In Taiwan, boba tea fans bemused at Dragons’ Den cultural appropriation row

Taichung, Taiwan – Standing in line at her favourite boba tea shop in Taiwan’s second-biggest city, Lisa Chen was perplexed to hear that her preferred beverage had been embroiled in a headline-grabbing controversy halfway around the world.

After a Montreal-based company pitched a “convenient and healthier” canned version of boba tea on Canada’s version of Dragons’ Den last week, a firestorm ensued.

Chinese-Canadian actor Simu Liu, a potential investor on the reality show, raised concerns about so-called “cultural appropriation” and the lack of any indication that boba tea originated in Taiwan.

“There’s an issue of taking something that is very distinctly Asian in its identity and ‘making it better,’ which I have an issue with,” said Liu, who was born in mainland China and grew up in Canada, declining to back the company.

Manjit Minhas, another judge on the show, announced in a video on Instagram several days later that she had decided to withdraw an offer to invest 1 million Canadian dollars ($726m) for an 18 percent stake in the company after “more reflection, due diligence and listening to many of your opinions”.

On Monday, after days of angry comments online, the company, Bobba, offered a public apology online for the “harm we have caused with our words and actions on the show”.

Simu Liu attends a premiere of the film Jackpot! at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, California, United States on August 13, 2024 [Mario Anzuoni/Reuters]

To 21-year-old engineering student Chen, though, the controversy felt silly and not worth getting upset about.

Chen said she did not see the problem with the beverage becoming part of the globalised food landscape with variations that are increasingly detached from its Taiwanese roots.

“It’s great that more people can enjoy boba tea,” she told Al Jazeera.

“In Taiwan, we’re constantly coming up with new kinds of boba tea, so I think it makes sense that people abroad are doing so as well.”

Lin You Ze, who worked at a boba tea shop in Taichung from 2019 to 2022, had a similar reaction when he came across the controversy while scrolling social media.

“I don’t think it’s a big deal that they took boba tea and added their own twist to it,” Lin told Al Jazeera.

“Boba tea can be quite easy to make and a lot of the things you need originally came to Taiwan from somewhere else anyway, so it’s all connected.”

Lin said the focus should be on the quality of the product and not the background of the company’s owners.

“If they made a delicious new boba tea that’s healthier, then that’s good for everyone, right?”

Yang Zou Ming, whose uncle owned a boba tea shop in Taichung, was less impressed with Bobba’s pitch, although he said he did not have a problem with people who aren’t Taiwanese selling the drink.

“Boba tea should be made fresh, and you lose that if you put it in a can and store it for a long time,” he told Al Jazeera.

“But I don’t see a problem with people across the world selling different kinds of boba tea.”

Boba tea, which in its most classic form consists of milk tea with chewy tapioca pearls, originated in Taiwan in the 1980s before spreading to the United States in the 1990s through Taiwanese immigration.

Today, boba tea is available worldwide with companies such as Kung Fu Tea and Sharetea, which have their headquarters in New York and Sydney, respectively, operating hundreds of outlets in multiple countries.

Amid explosive popularity globally, the boba market, which has expanded to include variations such as cocktails and ice cream, was worth $2.43bn last year alone, according to Fortune Business Insights.

In Taiwanese media, reaction to the controversy in Canada was muted, while discussions online paid more attention to whether the products were healthier as claimed than questions of identity.

Despite the subdued reactions in Taiwan today, the early history of boba tea was itself marked by a battle over representation.

As boba tea was first gaining popularity in Taiwan, two rival tea houses both claimed to have made the first iteration of the drink.

The two sides spent years battling each other for the right to claim ownership, filing multiple lawsuits against each other in court.

In 2019, a Taiwanese court concluded that since anyone is allowed to make boba tea, the question of who invented it was irrelevant.

Tourists walk past a boba tea installation in the Ximending shopping district in Taipei, Taiwan on October 13, 2024 [Tyrone Siu/Reuters]

Clarissa Wei, a Taiwanese-American journalist and the author of a Taiwanese cookbook, Made In Taiwan, said the heated reactions to the Canadian company’s boba products stem from issues of culture and identity among Asian diaspora communities.

“Bubble tea is a very dear symbol to a lot of the diaspora and has become a symbol of what it means to be Asian American and Asian Canadian,” Wei told Al Jazeera.

“In some ways, bubble tea is more important to Asian minorities in Western countries than it is to Taiwanese in Taiwan, who don’t think as much about the meaning or the symbol behind it.”

The Asian diaspora’s connection to boba tea, particularly among certain generations, has been referred to as “bobalife” – named after a 2013 song of the same name.

“There are different dynamics at play with boba tea abroad being much more than just a beverage,” Wei said.

Wei said that Bobba’s owners had entered a minefield with their business proposal.

“It can be really difficult for entrepreneurs to launch products with roots in different ethnicities, and I think it’s often a matter of trying to be as transparent about cultural origins, especially for something like bubble tea that means so much to people,” she said.

“We’re living in a political and cultural climate where it’s very difficult to launch products without offending people, so you do have to be careful.”