Chi Tea

I've been drinking a lot of tea recently. I never drank tea (except iced tea) up until a few weeks ago and for those of you that have heard the "I'm really not that Asian" rant, not drinking tea was another item on the long list that makes me a disgrace to my culture (the biggest one being my inability to use chopsticks). I guess that's the product of a kid born and raised in Canada in two non-Asian cities. Another product of an Asian kid born and raised in Canada: I'm a monster. I mean have you seen normal Asian people? The average height is like 5'. 5' 5" at most if they ate their green beans as a kid. These people are really short. Me? 6'. Every single time I go see relatives or any of my parents' Asian friends, the first words out of their mouths (in Chinese) are "YU SOUL TALL!" I think it was something in the Canadian water which therefore leads me to believe that basketball's Yao Ming was secretly raised in Canada.

I've never been good at "fitting in" with my culture. When I was little, the only Asian people I saw were at church and at home. Even when I went to a Chinese restaurant in St. John's, the owner and all the patrons were all white. A "Chinese" dinner at "Hong Kong Restaurant" (that was the name, I swear to God) consisted of fried rice, chicken balls, egg rolls, and chicken noodle soup. It wasn't even Campbell's chicken noodle soup. Living here though, my family never eats that stuff when we go to Chinese restaurants. The one place that is a "Chinese-Canadian" restaurant here (Golden Palace on Carling. The egg rolls are to die for), my mother hates. I can understand why you hate that kind of food after growing up on it, and then moving to Canada and finding out that "Hong Kong Restaurant" was the only place in your town serving "Chinese food." It's sort of like growing up with daily neighborhood shootings and then moving out of Toronto. I can't let that one go.

Where was I? Oh yes. Tea. I've been drinking a lot of it recently and I'm finding it hard when you start out. There are so many kinds, especially at Starbucks. They all sound so deceivingly delicious too. "White Blueberry." "Passion." "Green Orange Passion." The reason I say deceivingly is because these flavors taste NOTHING like their advertised fruit and need at least 6 spoonfuls of sugar to help that medicine go down. When you say "can I have a regular tea?", they just look at you like an idiot and ask "what kind of tea?" because "regular" in the barista girl's mind means "tall." That information is handy for later when you ask the barista girl "do you wanna go out with a regular guy?"

"YU SOUL REGULAR!"