The Popstar & Me

Chapter 11 - Some Like It Hot Pot

Chapter 11

I wake up the next day to a voice mail left by my father. He is cursing because his brilliant idea for a mobile Szechwan hot pot food truck met an unfortunate end. One of the girls in the Columbia area complained that the food he served was completely raw. My dad says he tried to explain to her that she needs to cook the sliced beef in the portable hot pots first, but she kept threatening to call the health department or, even worse — leave him a bad Yelp review. He eventually might have waved a kitchen knife at her, and how could anyone possibly have known that her dad was the district attorney of New York?

Regardless, now his food truck license was revoked, and he's without a side-hustle. It's back to delivering food for his friend's den of cockroaches and dirty oil. My dad says he is allowed to say that because they are best friends. Don't go repeating that to your friends, bǎobèi, he tells me. I roll my eyes and delete the voice mail. Really? As though I go around bragging every day that my dad is a stoner who can't keep a steady job.

"How about you serve something less toxic and dangerous? Maybe something friendly, like bubble tea?"

I press send before I recall that I'm giving my dad the silent treatment. I didn't think the food truck idea was ever going to take off. Who wants to eat from a place called "Dante's Mala Inferno" anyway? As I pack up my backpack and head off to a day of classes (Friday is a lecture day for us at the TCM school located at the Xuhui Qu), I realized all this talk of bubble tea is giving me a serious craving for it.

My grandmother used to make me tapioca pearls back when I was in kindergarten. I'm not sure if this memory comes to me because it's particularly sentimental, or I am starting to feel homesick.

Even though I've only been here for a week, I've already scouted out most of the bubble tea stores around my area. I do this because I am too self-conscious to eat a full-size meal by myself at a sit-down restaurant. A bubble tea, on the other hand, is a perfect meal for one.

During class, Calvin is too busy bopping his head to the music from his headphones to talk to me during our half-hour break for lunch. He's so busy highlighting his textbook that I am afraid to interrupt, or he'll think I'm a slacker who doesn't use her lunch break to study.

I finally manage to catch Andrew during a bathroom break. Andrew tells me they aren't free to hang out again until next Friday. He and Calvin are busy working out in the underground gym attached to their Airbnb. I tell myself that Calvin is probably trying hard to get that swim scholarship to Harvard. Nope, the fact that he doesn't spare a single second to chat with me after school doesn't mean he's ghosting me at all.

That Friday evening, I finally arrive home, and the idea of the lonely weekend ahead starts to scare me. I have way too much time to myself. About three days ago, I've moved out of the hotel and moved into one of my uncle's spare apartments in Nanjing Lu. The place is enormous but unfurnished, as he is too busy traveling for business to live there.

There are two giant balconies on opposite sides of the apartment, and I can see far and wide, from my floor, even to the Zara that is two blocks away. The wind is horrible when I open both balconies at once, but I guess that was useful to him because it probably airs the smoke out. As I learned by now, just about everyone here smokes, and I'm already used to it.

This place is enormous compared to my house back in New York. I decide to thank my uncle for his generosity by moving some of his wilting bamboo plants to a position by the window, and before I left for dinner, I even decided to try watering them. I can see the dim blue waters of an indoor swimming pool down below from where I am. Hardly anyone uses it. This building is probably full of investment property for overseas business people, so if I ever managed to find out how to get to the swimming pool, I could probably have it all to myself.