In 2023, a lychee tree over a thousand years old popped to life again after locals thought it was all but dead. In China’s Sichuan province, that tree was determined to have been planted in the Tang dynasty (618–901). This tree is about fifty feet tall—as tall as if sixteen giant pandas stood on each other’s shoulders. No one knows why it erupted, heavily dotted with fruit again, but the locals are thrilled. The last time it bore its fruit—with signature tough-red warty skin and a translucent milk-white dome of flesh inside the hard casing—was 2012.
What’s inside a lychee bounces us glimmer-glimmer and lusters lamplight into moonlight on our walls and floor. Sometimes I think heaven must be made of it—every window, chair, pale leaves juddering on every tree, every shimmered open door.
One of the most beloved concubines of Emperor Zhong had a penchant for the fruit. She adored it so, the emperor had couriers ride over twelve hundred miles to fetch some for her in the capital. No surprise, then, that the lychee, or “Chinese strawberry,” is a symbol of love and romance. Each fruit is about the size of a golf ball, but it can be oval or even heart-shaped too.
When I first met Joseph Legaspi and Sarah Gambito, Filipino writers close to my own age, they were on the cusp of forming Kundiman, an Asian American writing organization. One of their earliest ventures was a poetry reading series at the bar Verlaine in Manhattan, where the signature drink was a lychee martini. The lychee martini was cold and crisp, with a tart and light sweetness. It was the first time in my adulthood I heard the phrase “signature drink,” and that phrase signed itself in my heart. Even now, lychees and iced Nuoc Trai Vai drinks from Vietnamese restaurants always remind me of this friendship with Joseph and Sarah that I cherish with all my heart.
I lived in western New York in the early 2000s and this was before I was married with kids, so catching an eighty-eight-dollar flight to the city was fairly easy. I could go from Buffalo to JFK in just under an hour. I could go from being in a sea of small-town whiteness to another kind of family in the city, all of us tumbled and unattached in our twenties, but forming into gemstones I still treasure over two decades later. Instead of agate, jasper, lapis lazuli, sodalite, obsidian, quartz—I had Joseph, Sarah, Pat, Vikas, Lara, Oliver, Jon, Ron, and more.
Sometimes, I’d get a paper sack full of lychees from the Union Square Market and sit on a bench and shell them into a neat pile of red rinds. To open up a lychee, you can use your hands—the red exocarp will give way with a little pressure from your thumbnail. Once you’ve broken the skin, you can peel it away and pop the whole white syrupy aril into your mouth and chew lightly—be mindful of the almond-size dark seed at the center.
I’d carefully peel my lychees and watch the people in the city walk and rush by, people I thought had Very Important Lives to scurry home to. Where there might be a partner waiting, kids crawling to the door to greet them. All of which I didn’t have at the time, but I held so much hope in my small beating red heart that I might—one day. Maybe a house, two kids? Three? Maybe there would be space for a garden, enough to plant a small tree together, and we could say years later, I remember when we first planted this tree, our family was just beginning…
Oh, but I was a brand-new English professor then, and there didn’t seem to be any time or space or place for me in that teeny town to even whisper that dream aloud. But I still felt so lucky, so alive, during my visits—I had a sack of lychees, and I had sunshine in Union Square. In Washington Square some days. In Bryant Park some days. I had friends who made my heart leap. A different kind of family of Asian American writer pals, still growing, strengthening, all of us trying to make our way into the publishing world, eking out poems and sending them off to try and get published, slowly, but steadily. I still can’t fully explain how we all immediately felt like long-lost cousins who finally reunited in both the quiet and loud spaces among skyscrapers and subway lines. A few lychee martinis here and there. And loads and loads of laughter after various poetry readings in the city together. A different kind of treasure.
From Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Copyright © 2024 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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