though, I gulped down king-sized cups of boba without leaving behind a single drop. When only melting ice cubes remained, I hunted the last tapioca balls stranded among them as if on a search-and-rescue mission, and savored how their gummy vestiges would remain stuck in my molars long after I’d thrown the empty cup away.

Like me, bubble tea was a recent immigrant to the U.S. It had originated, sometime in the eighties, amid the vibrant snack culture of Taiwan, although exactly how and when is a matter of dispute. One story goes that a Taichung tea house whimsically blended iced black tea with fen yuan, a traditional Taiwanese dessert of sweetened tapioca pudding, only to discover that the combo outsold every other offering. It wasn’t long before the new beverage travelled overseas with the waves of immigrants from Taiwan who were arriving on California’s shores; before there were specialty boba shops, Taiwanese restaurants would offer it as an off-menu item for those in the know. Today bubble tea is rampant in China (the term “boba” is also Chinese slang for “big breasts,” though the name isn’t popular on the mainland), but the Taiwan–U.S. pipeline is how the trend first travelled. When I went back to China as a kid, during summer vacations, I was astonished to discover that my extended family living in third- and fourth-tier cities had never even tasted the drink.

If it were up to me, my mother and I would have moved next door to Taipan Bakery, and I could have grown up on a diet of tapioca, gawking at the Chinese-American boys with their gelled hair and baggy denim. (At twelve, I crushed hard on the “wannabe gangsta” look.) But my mother knew, in a way a child could not, that a life in New York would have also meant life in government-subsidized housing, in an urban school district whose quality she couldn’t ascertain. It was better for us to be interlopers among affluent strangers while quietly chipping away at the American dream.

After college, in 2007, I moved to New York, and lived in stamp-sized apartments on the Upper East Side and in Murray Hill—neighborhoods dominated by the élite, white demographic of my youth. But four years later my mother was diagnosed with A.L.S., a progressive, neurodegenerative illness that was destined to paralyze every voluntary muscle of her body. She was still living in Connecticut, working the same nanny job she’d had for a decade; the prospect of losing independence petrified her. But the disease left her with few options; her doctor warned that she would need a caretaker. So she scoured New York City for affordable apartments that the two of us could share, employing the same hard-nosed diligence she applied to grocery shopping, and settled on a place in Elmhurst, Queens, one of the most diverse and immigrant-dense neighborhoods in the city. I would have preferred a newer building with fewer cockroaches in the kitchen sink and a more handicap-friendly lobby, but it did not escape my notice that there were two bubble-tea parlors within a five-minute walk of our apartment.

Ten Ren, on Elmhurst’s main drag, was an old-timey place specializing in loose-leaf tea in gilded cannisters. Founded in Taiwan, in 1953, by the son of a tea-farming family, it had introduced boba as the trend accelerated in the late nineties. There, I’d skip milk tea in favor of the classics—ginseng oolong and High Mountain tie guan yin, which had a quietly earthy fragrance. The place reminded me of my childhood in China, with middle-aged saleswomen who spoke no English and cracked sunflower seeds between their teeth. A block away, the second shop, Quickly, delivered me into another scene entirely. Founded in Southern California, in 2002, by a Taiwanese entrepreneur who billed her café as “New Generation Asian Fusion,” Quickly offered pearl milk tea in Americanized flavors—chocolate and coffee and caramel—and simplified the operation, doing away with traditional hot brewed teas altogether. I patronized Quickly more often, because it was closer to my subway stop and because, in the right mood, I enjoyed a coffee-flavored tea instead of my usual taro. Waiting for my order to arrive, I’d watch coteries of Asian teen-agers slip in and out, laughing and chatting in a mixture of Chinese idioms and English slang.

The contrast between Ten Ren and Quickly was the first sign, for me, that the world of bubble tea was changing. Riding the wave of upscale coffee bars, boba shops in the following years would proliferate, moving outside ethnic enclaves to claim real estate on main city thoroughfares. Before the pandemic engulfed New York, I liked to travel forty-five minutes from where I live now, in Harlem, to St. Marks Place, which boasted, at one time, six bubble-tea shops on a single block. I am well into my thirties, but in my sweats and sneakers I’d convince myself that I could pass for one of the Gen Z students who are increasingly the target boba demographic, even if the panoply of novel bubble-tea offerings felt increasingly estranged from the drink as I knew it. Why go to a boba shop if you want panna cotta, or chia seeds in place of tapioca balls? My favorite haunt, Mi Tea, a spacious, well-lit outpost of a Chinese chain, specialized in “cheese tea,” a viral sensation featuring layers of foamy milk and salty whipped cream cheese. The drink, which originated in a Taiwanese night market around 2010, costs anywhere between five and eight dollars a cup, but before the pandemic, when I’d hunker in Mi Tea working for hours at a time, I’d notice many orders abandoned half-consumed on unoccupied tables. This was an altogether different kind of waste than what Francie practiced with her coffee. Boba and I had spent our adolescence as scrappy, enterprising immigrants at America’s periphery. But it had evolved into something different: the boba shop was now a sort of social club for Asian youth, a snacky sanctuary of belonging, and bubble tea a ubiquitous, Instagram-friendly accessory for a new generation of upwardly mobile Asian kids.

In 2018, boba’s new status was enshrined in a Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits, a forum created, as a lark, by Asian-Australian high-schoolers, to collect observations and memes about the Asian diaspora. Along with experiences such as strict parents, or a familiarity with the question “Where are you really from?,” a fondness for bubble tea was, according to the group, a signature trait of Asian youth; one meme shows an Asian baby being baptized with bubble tea instead of holy water. The phenomenon of Subtle Asian Traits, which has since swelled into one of the Internet’s largest Asian communities, with almost two million members (and has inspired such spinoff groups as Subtle Asian Leftovers and Subtle Asian Dating), suggests how hungry young Asians were to find a knowing, unifying language of their shared experience. Reading through the group’s posts, I felt as if I were at one of the middle-school sleepovers I’d never got invited to as a kid, laughing at insidery jokes whose punchlines, for once, did not have to be explained. By publicly cataloguing the habits and quirks of Asian identity, though, Subtle Asian Traits in effect, perhaps inadvertently, issued a definition of what—and, by extension, who—counts as Asian. The group became a subject of debate, criticized for being élitist and skewed toward the East Asian experience, and for otherwise treating a narrow, consumerist version of Asian-ness as somehow universal. In a long piece about boba for Eater, from 2019, the writer and critic Jenny G. Zhang wrote that “there is something irredeemably maddening” about defining one’s cultural identity in terms of commodified objects, “as young Asian Americans have done with bubble tea.”

On social media, such frustrations had found expression in a new coinage, a sort of intra-Asian put-down for the bubble-tea generation: “boba liberalism.” According to the Twitter user @diaspora_is_red, an Asian-American who was among the first to use the term, a boba liberal is someone who centers her Asian identity in buzzy cultural objects and “trend-chasing spectacle” but lacks true engagement with the politics of her Asian identity. It’s the Asian who can’t stop talking about “Crazy Rich Asians” as a breakthrough in Asian representation, or who posts boba selfies as a way to prove her Asian bona fides while, elsewhere, seeking acceptance within white culture. For the boba liberal, politics is as much a performance as is one’s choice of beverage, a cultural prop in the theatre of identity. I had seen the label lobbed back and forth on social media, but I never paid it much mind, until, last October, I noticed it attached to my own name. I had written a food diary for New York’s Grub Street, in which I mentioned enjoying, among many other Asian (and occasionally non-Asian) foods, boba in popsicle form. A few days after the article came out, I discovered, to my bemusement, that a fellow Asian-American had linked to it on Twitter, with the caption “boba lib idiot queen.”

I am admittedly vocal about my obsession with bubble tea; in fact, the editors of the Grub Street piece had cut several other mentions of it, on the ground that it was boba overkill. I also write for a mainstream, left-leaning American publication, and it’s true that I once wrote a Profile of the “Crazy Rich Asians” star Constance Wu. It hadn’t occurred to me that such proclivities made me a quintessential boba liberal (much less an idiot queen)—aren’t I too old, anyway, to be implicated in a younger generation’s negotiations over the meaning of bubble tea? But my intentions don’t quite matter; as my mother has always been fond of reminding me, an identity is as much about how you are perceived as it is about what you mean to project.

The boba-liberal label made me think back to my first year of college in New England, when I joined an Asian-American campus organization. (Another hallmark of the boba liberal: placing excessive value in Asian student groups.) The first Chinese-American I encountered at the group’s meeting had been born in the U.S. Another didn’t speak Chinese at all. They were comfortably middle-class, with parents who worked white-collar jobs. I don’t recall much about our activities—I had been appointed the P.R. rep, a role I performed lackadaisically at best—except that, at a campus-wide spring-festival event, we decided unanimously to offer bubble tea as a way of “sharing our Asian-American heritage.” Looking back, I wonder whether serving this ostensibly exotic drink to our predominantly white classmates effectively engaged their cultural curiosity, or whether it was exactly the kind of superficial, flattening display of Asian-ness that the term boba liberal was coined to critique—“all sugar, no substance,” as @diaspora_is_red put it.

On the other hand, a group of college freshmen could be forgiven for assuming that compromising our complexity was a condition of survival as minorities in a majority world. Part of being Asian-American—a subtle trait, if you want to call it that—is the fear of being judged for losing one’s Asian-ness while failing to earn acceptance as a real American. Assimilation, in other words, is an impossible process of pouring oneself into another while holding onto a sense of self. It is tricky to judge from the outside a transformation that largely takes place within.

The whole trajectory of my life in America has involved navigating cultural symbols, most of which were far more intimidating than boba. When I was young, my mother thumbed through the U.S. News & World Report college rankings as if it were the Bible, until its pages went dirty and ragged. She knew that an élite education functioned as a trophy on the mantel of cultural capital, and that accruing me such capital was the surest way to insure my success in this country. It was only years later, once I’d achieved the higher education she’d painstakingly engineered for me, that I recognized how my mother’s diligence was intertwined with a deep cynicism, a search for validation in a world whose ingrained racism and structural inequities she accepted as inevitable. What arrogance must I possess, she’d say, to believe that the system could change? Better to learn the rules of the game and submit. Practice this sort of pragmatism long enough and it becomes a kind of complicity: everything is merely a performance, a bending of oneself to the warped shape of America. And yet, my mother’s very journey to this country was a gamble premised on the possibility of change.

In adulthood, I’ve sought out boba most obsessively during the times when my life has felt most beyond my control. As the roles reversed between my mother and me, something about the syrupy, caramelized milk fortified—or perhaps anesthetized—me against the sight of her shrinking body, which weakened a little every day until she could no longer survive without a hospital’s round-the-clock care. The day she had a feeding tube inserted, because she’d lost the ability to swallow, I nursed a green milk tea with red beans and tapioca balls while waiting for the liquid food supplement to drain into her stomach. See, we both have our zhen zhu nai cha, I told her. Last March, when the pandemic hit New York City, and it was unclear whether I’d be able to continue visiting my mother at the medical facility where she lives, I hurried down to Chinatown to stock up on quarantine groceries. A rainbow-colored package that had never tempted me before suddenly called out: black tapioca pearl, ready in five minutes! I threw it into my shopping cart and hoped that I would not have to resort to using it.

The packet spent most of last year deep in the recesses of my kitchen cabinet, among my collection of dried seaweed and pickled tofu. To pass the fearful, lonely months of quarantine, I splurged on boba delivery, often several cups at a time. (When I went for an endoscopy recently, the first of my life, a mysterious gummy substance was detected in my gut.) But one night in December, too late to order in, I was overcome by the familiar craving. I fished out the emergency boba provisions and tore open the package. The shrivelled balls inside looked like rat droppings, with a whitish powder clinging to their surface. Dismayed that I hadn’t checked the expiration date at the time of purchase, as my mother would have surely done, I saw that the tapioca had expired some months ago. I Googled the dangers of consuming expired bubbles and was assured, by an entry on a site called talkboba.com, that “if you consume expired tapioca starch or other starches and flours, you most likely won’t get sick.” Good enough. I took a handful of the pebbles, dropped them into a pot, and turned on the stove. The balls vibrated in the water as they became bloated, and took on a transparent sheen. A thick honey smell filled the air. Before they were fully cooked, I couldn’t resist scooping out a spoonful, gulping them down so quickly that I could feel their dark, sticky heat long after I swallowed.

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