Requiem for a Bubble Tea
Bea Chang
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2025 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Nonfiction
Illustration by Connie Chang (no relation to author)
波霸奶茶的安魂曲
Up in a fifteenth-floor condominium in Xindian, my mother is writing instructions for "boiled song-ban 肉" on a Post-it note. The reason: my mother, vaccinated, is leaving Taipei to tend to her garden in California, and she doesn't want me—a woman in her mid-thirties—to starve. This is what our language has become: a stir-fry of English and traditional Chinese, peppered with anglicized phonetics of what my mother does not know in English and what I cannot read in Chinese.
Translation: boiled jowl, the cheeks of a pig. She likes to serve black pork at room temperature, thinly sliced and marbled with fat, soaked in soy sauce, mirin, and water. Simple. Decadent. Let the fresh-cut meat from Taiwan's sun-filled southern coast speak for itself. I ask her what "mirin", a Japanese rice wine, is in Chinese. She says she doesn't remember.
"So, how do I find it in a grocery store?"
All of a sudden, my mother's jaw locks. Frustrated, her cheeks pink, as if she were drinking wine. I too—infuriated that I am illiterate, unable to navigate food aisles on the island of my birth—feel a burn searing through my gut. This is how most of our Mandarin-English fights have begun since I was a teenager in suburban New Jersey: when words fail us.
She says now that she will stock the pantry with a few bottles of mirin before she leaves. Just as quickly, the redness in our faces dissipates, like steam from a boiling pot as soon as you lift the lid. We are both getting better at being patient, finding solutions.
My mother, after all, is known in our family as a culinary artist, and she has been in Taiwan with me for over half a year, serving up broiled squid dribbled with notes of lemon and truffle pasta tossed with shrimp plucked fresh from our sea. My stomach growls at the thought of her leaving me.
***
But there was a whole other time before this, before our languages diverged, before our tongues forked, like a river plunging out of the mountains of Taiwan and stretching like fingers into a turbulent ocean. I was raised in a family with a reverence for fresh food and flavorful eating. When I was a child, my grandmother's fourth-floor walk-up in a dead-end alleyway sat at the center of my small universe. She lived in the kind of old Taipei neighborhood where you could hear the clash of pans through open windows and smell the numbing tang of sesame oil and rice wine and ginger roots stewing in someone else's kitchen. On my grandmother's wicker couch, my aunt's Shih Tzu raised his head, his black nose wet and twitching. I, too, felt the buds in the back of my tongue come alive, tingling with the zest of sesame oil chicken soup.
"我 wu 餓 e 了 le!" I hopped off of the couch and announced to my older brother: I'm hungry!
He slammed his detective manga shut and sighed, "Again?"
Imagine this: a small Taiwanese girl with doll-like cheeks and a bowl haircut racing through narrow lanes, flanked on both sides by potted plants and parked mopeds. My brother trailed, ambling, his manga still in hand, in the shadows of charmless concrete blocks and sputtering air-conditioning vents. My arms and legs were a juicy feast for Taipei's summertime mosquitoes—here, everyone was always out for a bite—and I looked like a body with four popsicle sticks spotted with red adzuki beans.
"波 bo 霸 ba 奶 nai 茶 chai!" I ran shouting into the teashop with wicker stools and braised pork rice. This was in the early nineties, and bubble tea had just been invented in a city south of us. 波霸奶茶—coined for the big breasts of Hong Kong cinema sex symbol, Amy Yip—didn't have an English name yet.
My grandmother's coins clinked on the counter. The neighborhood uncle in a white apron grinned, "Coming right up, beautiful young lady."
I stood on my tiptoes, lifted my head above the counter, a front row seat to a private performance: the uncle ladled milk tea and ice cubes into a cocktail shaker. His powerful arms held it shut and swung it wildly back and forth, his entire body jiggling. A film of condensation crawled across the stainless steel like tendrils of fog. He opened the lid with a pop. I licked my lips as he poured it into a frosted glass, the froth tumbling out with the aroma of Taiwan's high mountain tea and fresh milk.
Upstairs in grandmother's fourth-floor kitchen, garlic cloves sizzled, popping in oil like firecrackers. The tongues of brilliant flames licked the belly of sooted woks. I nursed on the straw of my 波霸奶茶 in the living room, listening to the adults' polite conversations—just biding time until my grandmother stepped out of the kitchen to yell, "Jia ban lo!"
In those days, our dinners were gaggles of aunts and uncles, all of us children, a few too many dogs. My grandmother's dishes spun on a circular table top with the festivity of drunken chicken, steamed fish with red chili, cold cuts of bamboo shoots frosted with mayonnaise, and glassy mee-fun stir-fried with mushrooms and scallions. A clay pot of chicken soup, stewed since the early morning, sat in the middle. It held the promise of a long night, a raucous, mouth-watering affair of drumming chopsticks and smacking lips.
My grandfather held court in the airy, coarse texture of his Minnan dialect. In the dining room, situated at the center of the apartment, his voice boomed like ocean in a cave. With her chopsticks, my grandmother severed the fish head and placed it on his plate. My third uncle cracked jokes about his sister's double-eyelid surgery, and it sent the whole room into a loud cackle of laughter. His wife slapped him playfully across the shoulder.
Beside me, my youngest aunt lifted a chicken leg out of the clay pot and onto my plate. She whispered in Mandarin, "Don't tell grandpa." I stuck out my tongue in joy. She then told me about the red-butted macaques she saw bathing in hot springs in Japan.
All of this was a long time ago.
***
This is a story about our tongues: how they were forced to bend with the muscles of alien languages, how they were salted with the brine of a whole ocean that separated us. But before I tell you about how my brother and I started hanging out at a Taco Bell on Pacific Coast Highway in California, about how our Mandarin melted—like cheese in an oven—into English, I want to tell you this: My grandfather wiggled into life in the Shōwa Era in the margins of a city built between rivers, in a brick-and-mortar farmhouse on a dirt road in Japanese-occupied territory. He grew up, in the 1930s, cracking jokes in Minnan, a language birthed on the blue-steel continent across the Strait where he had never been, the dialect of a people who'd sailed to the island looking for fertile land. In another part of Taihoku, my grandmother's childhood nightmares were marinating in the cackling shuffles of pai gow and mahjong, her father wagering away acre after acre of land to men rolling toothpicks across their yellow teeth, cheering in the riotous dramatics of their native Fujian tongue.
In elementary school, my grandmother was made to use a Japanese name that wasn't her, 梅 mei 子 zi, one that she will almost forget. My grandfather, four years her senior, penned essays in the colonial language about how his parents had given up his baby sister for adoption and how he'd found her and cradled her all the way home. After the Emperor announced their surrender on the radio and Japanese military bases in the city emptied, my young grandparents began to attend buxibans to reshape their tongues once more—this time to the contours of the Mandarin-speaking Kuomintang as their warships sailed into the island.
Our luck no. 1: Because my grandparents were a pair of farmers who ate a whole lot of rice harvested on their own land and took their children to the clinic on the back of bicycles, we skated by the worst of the Kuomintang's brutal campaign that imprisoned and executed Taiwanese elites. My father was the eldest child in the family of five, and he grew up practicing the intricate strokes of Chinese characters at school, the language of soldiers that had come marching in, that had spit on the sandaled feet of island-born civilians; in their farmhouse, he tricked his younger sisters out of their lunch money for a heartwarming bowl of goose noodle soup in Ximending. My mother, on the other hand, spent her moonlit evenings in a Zhongshan apartment memorizing classical Chinese texts for her entrance exams.
My father's family came into financial comfort in a wild strike of historic fortune. Our luck no. 2: My grandfather's seemingly insignificant plot of farmland sat on the dirt road that would become Xinyi Road, now a major thoroughfare tumbling with Mercedes and Teslas towards Taipei 101. In the mid-seventies, he sold it to a developer, moved his family into an apartment with running water, and retired from his job at the police bureau. For a decade afterwards, riding the wave of Taiwan's economic miracles, going to the airport became a black-tie affair for the emerging middle class: my aunts and uncles lifted their heads toward the Pacific skies as they, one by one, flew to the United States to pursue their graduate degrees. They picked English names out of a book for their children that their parents never learned to pronounce. With that fortune, before any of us could comprehend it, before we could know exactly what it would cost us, came our reality: three generations of my family were educated in three different languages.
I was nine years old when we left Taipei for my father's job in Los Angeles. On the plane, I didn't cry. I wasn't excited. I was just a kid holding a stuffed Japanese macaque with a red butt, following her parents across the Pacific. When city lights receded into the night, a silver speck against the immense, dark ocean, a bright beam shot from the heart of the city where Taipei 101 would soon dominate the skyline.
What if, I turned to ask my mother, I never get to slurp a tapioca ball through a comically large straw again?
My mother rubbed my head. She didn't reply.
***
But perhaps the story of our tongues began somewhere else entirely: in the hold of a Portuguese ship in the 16th century as it raked the Pacific seas. Historians estimate that cassava, a plant indigenous to the South American tropics, arrived on the Asian continent with Portuguese explorers by way of their colony in Brazil. Once here, locals mixed the extract from cassava roots with boiling water and kneaded them into starch. As empires rose and receded from Taiwan, Han migrants dropped these pearl-like 粉 fen 圓 yuan into sweet dessert soups and sprinkled them on shaved ice. In night markets, hawkers bellowed out their prices in a Minnan language that was just beginning to blend with indigenous tongues on the plains and riddle with colonial Dutch in fortified Zeelandia.
Across the world, across the centuries—in California and then in New Jersey—I too began to sculpt my tongue to the alien curves of a foreign language. It didn't take long for me to become ashamed of the stiff Mandarin intonation that seeped into my English, like garlic that lingered too long on my breath. When my white middle school friends upturned their noses at the slab of pork belly oozing out of my mother's oven, I forced my tongue to adapt to the sugary crunch of cinnamon toast cereal and smoky, sauce-smattered barbequed ribs. I learned to smile at the white carton of orange chicken masquerading as "Chinese food", and I tried to ignore that their favorite take-out joint, "Golden China", was staffed only by Hispanic workers. With my parents, though, we sought out Thai and Malay restaurants along the Jersey Turnpike so that I could sip on Thai iced teas and teh tariks, milk teas just barely reminiscent of 波霸奶茶. "It will come," my mother kept reassuring me, tousling my hair even as it grew into a thick ponytail. "It will come."
I was in high school when my brother called from UCLA, the two of us speaking exclusively in English by then. He announced, "It's here!" In the kitchen, my mother was fashioning broiled pork loin and charcoaled asparagus with Parmesan. "Boba is becoming more and more popular in LA!"
"Boba?" I asked. "What's that?"
"It's what Americans are calling 波 bō 霸 bà. Boba. I don't know. I think it's because they can't pronounce it. Anyway, it's in LA now. I think it'll get to Jersey soon!"
Within ten months, 波霸奶茶 reached suburban New Jersey without fanfare—in frozen boxes, powdered mixture, and an anglicized name. Somewhere along its journey through the heartland of America, "boba" was further chiseled and reshaped into "bubble tea" that I barely noticed when I stumbled upon it in the food court of our Asian grocery store.
"Are you sure this is 波霸?" My mother asked, clucking at the menu, "Why is it so expensive?"
In the parking lot, my brother was holding an armful of our favorite childhood snacks: chocolate-filled koala crackers, wan-wan, and hey-song soda. As my tongue curled around a half-frozen tapioca pearl, both mushy and hard to chew, he asked, "So? Is it the same?"
The plastic cup crinkled in my hand like a cheap knock-off. The milk tea powder lodged uncomfortably between my teeth.
I wondered: was it possible for it to ever be again?
***
In my mid-thirties, I arrive at my grandparents' suburban house in a mountain just outside of Taipei. My grandmother is lying on her leather couch, the fan blowing through her summer nightgown. On the television, anchors are reporting how the coronavirus pandemic is ravaging the rest of the world. My grandmother doesn't wave hello; instead, she says in Mandarin, gesturing to a paper cup running with condensation on the coffee table, "Your aunt bought 波霸奶茶 for you."
"You're here!" My eldest aunt exclaims as she comes out of the kitchen with steaming bowls of rice. "I've been waiting all day! You know, we only get this kind of feast when you come over!"
The long wooden table is set with beef noodle soup, stir-fried sweet potato leaves, and cold cut goose leg and intestines. My grandfather, his combed hair wet from a shower, pulls out his chair. "來 Lai! Doh jiah! Doh jiah!" He says, "Your grandmother is afraid you will starve in the city because you don't speak Chinese, so we cooked everything!"
It is just the four of us tonight—the remnants of our long-ago emigration—gathered at one end of the table like a lonely, off-balanced seesaw in a deserted playground. Even as my aunt and grandfather speak in their Taiwanese dialect, there is something silent behind their words, something—like peals of laughter—missing in that deep, indigo quiet of our mountain evening. My grandmother, sitting beside a cascade of empty chairs, pokes absent-mindedly at a pan-fried fish with her chopsticks, its marble eyes glistening with fat and wisdom. Now, in her nineties, she has begun to forget. She no longer cooks, and has passed her recipes onto her live-in helper from Semarang, Indonesia, who makes my grandmother's dishes with a kick of Javan spice.
I take a long drag on my 波霸奶茶, trying to find the language to tell my grandmother about my job at the red-bricked institution down the roundabout from where she had once chased after her chickens with a bamboo basket and guided a water buffalo to work through her rice paddies. Tapioca balls parade into my mouth, the aromatic, earthy tea tug through the milk like a dry sheet against my tongue. The ice has melted; the sugar level is not quite right. My grandmother is looking at me, and I can't remember enough Mandarin words to string together into a sentence. It keeps hitting a dead-end, a period in the shape of a 波霸.
At last, nodding toward my aunt and grandfather's conversation, my grandmother asks, "Ti-ah wu bo?" Do you understand?
I shake my head.
She chuckles. But tonight, her feathered nature feels loaded, as if masking a loss too immense to comprehend. "Aiya," she sighs, "a Taiwanese person who cannot speak Taiwanese."
There are so many ways to respond—self-pitying jokes, heartfelt explanations, unbridled frustrations, and a lifetime of things to say to my ah-ma—in English. Yet, since our lives had intertwined in the same city, since the mornings she'd taken me by the hand through her neighborhood market, this has been the extent of our conversation for the better part of two decades. I am crushed by the thought that I will never know my grandmother again, even as she sits across the table from me.
Outside, their rescue mutt pants against the sliding door, her tongue hung loose like a red ribbon, her drool ambling down the glass. She barks. My grandmother shouts something at her; even she understands, whines and quiets down. In the adjoining kitchen, our helper is speaking on the phone in Bahasa Indonesian with her husband. My grandmother stares at me as I suck on the straw of my bubble tea. With barely any milk tea left, the liquid gurgles, struggling along the bottom. I try again. Nothing comes up besides a mouthful wallop of air.
My grandmother picks up a slice of goose meat and places it on my plate.
***
The story of our tongues must begin again: in a cobblestone village in the mountains of Zhejiang Province, where my maternal grandfather, barely eighteen years of age, was handed a rifle and conscripted to partake in a civil war on a parched continent that knew nothing beyond decades of violence.
Then: in 1949, my mother's father stood on the deck of a warship as a fleet of 1.3 million fatigued men carried canvas bundles on their backs, retreated from China, and sailed into Taiwan's Keelung harbor. His Kuomintang-issued combat boots landed on the island with a thud, a wintry cloud of dust swimming with the false, lofty promises of retaking their motherland from the Communists once more. Their reality: the young men were ordered to work on constructing roads and railways on a foreign land someone else—at a faraway conference in Cairo—had decided belonged to them. By day, my grandfather spoke the Mandarin language, the Beijing tongue, of colonizers; at night, in military villages popping up all over our island, he whispered to his comrades in their native Zhejiang dialect, the tongue of refugees. At the very least, in an attempt to assuage the pang of exile for his men, their Generalissimo had brought along the best cooks that China had to offer. My maternal grandfather, I imagine, sat on those long, inky evenings on a short plastic stool and sank his teeth into braised bamboo shoots and dongpo pork, swallowing the chewed-up memories of his mother's cooking and the taste of his old country.
Of course, the Kuomintang never left. Just as the Japanese Empire had left behind a cuisine of balanced dishes and a passion for fresh, raw fish, provincial recipes from the corners of that boundless continent converged in Taiwan, now made with the local ingenuity of an oppressed and industrious people who, above all else, loved to eat.
One day, after school, I rent a YouBike and ride south across our metropolis of mouthwatering delights. The city of Taipei lingers on the tongue with the spicy bite of mala and the rich, milky shoyu of Ramen broth. In Ximending, a line coils around the block for a deep-fried donut tossed in sugar dust. A woman, parked in front of a gated school, sells watermelon out of her truck that dissolves in the mouth like cotton candy. Roadside stands cackle with fried stinky tofu. Egg shells crack, yolks hissing with scallion pancakes.
I pedal to the Shida neighborhood, where a queue of university students wait along a one-way lane, their faces glowing with the light from their phones, the ramen bar still more than an hour from opening. At an open-air stall on the corner, a broad-shouldered woman digs her tongs into a tandoori oven and lifts out Fuzhou-style pepper buns that steam like a fog rolling through the mountains. All of a sudden, the air around us smells like the zest of freshly ground pepper and the warmth of succulent meat bathing in its own juice. I lick my lips, full of wanting.
"What would you like?" she asks.
Brushed in black-ink calligraphy, her menu tumbles like waterfalls down four wooden placards. I trace the strokes of those words—牛 beef, 羊 lamb—but my tongue, caught like a hooked fish in a river, cannot find the shape of their sounds. Across the street, in front of a brightly lit bubble tea stand, teenage girls in uniform skirts giggle. Soon, the woman turns to another customer, dropping half a dozen steaming buns into paper bags. My stomach gnarls at my own inadequacy, grumbles with something close to rage. I take a picture of the menu and scurry away on my bike.
That night, I rewrite the menu by hand, translate the characters online, and curl their melodies across my tongue. A few days later, I come back to the broad-shouldered woman; as soon as I recite the words 牛 niu 肉 rou 胡 hu 椒 jiao 餅 bing, she hands me a paper bag, pregnant with a beef pepper bun, already darkening with grease. At the street corner, I sink my teeth, crunching through the skin, and the sweet and savory broth bursts like fireworks in my mouth, triumphant.
All across our city, I capture Chinese menus with my phone and begin to memorize them with the urgency of a lost inheritance—or, perhaps, of a simple craving for a flavorful bite. Each intricate stroke, even by my hand, seems like an art form, making poetry in a cube; it takes painstaking, complex worksmanship, as meticulous as my grandmother chopping equal-lengthed matchsticks of ginger to serve in congees during Taipei's chilly winters. One by one, I recover my mother tongue deep-fried in the boneless chicken thigh in the alleyway, shaken in grapefruit green tea with coconut jelly, and kneaded in 飯 fan 糰 tuan from a breakfast auntie. As the classical language of empires and culinary feats unfurls from my tongue, I am able to savor once more in the taste of 刈 gua 包 bao in neighborhood stands, the unparalleled, delectable joy of a Taiwanese childhood—of stewed pork belly and sugared peanut dust and chopped cilantro stuffed into a warm, steaming bun.
I lick my lips. It is said that the Chinese script, which dates back three thousand years to oracle bones in the Shang Dynasty, offers us a window into how our ancestors perceived their worlds. At night, tracing these olden words in my grandparents' condominium, I learn: the character "tongue" 舌 shows the image of a tongue 千 rising out of an open mouth 口.
***
After my mother leaves Taipei, I start cooking in earnest. I follow her Post-it instructions through the alleyways of my childhood, its aging concrete blocks, rusted mopeds, and new parking garages. I begin again in the traditional market my grandmother used to frequent. Here, mornings are a rainbow of colors, painted with the medley of tropical fruits in baskets and striated ribs hanging, brilliantly pink, from metal hooks. The narrow lane smells of freshly caught fish, their crystal scales shimmering on ice, the caught light like rivers cascading through our forested mountains. The fishmonger shouts, her voice the hard-coin sounds of Taiwanese and Mandarin, "Hoa jia oh! Hoa jia! Delicious! Fresh fish today and every day!"
My shopping bag fills up: fresh halibut, Buddha's head fruit, and saltwater chicken leg from Big Brother Chicken. Taiwan, after all, is a tropical island that rose out of the ocean and has always served as a refuge for people in need of a bite to eat. For more than six thousand years, various Austronesian-speaking peoples have nourished their stomachs on the lush, delectable abundances of this island's volcanic soil, waterways, and ample rain. Fishermen in the Ming Dynasty came to use Taiwan's southern shores as a seasonal base as mullets migrated through. When the earth began to wear out in Fujian province, farmers began to arrive by the boatloads, chasing the ghostly memory of full-bodied rice surfing across their tongues. It is, in fact, partly because of Taiwan's food sources that we remained, after the Ming Dynasty, under control of the mainland. In 1684, Admiral Shi Lang wrote in a letter, urging Qing officials in Beijing to maintain rule over the island: "Both mulberry and field crops can be cultivated; fish and salt spout forth from the sea; the mountains are filled with dense forests of tall trees and thick bamboo." He continues, "This is truly a bountifully fertile piece of land."
One weekend, on a drive out toward the sea, my father tells me that during Taiwan's blistering summers, he and his college friends used to dive into the calm waters of Long Dong Bay and pluck sea urchins from ocean reefs. I imagine them: slender, bronzed bodies baking on the rocks, the Pacific Ocean swelling and lapping against the rocky coast. The young men sliced the spiky creatures in half with a pocketknife. They scooped out the urchin's flesh with their hands, bright and golden like the sun, and slipped the buttery souls onto their tongues, into their mouths.
In the car, my father licks his lips, remembering, "It was more delicious than the uni we have in sushi bars. It was so fresh, and so, so free."
We roll past Long Dong Bay. Its deep blue water is speckled with stand-up paddleboarders and guided rings of snorkelers, spots of sunscreen oils floating on the surface of the sea. I keep thinking that my father's Taipei sounds like such an idyllic place, but I don't dare ask: So what happened? What happened to the sea urchins that had clung to our corals? What happened to the shrimp my father and his siblings used to catch in our rivers and grill right on those pebbled banks in the mountains? Where did their brick-and-mortar farmhouse go, those long, boisterous nights of my grandmother's meals reaped from her own farm, gathered around a table with extended families and neighbors and merchants and fishermen passing by?
In a vegetable stall at the end of my grandmother's long-ago market, I run my fingertips across greens I do not yet have the words for. I think about my grandmother caressing ginger and lotus roots in those early mornings before family dinners, my small palm in her hand. I pick up a bundle of water spinach and hold it like a bouquet of flowers, breathing in the fragile crunch of their hollow stems, the perfume of our island's rain-soaked jungles. The vendor says something to me in Taiwanese I cannot understand. I grin; I nod. I know that in Mandarin, the greens in my hands are called 空 kong 心 xin 菜 tsai. Literal translation: Empty heart vegetable.
The 心, my friend points out earlier, runs with three drops of tears, like a permanent state of sorrow. I want to ask my father: why did we emigrate?
In the end—I want to know—was it, any of it, truly worth it?
***
As I wash the soil of my island off of the vegetables from the market and pull strings off of sugar peas like a runaway stitch, the fan in my kitchen grinds. The pungent bite of garlic spatters from the wok, and, with my free hand, I toss in sakura dried shrimp caught in 東 Dong 港 Gang's deep waters. My mother: Wait. Just wait. Let the sweet and salty taste of the shrimp flare out and seep into the high mountain cabbage leaves like cherry blossoms in the spring.
During the three years I end up living and working in Taiwan, I call my mother more and more for cooking advice. She tells me: stir-fry black pork song-ban 肉 with Korean 김치 kimchi, stew pork belly in a pot of soy sauce and Japanese みりん mirin, and drizzle Sichuan mala oil from a boutique shop on Dihua Street on steamed napa. Her Post-its' instructions are still taped to my dining room wall, scribbled in the havoc languages of our convoluted, borderless lives. But here are her recipes in a nutshell: batter colonization with migration, toss in a cup of childhood nostalgia, whisk it with the island's fresh produce, and finish it off with a pinch of ingenuity and western taste.
One afternoon, I call my mother to ask about steaming a flop of river fish belly to a tender, oily delight. She winds up telling me: my maternal grandfather had spent the remainder of his life in exile trying different Shanghainese restaurants in Taipei, searching for the delicacy of his childhood, 上 shang 海 hai 熏 xun 魚 yu. I run my mother through Google Translate: Shanghai smoked fish.
I ask, "What does it taste like?"
On the phone, my mother doesn't speak. I am coming to understand it, that silence: she may not know the answer, or she may not have the words in either language to explain. Outside, an Uber Eats moped idles its engine and rings a doorbell. My white American neighbor yells through her open window, "Thank you!" I imagine that she has ordered pasta from a western restaurant in the Tianmu neighborhood. I wonder: Is it possible for my maternal grandfather to have found, on this foreign island, that perfect concoction of the right fish from the right river, fried and marinated in that same sugary and tangy sauce, smoked by the right cypress branches of the old continent?
At last, my mother replies, "I don't know."
"Did he ever find it?"
I do not tell her: just after I arrived in Taiwan, I stood in front of the bubble tea shop of my childhood, looking for a neighborly uncle with muscular arms, dancing with a cocktail shaker, his triceps flexed, sweat shredding from his black, silky hair; instead, I found an air-conditioned shabu-shabu restaurant, two women ladling sliced meat and enoki mushrooms out of a pot. I do not tell my mother that there is now a parrot on the sidewalk talking smack to passersby in a language no one understands. That I have taken the high-speed train to Taichung, 波霸奶茶's fabled birthplace, and tried half a dozen bubble teas from the shops that line its main station. That I have taken my students' recommendations and scavenged through Taipei in chase of that fragrant milk tea tumbling out of a cocktail shaker, plopping into a frosted glass.
"No," she says. "I do not believe he ever found it."
That night, I stand amidst the sizzling frays and frantic crowds at Shilin night market, one of hundreds peppered in cities and villages across our tropical island. Beneath our watery, Pacific sky, I watch young couples share oyster pancakes and skewers of stuffed squid, families slurp bowls of oh-ah mee-sua, and Vietnamese migrants seek out steaming bowls of phở. With a box of たこ焼き takoyaki in my hand, I think: maybe, just maybe, all of these people stuffed into night markets are ravaged for dishes from continents away, all of us in a pursuit of a taste that language cannot describe, that only the tongue can remember.
***
Up on the mountain, I am sipping on yet another cup of 波霸奶茶 as I watch my grandmother's fingers tap in mid-air, rhythmic, as if she is making a string puppet dance. "Kili-kala, kili-kala," she says. "That's the sound our ceramic tiles make on the roof when a typhoon plows through." My father translates for me, equal parts Mandarin and English.
We are, once again, gathered around her dining table, and I have just asked her about the loofah that she stir-fries on high heat with ginger roots and fresh clams. Since I've found enough Mandarin words to ask her about the dishes on her table, the stories have kept on coming. My grandmother is telling me about their farmhouse where the edges of Taipei once shimmered in an endless field of 稻 dao 田 tian—rice paddies pregnant with golden stalks in the shape of 禾, organized into patches that look like 田, rolling for kilometers across the basin's rivers and streams.
Crack. My grandfather snaps the whiskered head off of a shrimp, curled like an orange comma. He recalls, "After the typhoon, we had to pick up the tiles one by one across the 稻田! It was hard work!"
My uncle mocks, "Oh, please, Mom did all the work! You were napping at the police station!"
I laugh, along with my aunt, my father. Excited, our dog barks.
"Ah-ma," I ask, gesturing to a plate, "What fish is this?"
My grandmother touches the pan-fried fish with her fingers, rubbing it like a block of dough. "It's a freshwater fish from northern Taiwan." She picks it up and smells it, "Freshly caught, not farmed." As she tells me about the fish's migratory patterns in our island's rivers, she dissolves into her mother tongue and I do not understand. My father freezes, mouth-open, unable to translate words we do not have in English.
But, perhaps, what really matters is this: even now, my grandmother beams, comes brilliantly alive, when she talks about food. It is as if she is able to once again pull sweet potato leaves and water spinach from the soil of her island. As if she can wander the lane of hawking vendors, her fingers kneading garlic bulbs and a-choys. As if she is once more the master in her kitchen, the fan whirring and woks sizzling louder than my grandfather's voice, her octopus arms cooking up a dozen dishes at a time, feeding whole families of daughters and sons and in-laws and grandchildren and dogs.
That night, in the hours before my red-eye flight, I step off the community bus at a place where the city meets the mountain, and this modern metropolis of gastronomic affairs seems a bit quieter, a little slower. It is plum rain season again. The afternoon shower has washed the basin's dust and exhaust out of the air. Asphalt roads glow with red brake lights and golden haloes of street lamps. I amble through the back alleyways of my childhood—past where the bubble tea shop with wicker chairs and a dancing uncle once stood, past the hairdresser who used to dye my grandmother's hair out of her second-floor living room. I pause, for a while, at the dead-end road where a fourth-floor walk-up once smelled of garlic and ginger and chicken broth and the spraying saliva of laughing relatives. But I no longer remember which of the buildings belonged to my family. I no longer remember how to find the place where my grandmother stepped out of her kitchen to shout at us all, "Jia bian lo!"
吃 chi 飯 fan 了 le!
Time to eat!
I am not sure how this story of our tongues of broken languages and faintly remembered tastes will end: after all, my father still chases after goose noodle soup in Ximending and dreams of going to Hokkaido at the peak of sea urchin season. In Los Angeles, and now in Seattle, I will continue to spend an exorbitant amount of money on a traditional milk tea with tapioca—half sugar, less ice—that never tastes the way I want it to; yet, with each overpriced attempt, I tell myself that I am simply paying the price of immigration, a tax on an abandoned tongue and a disappeared childhood. I keep trying, I suppose, because I want some reminder of a self that felt rooted to that tropical island in the Pacific Ocean, some proof that once upon a time in a fourth-floor apartment in Xindian, a raucous family had gathered around the same dining table, wholly intact.
There is, after all—with a cup in my hand—that gasp of breath as that first tapioca ball waltzes up the straw, that moment of childish eagerness, that surge of illogical hope. That stubborn, blind faith that somehow our tongues can carry us back to a place we've left behind.
