I can’t remember the first time I had bubble tea, to be quite honest. In Hong Kong, in the 1990s, we had Ten Ren’s tea shop where I used to go with my friends for a tall glass of ice-cold green apple tea. It was tart-sweet and tannic, but I don’t recall any tapioca pearls. Afterwards, we would walk across the street to the Times Square mall in Causeway Bay and go shopping at Loft, a Japanese stationary store filled with cute washi tape and mountains of pens.
Buried within in this core memory lies a young girl in between worlds; I had one foot in Pakistan and one foot in Hong Kong. Back then, the distinction was very clear. Now, having migrated West, I seem to have ended up in the monolithic category of “Asian” that lumps together everyone whose ancestry lies east of Oman.
What I will never forget is the first time I tried Desi bubble tea. Desi (pronounced they-see) is a label for people from South Asia, particularly those from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. It’s not quite as broad as Asian, but it’s a shortcut nonetheless.
I was at Pila de Boba, a bubble tea shop on East 14th Street where Artichoke Pizza used to be. I ordered the mango kulfi milk tea with tapioca pearls and pink vermicelli noodles called sev. The first sip of that musky mango drink instantly moved me to Karachi circa 1992 and a summer full of syrupy mango juice boxes. Then, I was chewing on boba, which I most closely associate with the “Asianness” of Hong Kong.
At first, I was enthralled by this novel intersection of my two Asian identities. But the more I looked, the more I started to see Desi bubble tea as something else entirely.
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