But there was also the rampant xenophobia - think back to the beginning of the pandemic and the conversation around wet markets in Wuhan - plus an uptick in hate crimes, and suddenly, the foods I had grown up consuming and the habits I never thought to question took on new meaning. Of course, if the worst thing to happen to me during the pandemic was that I was slightly inconvenienced by my inability to access a drink, I would have been 1) extremely fortunate and 2) probably not still be talking about it right now. When the pandemic forced New York and the rest of the country to go into lockdown, many of my favorite bubble-tea shops around the city began to shutter (some of them permanently, others for the monthslong stretch between spring 2020 and the first murmurs of a widely available vaccine). Two things happened simultaneously to change all of that. Bubble tea was something I took for granted, and I certainly never thought of it as the complex cultural product that it is. It always sort of hovered on the periphery of my social life, serving as an occasion to catch up with a friend or a treat to myself. To this day, I still drink bubble tea the way other people drink coffee or beer - sometimes with a meal, usually on its own. During high school in suburban Maryland, my friends and I would take advantage of the open-lunch policy and race to get in line at the Kung Fu Tea a few blocks away, where the lunch-hour rush was so intense that we always risked being late to fifth period (but it was worth it for the adrenaline rush alone). My earliest memory of bubble tea is trying it for the first time on a family trip to Shanghai I was 7 or 8, and I was so obsessed with my new discovery that I couldn’t stop prattling on and on, bending my mom’s ear about how the Oriental Pearl Tower resembled the similarly shaped orbs in my drink.
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