What I Learned from Boba

The tea shop looked more like a permanent pop up than an actual establishment. At 8 x 8, half the size of most American living rooms and 1/4 the size of American tea shops, it was easily overlooked by passersby after they had dodged cars and scooters to cross the four lane boulevard to the pedestrian (mostly) street that housed small boutiques -- predominately beauty or bon marche clothing -- and led to the entrance of Feng Chia University. The block catered to students:  four feet from the shop, directly on the corner, a thin, thirty-something man stocked a sushi cart each afternoon after classes adjourned, and ten feet down, eggs and Taiwanese pancakes were cooked for breakfast by a cheery, diminutive matriarch in a green apron.

I don't remember how I found the shop -- accident, probably -- or how I chose the flavor I would end up drinking nearly every day: pomegranate. The fruit was far from my favorite at home, I actually hadn't eaten an entire one since Michelle Bordenave had given me her extra one in third grade, but I was in Taiwan and thought I'd choose something different, exotic. And I couldn't stomach a fleshy, neon dragon fruit even in my beverage.

I stopped by the shop every morning on my way to school to taste the semi-sweet tea in the styrofoam cup and to be motivated by the ultra-sweet smiles of the tea baristas. As the only caucasian around and definitely the only frizzy-haired blond with a backpack, I was quickly and easily recognized by most people on my path. Early on, a teenage barista who knew the backpack lady regularly ordered pomegranate tea taught me how to say the drink's name in Mandarin: shiliu lu. Pomegranate green tea. I smiled and repeated the sounds while he waited for me to utter them correctly, then took my cup and oversized straw and said xie xie (one of two words I had memorized). Each morning I practiced again, embarrassed by my accent and sometimes resorting to pointing at the picture on the menu just in case my words sounded too much like English to be understood. (Once, when the boy wasn't there, I smiled at the woman covering his shift but didn't dare attempt the words, simply pointed to a picture. The wrong picture. The woman gave me peppermint, which was good but not the same.)

Toward the end of my visit, I didn't see the boy for two consecutive days. On the third day, a woman, the owner perhaps -- I didn't recall having seen her before -- said, cheerfully while nodding her head, 'the boy. you knew him.' I did. But I didn't know that she was aware he and I had even chatted. I nodded in return, not knowing how to say yes and thinking 'rice and chicken' (my other words) wouldn't clearly express my thoughts. She told me the boy had gone back to China for the rest of the summer. I thanked her -- xie xie again -- and walked to school touched by the fact she'd recognized our two word friendship and knew I would feel his absence. While I taught that morning, I couldn't help but think about the value of connection. Of people. Of paying attention.

Four months later, I was sitting in a boba shop in San Jose drinking pomegranate tea and grading papers on a plastic table of vibrant green when a woman called my name. I looked up from my work (thankful for the break, let's be real) and saw a girlfriend, a fellow mom from my kids's elementary school, stopping for a bit of liquid joy on her way home from a softball tournament. I stood, we hugged and chatted. I asked about her oldest daughter who had recently left for college, and my friend said she felt, upon her daughter's departure, a sense of disconnection, the same physical absence she had felt after giving birth because for nine months a being had grown inside of her, and after 8 hours (or 20 -- I didn't ask), that little person had physically become absent and left an empty space. No more kicking or tumbling or generally causing discomfort. And 18 years later, when that same being moved six hours away, the space was empty again. The connection had changed.

But my connection to this mom and my connection to the boy in the pop up tea shop and even to the unfamiliar woman who had noticed our intermittent, non-verbal interaction, remained strangely solid. So as my girlfriend and I lamented the shifting state of motherhood and I sipped on my pomegranate tea, I considered myself lucky to feel so connected, to be open, to notice and be noticed. I was thankful for the lessons of boba.

Bubble tea street