Katie Goh’s Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange begins with an unusual childhood obsession with oranges.
At Chinese restaurants, which serve meals with oranges as a lucky and healthy bit of sweetness, Goh would eat these with flourish:
“My uncles chuckled and called me a wee beast as I tossed triangles of rind on the table. As I grew older, I learned that eating food with savage gluttony quickly ages out of being cute. With the self-preservation of a Victorian lady, I restricted my orange eating to a meal for one, a private pleasure to relish behind closed doors.”
Goh was born of an Irish mother and a Malaysian Chinese father. She grew up in Ireland. Both her parents worked in health care. She was othered by her peers and uncomfortable in her skin. She lived as “part person and part shadow” while hankering to belong socially. She explains:
“I understood that the curtailment of self was paramount for survival. I was privileged—I could pass for white from afar—and so, if I remained vigilant about how I presented myself in public, I could fade into the background. I learned to quiet down, to avoid being recognized as different. I became secretive, refusing to give myself up to even my closest friends.”
She looked to the East for her muse and perhaps for her identity. She identifies as “hybrid,” not only racially and culturally and lingually but also in other dimensions, like gender. During the early years of the pandemic (2020 onward), she was living with her parents and cut loose from a writing career. She was unmoored by the pressures of the pandemic and at loose ends. Then, with a tragic shooting of a group of Asian women in Georgia in 2021, Goh’s multiple obsessions solidified. In the prologue, she writes:
“The morning after a white man murdered six Asian women, I ate five oranges. They were not dainty tangerines or pretty satsumas or festive clementines. These were unwieldy, bulging oranges, pockmarked and rind-covered fistfuls of flesh. I ate them all until my body ached.”
She took some three years to study the history of oranges and found insights about human migrations and adaptations and about her own self. This is the core premise of Foreign Fruit.
She introduces citrus as originating from three species: the citron, the pomelo, and the mandarin orange. All other citrus hybrids emerge from those species: “sour orange from mandarin orange and pomelo, lemon from citron and sour orange, and grapefruit from pomelo and sweet orange.” She writes:
“Citrus is fruit that freely betrays. Plant a seed from an orange and any of the fifteen hundred species of the Rutaceae family, commonly called the citrus family, could grow from its burial place. Citrus trees have a promiscuous tendency to breed across varieties—both spontaneously, through cross-pollination in the grove, and by design, in the laboratory.”
To control for the emergent fruit, growers of citrus use a grafting method to enable more predictability. Her studies into oranges writ large provide her with a sense of analogical comparison — a grafted citrus tree bearing various mixed fruits compared with a human family tree with family lineages, diversities, and connections, not only through marriage and children and bloodlines and genetics, but also through adoption and other connections. She writes:
“The branching tree has become our model for tracing family lineage and bloodlines, yet grafting complicates the myth of a single stable tree, a single consistent species, and a single extractable fruit. The grafted citrus branch with its hanging oranges, lemons, and limes is an amusing—and astounding—sight, but it also offers a cornucopia of endless possibilities, a tribute to the variousness of nature.”
This work summarizes the author’s trip to visit family in Longyan, China, when she was 17; a visit to an ailing relative in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as a young adult; and then a trip to sites of citrus farming in California.
In her trip to Longyan, she finds that the hometown of her family does not necessarily resonate. She does not have the language skills. She does not know the characters for her Chinese name. She is shaken to her core when she realizes that time is moving quickly for her family:
“My father’s generation will be the last of our Malaysian family to speak Longyan. Uncle Boon’s sons, my cousins, had been raised in Singapore and learned mandatory Mandarin in school. My brothers and I knew no Chinese languages. When our father and aunts and uncles died, there would be no one left who remembered Longyan. Our family’s connection to the language and the village would sever as future generations branched farther and farther away from this place that we came from.”
Where her European identity leaves her wanting, so, too, does her Chinese half. The narrative threads of Foreign Fruit are both her travels and insights — and then the travels of the orange as a traded commodity along the “Silk Roads” (plural) of ancient trade routes of the Far East, Middle East, and Europe. Trade brings together mixes of people to share goods and exchanges, but also ideas, religious practices, human genetics, languages, and contagious diseases (and resulting pandemics). These interchanges have resulted in multicultural hubs along the way in Asia, Europe, and Africa. They have resulted in the mixing of native and foreign.
Foreign Fruit elevates a fruit that is seen as perhaps common and mundane in the West. Yet, it has carried with it a vaunted and glorious past, with mythmaking built around oranges in some of the world’s main religions (Christianity, Islam), artworks, still-life paintings, and writing. Intertwined in that history are acts of human violence against others in competition for resources. She writes of the competition for spice from tropical trees (for nutmeg and mace) from the East:
“When the Bandanese people break their contract for exclusive trading with the VOC, the Dutch Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen lands on the islands with over a thousand soldiers and eradicates the native population. In the largest massacre in the VOC’s history, the army kills, enslaves, and forcibly deports fifteen thousand of the island’s inhabitants. A small fruit’s seed has become one of the most lucrative products in global trade, and the island society which has cultivated its trees for centuries is obliterated in the race to own the means of production.”
Learning about the past is no reprieve from violence in the present, Goh finds. While she had thought about alternative lives for herself had relatives not gone abroad to make new lives, she concludes that a critical relative would not likely have survived Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, in which tens of millions of Chinese starved.
She brings a thread of skepticism about governments and their decision-making through various examples, such as the destruction of food crops by the state of California to protect agricultural markets during the Great Depression.
This book is engaging and highly readable. It is written with candor and sharp analytics. It is peopled by fascinating characters from history (a king so enamored of porcelain that he collected some 35,000 pieces over his lifetime, for example) and potent events that speak of a complex past for humanity. Ideas and practices (like eugenics, like job protectionism, like violent expression) echo between continents. Even centuries ago, globalized trade already enabled so many imported foreign goods to be understood as local, as part of daily life in Europe, as today. At its conclusion, what the world is and who people are, through time, no longer surprises but does disappoint.
Katie Goh is a writer living in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
