Maggie's First Experience with Boba

I was born and raised in the Bay Area but I moved to a small town called Rochester in the state of Michigan in the 8th grade. On one of my summer visits back to California in high school, I tried boba for the first time. My aunt told me that it was a tasty drink that was quickly becoming a hot trend in the area. When I returned to Michigan, a few months later the first boba tea shop was established in the county I lived in, and the store happened to be in the downtown area of the city I lived in. The county I live in is predominantly Caucasian, and the highest population of Asians lives in a city called Troy. Which is NOT the city I live in. The boba tea shop is called Bubble Bliss, and in the first few months it was open it would always be heavily crowded on weekend evenings with many many Asians that came from different cities in the county. Most of the people in Bubble Bliss in fact were not from Rochester. It seemed like any Asian I knew had connections with the owners of the store, who were a young Asian couple. The boba tasted decent, but it felt like it was missing something in comparison to the stuff I had tried in California. Many people in county wondered how could Bubble Bliss afford to operate because in the daytime it was always completely empty. Every day of the weekday it was pretty much vacant as well. It didn't seem possible that sales from the weekend could make up for the lack of business on very other day of the week. However, the place stayed open and many of my friends enjoyed hanging out there on the weekends.

Eventually, the owners started to change (none of my friends seemed to know why) and that really affected who was going into Bubble Bliss and the quality of the drinks. I believe that the second set of owners knew the original owners, so this didn't really affect the similar taste of bubble tea. There are only two blenders in the shop, so it takes forever to get a drink but most people don't seem to mind. As of last year, the owners changed to a Caucasian couple. The people making the drinks were no longer designated as the owners, but now high school hirees were being trained to make the drinks. And the drinks sometimes tasted awful because many times the workers would forget how to make it correctly. Interestingly enough, after months passed Bubble Bliss became less of an Asian-dominated place and just about anyone who wanted a drink would come in. The weekends were no longer crowded by the hoards of Asian teenagers who would stay in the shop past its closing time, but instead overall it seemed like the amount of people going to Bubble Bliss was spread across each day of the week evenly. Still, not so many people were buying drinks at Bubble Bliss.

I've always wondered how Bubble Bliss was able to operate with its seemingly low sales (many times people would just go to hang out). When I was there over Christmas break, the only people there one entire evening was myself and three other friends. And actually, I just asked my sister about five minutes ago how is Bubble Bliss and she said that the place has "basically died" and that the building is up for lease! I guess it makes sense now...

David's First Experience with Boba

Growing up in a pre-dominantly white area in the Western suburbs outside of Chicago, my exposure to boba was limited to the few cafes I visited while I was in Chinatown, visiting my grandma and other relatives who lived in the North side of Chicago. The bubble tea cafes that seem to have sprung up on street corners here in the Bay Area were almost nonexistant back home. Maybe boba tea shop owners didn't see the incentive of opening a cafe in the middle of white Suburbia. Personally, I feel that in the Midwest, bubble tea hasn't received its widespread popularity to reach outside of the Asian American youth like here in California. My major exposure to bubble tea was through the Vietnamese noodle shops that my family and I would often eat at during the weekends while we visited Chicago. I fell in love with bubble tea, but I never had the chance to really develop a liking for the drink since the closest bubble tea place was over an hour away. It wasn't until I came here to Stanford that I came to realize the popularity and experience behind bubble tea.

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