, During the Lunar New Year of 1988, Selena Wong wanted to create a special dessert for her family in Kingston, Jamaica. Wong, whose ancestors came to the island from China in the 19th century, was a self-taught baker who occasionally sold goods from her home. Knowing the importance of lychees to the Chinese Jamaican experience, she made a light sponge cake that featured the canned lychees and their syrup.
“I was riffing on the idea of strawberry shortcake, which has always been popular in Jamaica, even though strawberries aren’t native to us,” she said. Her creation, which she simply called “lychee cake,” was a hit with her family, and, within a few years, a national obsession was born. The cake has become one of Jamaica’s most popular desserts, sold in grocery stores and pastry shops and by home bakers.
It has even emigrated from Jamaica to become a cultural staple in cities with large Jamaican American enclaves, like Miami. In the United States, lychee cake remains very much the bailiwick of Caribbean home bakers. In 1978, Kay Chen, 84, emigrated from Jamaica to Miami to operate a Blockbuster video franchise.
Before that, Chen, also a descendant of late-19th-century Chinese immigrants to Jamaica, was a seamstress, flower arranger, beautician, nightclub owner, restaurateur and beauty queen, crowned Miss Chinese Jamaica in the 1950s. But, like many Caribbean women, she turned to baking for family and friends for extra money, making a variety of desserts — black.