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. pipeline is how the trend first travelled. 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. 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. 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 had originated, sometime in the eighties, amid the vibrant snack culture of Taiwan, although exactly how and when is a matter of dispute. Like me, bubble tea was a recent immigrant to the U.S. 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.

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.

(“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.Īt 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. 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. 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. 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.

Yet every time she relented and let me buy one, and the victory tasted as sweet as the drink itself. An order cost about three dollars, half of my mother’s hourly wage cleaning houses. 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. 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. 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. These were not leisurely shopping trips but carefully strategized plans of attack, during which my mother practiced bargain-hunting as blood sport. 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. 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. I first discovered zhen zhu nai cha, as bubble milk tea, or boba, is known in Chinese, when I was ten.

Bubble tea sample kit