I Missed Home at Starbucks

I was sitting at a Starbucks on Avenue du Parc in Montréal. It was my first winter away from home. Covered in heavy snow, the city looked particularly run-down and desperate in the northern cold. The climate, the language, the people—everything was foreign to me. But sitting in front of the green smiley siren, all of a sudden, I felt like I was home.

I realized I was being absurd. This wasn’t a place where you would normally miss home.

There is nothing Chinese about the chain brand that started off at Pike Place Market, Seattle, and grew into a global monopoly of caffeine supply. Nonetheless, there was a Starbucks down the street from my middle school in Guangzhou. Growing up, I went there from time to time. Some of my well-off schoolmates would go there every afternoon to do their homework, and one day, I followed them into their third place after school.

While we waited in line to order, a girl from my class whispered to me, “Starbucks tastes like sh*t.” Fearing I wouldn’t believe what she just said, she added, “I didn’t make this up—an Australian guy once told me.”

It was the same group of wealthy schoolmates who gossiped about our Chinese teacher wearing fake Louis Vuitton, when I barely even knew what Louis Vuitton was. Another classmate of mine once proudly told us a story about how her mom helped a Syrian lady who was said to have been abandoned by her husband: she saw her crying on the street and couldn’t speak Mandarin, so she took her to the nearest juweihui—the residents’ committee in China that deals with daily affairs in the neighborhood.

Over the years, we all ended up in different places, but mostly somewhere near a Starbucks store.

Last summer, I went back home after four years away. My uncle picked me up at the train station. I hadn’t seen him for more than a decade. The last time we were together, his son was merely a toddler, but standing on the platform, he was taller than me.

“His English is getting better than his Chinese,” my uncle complained to me. He sent his son to a school that teaches in English. “A kid from his school just moved to the UK and is already doing better than the Brits in English class.”

My uncle pushed his son to speak to me. “You can talk to him in English. Learn from your cousin so that one day you can get into a college like Yale.” The eighth grader turned back to his father, saying he wouldn’t want any of that.

Finally, my teenage cousin reluctantly squeezed out a few words from his mouth, with an impeccable American accent:

“Where is Yale?”

“It’s in New Haven,” I said.

“I don’t know where that is. I only know American cities that have NBA teams,” he answered back.

A moment of silence.

Then he continued, “Are there gay people at your school?”

“Of course,” I said.

He looked at me in some kind of astonishment. As if he was annoyed by my too-brief answers, he moved on to the next question:

“Is there racism in the United States?”

“Yes.” Trying to be the adult in the room, I added, “But that’s probably not a good question to ask when you first greet someone.”

“That’s what I saw on Instagram,” he said.

I told my uncle the things his son said were pointed. “We are democratic,” the father laughed. “Nothing is off limits in our family.”

Probably tired of the awkwardness, my cousin went on to watch One Piece on his phone. I didn’t know what to tell him. It was not my job to teach him, either. He has the whole world in front of him, and it is up to him to figure it all out. After all, I was about his age when my classmate first told me Starbucks tasted like sh*t. After all these years, I can confirm that it is mostly true. Starbucks does taste terrible. But despite all this, when in New Haven, I still go to the Starbucks on Chapel Street from time to time.