How did "boba" become the de facto term for the drink? I remember calling it "pearl milk tea" in middle school, somehow switching over to "bubble tea" in late high school to college, and now calling it "boba". And I don't think I heard of the slang meaning until much later.

Aside from that, as I am a first generation (native-born) Chinese-American, this article discusses my identity scarily well from an angle that I never really thought about. Despite Subtle Asian Traits becoming popular around the time that I was cutting my Facebook usage after I graduated and started work and "boba liberalism" being a term I learned today, I'm not really that many steps removed from this all. Why is it that I subconsciously tried hard to prove myself to classmates that I'm an American, but on the other hand, I tried to be as "Asian" as my Asian-American classmates? This article hit a cultural identity nerve in me and I haven't really formed a coherent set of thoughts on it.

(Maybe this also ties into why I'm such a boba purist in that I reject anything that isn't tapioca balls + whole milk + some sugar but not too much + good tea, though when I'm feeling less tolerant of lactose, oat milk surprisingly tastes almost no different from whole milk in a boba drink.)

Also, the boba metaphor for culture that the author presented also really works well in another way. A person born of parents from Shanghai and a person born of parents from Beijing can have very different cultural backgrounds, but that richness gets lost when they become Chinese-Americans. Similarly to how boba, a Taiwanese drink, has become a de facto symbol of Asian American cultural identity overall. Some might argue this is a "bad thing", but, well, as I mentioned earlier, I'm still coming up with a coherent set of thoughts around this.