Lychee love

In the late nineties I lived in Miami . One of the things I loved the most about hat city is how I gathered Lychee fruits from the front sidewalks of houses that grew them but did not know how good they were. The trees would droop over the sides of fences and drop their fruit on the hard concrete without anyone taking notice. I had certain neighborhoods where I knew there would be dozens of the juicy red fruit laying on the sidewalk. No one was fighting for them; no one was waking up early to get the choicest selection. They would all just lay there, only the ants taking notice. Some of them were crushed by foot traffic, but not many since Miami is such a driving city that few neighborhoods have sidewalks. The Lychees were so good, fresh and sun warmed; the sweet juice bursting as you puncture the bumpy red husks.
Sometimes if I wanted more than just a few dozen I would go to this older Cuban lady that sold them in the front of her house off a table like lemonade. She sold them for a dollar a pound, and she used the term loosely, really it was a huge sack weighing three or more pounds for $2.00. It was such a good deal. This is before they exploded in popularity and before they were so well known. At that time nobody in Miami was using them in Martinis or really in anything else. This is when you could really only find them canned. There was no large Asian or Asian American population to take advantage of the bounty so the old Cuban lady always had plenty. The Coco Frio guys and the people selling mangoes were much more popular and would always sell out in the summer months. I miss having such incredible access to fresh Lychees. They are so hard to find and so expensive when you do find them. Now that Lychees are so well known and popular I wonder if the Cuban lady is still there. I wonder how much she is charging for those overstuffed bags. I think no matter what she is charging I would seriously consider paying it.
I was reminded of my Lychee love because an odd and disconcerting thing happened to me yesterday. I was in Capogiro ordering Lychee Gelato at the 20th street location. Jeannie had alerted me to the fact they would have it there. It was very urgent that I try it and order a pint if it was good. I asked for a taste and pronounced it LYE- CHEE as in lye or dye. These two women were there deciding what to order and one of them asks the other “what is that LYE- CHEE thing he is asking for?” “It’s a fruit from Asia that is very delicious, but actually it is pronounced LEE-CHEE”, She said. She pronounced as in fee or me. At this point I looked over, I saw that the woman who was saying this loud enough so anyone within twenty feet could hear was East Asian-American. I was mortified. I started to question myself about whether I was pronouncing like a jerk. I felt like everyone in the place thought I just picked it up the pronunciation at some white imperialist conference or something. I know that I had heard other people Asian, Asian-American and others pronounce it LYE-CHEE. My mother in law who is Cantonese from Hong Kong pronounces it LYE-CHEE. But this woman spoke with authority on the subject like some sort of cultural tour guide correcting the ignorant tongues of foreigners. So what was I going to say? Was I going to argue the point about a part of her culture as though I was some expert? Was I going to question her cultural knowledge based on my unclear recollection? Was I imagining my memories of the pronunciation to back up my own mis-pronouncement? I remained quiet, trying to shrink inside my clothes. My friend who was with me ordered Lychee and pronounced it LEE-CHEE, just as this woman had done. The woman behind the counter also said LEE-CHEE afterwards. I was so dumbstruck that when I was ordering a second cone of Lychee for myself, I just pointed to the flavor ashamed to say the name. “The same flavor, Lychee?” the woman behind the counter asked. I nodded sheepishly, worried that I would be forced to pronounce it again and choose a pronunciation. I felt awful the whole way home.
When I related the story to Jeannie, subsequently did research online. She called her Mom to see how it was pronounced. It was LYE-CHEE. The fruit originates in South China, in the Guangdong, where Cantonese is the dominant language. In Cantonese Lychee is pronounced LYE-CHEE. In Mandarin however it is pronounced LEE-CHEE. I am not saying that I was more right than she was. I think both pronunciations are right in context, but I didn’t like feeling like a heel because she wanted to assert her cultural knowledge on an outsider even though in this case her knowledge was incomplete.
So for the record if you want to pronounce Lychee in its language of origin- Cantonese, you would pronounce it LYE-CHEE, if you want to pronounce it in Mandarin and possibly other languages, it would be LEE-CHEE, and if you want to switch back and forth depending on your mood then they are both right.