The BoBA Cap. Fundraiser for Asian Americans Advancing Justice- Asian Law Caucus

About this campaign

THE BoBA CAP is our wearable ode to a drink whose role has evolved with our lives and our Filipino and Vietnamese identities: who we were, who we are, even who we’re becoming.

The two of us discovered the tapioca pearls in our teens, at the crest of the ’90s “AZN pride” era, around the same time we encountered the lively shanzhai bootlegs in Asian districts near family—San Francisco’s Chinatown, Houston’s Bellaire and Harwin. We met as students on a mostly boba-free Midwestern campus. First as friends, later as partners in everything, we took trips together to New York City, where our love deepened for both Canal Street and a certain modern-art temple, linking their very different inventive energies in our memories. In the pandemic’s wake, we found comfort in returning to boba, and savoring it with siblings, parents, and our two boys—sometimes in a spirit of pan-Asian embrace, sometimes as classic parental bribery.

Disentangling matters of art, assimilation and appropriation, food and family, feels like a never-ending project in our corner of the world. Boba gloriously distills and relieves us from this.