波 - Bo1 - Wave

波霸奶茶 - Bo1 Ba4 Nai3 Cha1 - Bubble Milk Tea

Just the other day, NPR did a feature on Bubble Tea - a Taiwanese drink that is becoming more and more popular in the US. Also known as 珍珠奶茶 - Zhen1 Zhu1 Nai3 Cha1 - Pearl Milk Tea, it’s iced tea with these chewy balls of tapioca at the bottom. You drink / eat it using a special heavy gauge straw that can suck up the balls. If you live in a big city in the US, you’ve probably seen it already. If not, don’t worry, Bubble Tea franchises like Q-Taste and Lollicup are spreading across the country and will reach your area soon.

The reason why it’s called 波霸奶茶 is still somewhat unclear to me. At first I thoght it was because 波霸 is pronounced Bo1 Ba4 which sounds like the English word Bubble. Bubble Tea Canada, (sounds like an authoratative site, right?) seems to confirm this at their Bubble Tea history page. But then again, the Bubble Tea article at Wikipedia, combined with what Jenny is telling me, points to another derivation, that 波 sounds like “Ball” in English and that 波霸 put together therefore means something like “Ball Master”. It’s not clear if this also has something to do with the slang meaning of this phrase, a busty woman. It could be that the answer is “maybe both”, that they purposefully named it something that sounds like “Bubble” but also has an attention-grabbing connotation. Or maybe none of these are right. I wonder if Liu Han-Chieh, the man who supposedly invented Bubble Tea in 1982 in Taichung at the 春水堂 tea house can answer.

Also, 波浪 - Bo1 Lang4 means Wave, like in the ocean, or also as in wavy hair. Jenny got a wave added to her hair, the same day I heard the Bubble Tea story on the radio. Come to think of it, she also had some Bubble Tea herself in Flushing that day, at a place Yvonne recommended that supposedly has EVEN BETTER Bubble Tea than they have in Taiwan.