Abstract

Bubble tea, or Boba tea, has been a more and more popular drink worldwide and an emerging international symbol of Taiwanese food culture. At the same time, it has also been a growing business not just in Taiwan but in other countries, where investors with different national backgrounds have made efforts to expand the bubble tea market. The expansion of the bubble tea market outside Taiwan, however, has worried the Taiwanese merchants of bubble tea. One of the major concerns has been the loss of ‘authenticity’ of bubble tea as a national food symbol of Taiwan. While more and more bubble tea shops seem to appeal to the authenticity of Taiwanese taste as a marketing and branding strategy, tea merchants and business investors from Taiwan have worried that Taiwanese people have in fact gradually lost the power to define and to authorise the authenticity of bubble tea. As a result, although overseas Taiwanese bubble tea merchants are positive about the international expansion of the bubble tea market, they have struggled over ways to claim and to retain bubble tea as an authentic food belonging to Taiwan. In accordance with these concerns, Taiwanese tea merchants, especially those running bubble tea businesses outside Taiwan, have taken every step of the processing know-how as defining criteria, by which Taiwanese people are able to draw a clear boundary to differentiate the authenticity of Taiwan from others. Thus Taiwanese tea merchants have tried to export a whole ‘package of authenticity,’ including the raw material, processing machines, and customized services from Taiwan to the other countries. This paper takes the expanding bubble tea market in Vietnam as a case study to explore this scenario. Theoretically, we combine food nationalism, criteria of authenticity, and mobility as the framework to analyze people’s everyday practices in producing and consuming bubble teas. Methodologically, we follow a group of Taiwanese bubble tea merchants in Vietnam to investigate the relationship between the mobility of processing techniques and the policing of authenticity in the emerging Taiwanese bubble tea market in Vietnam. From this case, we argue that the overseas expansion of the Taiwanese bubble tea market has faced a dilemma between boundary maintenance and de-bordering forces in running bubble tea businesses in Vietnam. This dilemma has then become a mechanism for reconstructing the culinary meaning of a national food icon, as seen in Taiwanese bubble tea in Vietnam.