“What’s your pleasure?” asked the barista, a young Asian-American woman with interesting piercings, tattoos in place of eyebrows, and a demeanor that blended I’m sooo interesting and this job sucks with I have a really cool secret life and this job is an awesome front. Her nametag read “Julie Lee: Professional 聪明的驴子•双簧管” (which I understood, roughly, as “Smart-ass Oboist”). We ordered drinks—Tristan, black coffee; myself, something I would never normally have, a complicated something-latte-something with lots of buzzwords I picked out at random from the menu over the bar, and which prompted a
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