Erstwhile Bubble-Tea

Carrie Chang

Description

“Erstwhile Bubble Tea” is 100 percent pure moonshine, a literary topis of strange beliefs and occasional bliss, a humanitarian account of how the sunshine tribe triumphed over darkness and the little cities of the Bay Area celebrated their second shadow; while drinking tea becomes an erstwhile pleasure for the taking, the cool cat Asians of suburban California put to rights their value to conquer the vicissitudes of plainspoken time and outrageous happenstance; whether they are putting on airs, or exhibiting the sur le tat neuroses of a resurrected childhood on a summer’s day, these characters lead a charmed existence, putting on a show not unlike “Juneteenth,” and making a statement for their ethnic pageantry, and cosmic FOB existence on the planet.

Sujets

• Asian
• California
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 01 août 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9798369404218
• Langue: English

Extrait

ERSTWHILE BUBBLE-TEA
Carrie Chang

 
Copyright © 2023 by Carrie Chang.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2023914123
ISBN:
Softcover
979-8-3694-0422-5
 
eBook
979-8-3694-0421-8
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 07/26/2023
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
854887
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Dedicated to my grandma Tze-Hwa Teng

 
 
 
I had not felt such a f eeling of belonging for my whole life, before I entered Chez Chao’s, where someone has left the bubble tea tap on for the last sixteen hours, and I can feel there’s eminence coming from the little squishy tapioca balls that are drenched into the cup; speaking frankly, there’s no place I’d rather be when the lightning strikes and the little curios which are my people come spacken lieber chinglish with a belly full of iridescent sweetness that is beyond compare; strange postmen who have sullied their gut to find a bevel of dark envelopes delivered to people from the yellow planet, now chitter in full reign and disclose the fact that every dragon-poke and their clever mamma has lit up like an X-mas tree in the hour of our Lord, and harbored such bourny words of classic repression and angst by the way of hiding ourselves in the shadow of our calumny, playing light bright with the erstwhile memories of seeming fresh and above it all, this essential thing called life.
What troubadour mix of gross motives there were on Sandy Shi’s face when she woke up that day and found herself dawdling between the cold Oolong tea and the more oddball aperitifs at Chez Chao’s , feeling surreptitious slumber had made her a dandified octu lover of inebriate dreams, and sweet spider punch, the transparent duo of steam-pressed yam fries and barney milkshakes making her salivate like a child in l’hiver; what were the righteous seasons of etranger whirlwinds and effulgent, breathless underwater meditations in personal history, the nervous eyeball and its fearless network of dark ganglia shimmering like spiral clouds in your tepid borscht, at Chez Chao’s , where the all-nighters raged and civilization began and ended with a groupie formation of the fondest sort—-where dandelions bloomed in the side-doors like Hawaiian punch, and there were a heck of a lot of ambling ghosts of privilege a sortie in the eating booths putting on their sacre bleu airs, and getting high on monty python dreams.
What hunched shoulders were Alex Lai and Maybelle Wu in matching paragon shorts, doing the fandango, seeming naught for naught in the deviltry department (such innocent eyes shining!) They could be the ransacked ideal of someone’s poetic conceit, dressed in midnight blue, all stork and no tail, witnessing the travesty of the hour, someone’s bent spoon or straw in connivance with those seconds of distress in the light. Maybelle’s tresses were like rivulets of ebony hay sighing in the particulars of some body-wave that hurt the eyes, there were stringy roses in her epaulets, which stung like Jesus on the crescent of the moment; Sandy noticed this, and thought her own white t-shirt quaint and modest beyond words. She was not a little nonplussed and zoned in on Alex, who squirmed in his seat, feigning some Godzilla stripe that was not worth mentioning. It was the nerve of Sandy to be the I Spy on You adulterer in this case, who was sorely interested in saying something cheeky to this angelic couple in aisle #14 just for the hell of it.
There were pale asterisks in her eyes, as she peered at the tall frosties in their hands, and felt such a shingo dingo of unflappable sarcasm rising through her mouth that her hair flew off at the ends, making her whole head shine like a doppelgänger. “ You two seem like Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, may I take your picture?” Alex and Maybelle chortled like the snobs they were, like two Pendleton yuppies in a crystal dynamo time warp throwback to Xing Guang Taipei in the Eighties, when everyone getting out of a cab was a movie star. There was some surly forte to Alex’s salty grin when he thought that he was now moonlighting as a diablo artist, drawing mock Nagels in his studio proper at night, and torturing his Maybelle with his kvetching about all the idiot idiosyncrasies of Bay Area culture, with all its whatnot preambles of loose partying and skyrocket prices for the Mumtaj believer of the Coming. Maybelle for all her warped, cosmetic angle, could not get the items on the menu right, and kept dreaming about some blue-iced islander tea, looked at Sandy coolly in return, and shrugged, with a cringe of delight. Earthily, sarcastically, driven by inner impulses of hedonistic pleasure, she longed to gossip and divulge the news of the day to Alex, to sip her tea, and not seem too above it all, whispering that Sandy was fucking out of her mind. What cruel ministry of slow efforts had contrived to bring them together in this bubble-tea outfit in the Cup, where wacko pandemonium raged, and the super-bananas were at battle again, babbling in sestinas of largo and soprano, in territorial language that would make the stars shudder. It was all Maybelle could do not to make Sandy feel so much like an essential lamp-post, and titter a few words of hsieh, hsieh, but I don’t do bellyflops.
There was a wintry, Salomé kind of demeanor to Sandy that made the couple curdle in their seats with mirth, and lambaste their lallygagging moments of the goon show with some apotheosis of friendly, cum friendly comments about the way things were in their sleepy ghetto where the sun also rose like a violet meteor in this still-life regards to making things more universally acceptable and riddled with cheesy terror; little strophes of self-regard had cleared out the damnation in her life, and made Sandy less the black sheep than she was, some vintage of personal stammer in her voice leading her to the past years when she had been a governess-like deity in Miss Sixty jeans, back before the explosion in her ears. She was all sentimental mob squab, and not about to come down from her high horse of olympian dreams of pious plenty; born in Shaoxin colors and dipped in the heather of those warmicking days of bellwether charms that had bedeviled her here and there, she called herself The Interloper, as was always frequenting little nondescript bubble tea joints in the Bay Area with shadowy impulse, braiding her hair with three equal strands, for anonymity, democracy, and truth; there was no viper in her that would sing with toots alors , in the middle of the night when things got rough and there was a kudzu of fine telepathy in the crowd she ran with, in the many scouting individuals she knew who flew with alacrity into mod space nine during the 21 st Century years to get a sensation of it, that fling that was inured to the new hep cats of the breathing, sensational planet.
“It is a tough freeze,” confessed Sandy, describing how difficult it was to make friends in the Bay Area where it was all stiff necks and turdly beards, and one was urged to hug a computer and not jump off the balcony. In those days, Sandy talked the talk about the zero coin and remembered how she dreamt of all the vicious years she lay in her apartment, wavering in the gothic shadows, sifting among the old furniture, afraid to go out. She mewed and mewed. It was the asinine feeling of betrayal of society that had left her listless, in a shroud of black tulle dresses, looking proper and proper lonely, like a ditto meme graph from an Edward Hopper painting, which hung in her room. It was all she could do stare into the airless window panes, and gripe joylessly of the days to come, of the long switch in people’s behavior in this rabid year, in which they’d be eyeing her considerably as a femme moderne that bucked the trends in expectations for what it meant to be an Asian American woman; who knew when the next pay check would arrive and for what civilization’s heartbreak the wallpaper would come undone, peeling ecstatically into the next good hour. She had, as the gift of her old uncle, an apartment in Cupertino, that she slept in nightly, slumming it with high regards for time, space and everything, that was the heady confusion she felt in the morning, when she awoke to an ailanthus plant curling up and tickling her face as if say, “Ah, you caught the gist of my funny life.”
*    *    *
The Yammies speak. Beyond all the yellow brick city of pretty Jones and wild-faced keppers, there once lived many sprockets of tribal color that could only be misunderstood as severe and downcast as its enigmatic motherland, and the sour boot, if the alignment of the stars will tell. The self-righteousness of my people is unique, built on insecure trusts with the outside world and all that jazzy foundation of forgetfulness that makes the deal unbearably real; just some smudge of yellow eyeshadow on Maybelle’s dresser