College grad comes home with bubble tea
May 19—Suen Chang's plans after graduating from Portland State University were thrown into disarray because of the coronavirus pandemic.
After school, she soon returned to Astoria, where she grew up and her parents run Tokyo Teriyaki.
Chang had grown up with bubble tea and missed the ubiquitous shops she used to visit with friends in Portland. She wondered why her parents hadn't started one in Astoria.
"I told them, 'Hey, you guys should open one,'" she said. "And my mom said, 'Why not you?'"
Chang recently opened Milky-Cha, a bubble tea shop in a former mortgage office on Commercial Street. The shop, open every day, offers several flavors of teas — green, black, jasmine and others — milks and other drinks topped with fresh fruit and other condiments. The drinks are often filled with dark, chewy tapioca pearls made in Taiwan and known as boba. The shop also specializes in bubble waffles, a dessert from Hong Kong.
It takes Chang about an hour to make more pearls for her teas. But only days after opening, she said she's already running short.
Oliver Yoon, the vice president of sales and global marketing for the supplier Boba Direct, told National Public Radio last month that there have been too many shipments from Asia to the U.S. and not enough production capacity for the pearls. The shortages are compounded by a lack of dockworkers and truck drivers in the U.S. to get products from port to retailers.
Running a bubble tea shop isn't necessarily the end game for Chang, who said she wants to go back to school and get a master's degree in business. Her parents have assured her the shop will continue regardless of her next move in life.
"I don't know if anybody's really sure what they're doing," Chang said. "I never knew what I wanted to be growing up. This is just one of the many things I can do."
