#Boba origin how to

We would spend hours playing board games and chatting at Bubble Island.

Reflexively, as if to compensate for my 18 years surrounded by neighbors and classmates who didn’t share my background, I found nearly all my new friends in the university’s API (Asian Pacific Islander) student associations, which soon took up most of my extracurricular time. The shop where I took my first sip, a place called Bubble Island just off of campus, soon became a centerpiece of my college life. It wasn’t until I got to college that I first laid eyes on bubble tea. Unlike Wei, I didn’t grow up in a predominantly Asian community from kindergarten through the end of high school, I was one of fewer than a dozen Asian Americans in my grade. Boba shops were, in her words, “our sacred gathering grounds.” “As a Taiwanese-American kid growing up in the early 2000s in the San Gabriel Valley, the concoction was an integral part of my social life,” Wei writes in a 2017 LA Weekly article about how boba became synonymous with Asian-American youth culture in LA. What was happening, says Wei, was that there was a generation of young Asian Americans - originally primarily Taiwanese Americans, but inclusive of Chinese, East Asian, and other members of the Asian diaspora in the Valley near Los Angeles - who grew up hanging out every day in boba shops, where they studied, gossiped with friends, and went on first dates, all over the cold, milky, tapioca ball-filled drink that is bubble tea (or boba, or pearl milk tea, or zhenzhu naicha, depending on where you’re from). And that comes with its own complications.

#Boba origin how to

“Because before … no one knew how to describe what was happening.”īubble tea is more than just a drink it’s also an identity. “It was as if, for the first time, people were able to define what the subculture was,” Wei tells me. since the ’90s, but it wasn’t until millions of people watched that YouTube video by Chinese-American brothers Andrew and David Fung that the phenomenon of “boba life” or “boba culture” was given a name, according to Clarissa Wei, a Hong Kong-based journalist (and Eater contributor) who grew up in California’s Asian-American enclave of the San Gabriel Valley. Another lyric, at the close of the song, proclaims: “The new drink of young Asians … Call us the boba generation.”īubble tea has been around in the U.S. “We’re livin’ the boba life,” the chorus repeats. In the 2013 music video “ Bobalife” by the Fung Brothers, the rhythms and motifs of the eponymous “boba life” are familiar to anyone who spent a good part of their high school and college years drinking bubble tea with other young Asian Americans: strolling down sun-soaked streets sipping through oversized straws, abandoning a study session to satisfy a craving for chewy tapioca pearls, eschewing booze-fueled wild parties for nights of Jenga and milk tea with friends at a favorite local boba shop.