Book Review

Early in Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange, Katie Goh describes a fanciful multi-citrus tree, a single trunk bearing limes, lemons, oranges, and grapefruits, “pink, green, orange, and yellow fruit—all different species and all thriving together.” Such trees can, and do, exist, and Goh conjures this one as an object lesson in the possibilities of grafting, one of many accessible scientific explanations in Foreign Fruit. The symbolism is unmissable though, especially for readers raised on boxes of “multicultural” Crayola crayons and United Colors of Benneton ads. Luckily for us, part of Goh’s aim with this hybrid memoir is to complicate familiar narratives of identity, and she does so ably by tracing her own lineage alongside that of the orange, a fruit with roots in Asia that has ridden the coattails of trade, science, and empire to conquer the world.

All oranges are cross-bred descendants of the wild pomelo and mandarin orange. Those two, along with the citron (it looks like a warty, thick-fleshed lemon), are the common ancestors of every citrus fruit you’ve ever tasted, from the tiny key lime to the ruby red grapefruit. Citrus hybridizes easily through cross-pollination, by insects or humans, and Goh uses this botanical fact—along with oranges’ colonial entanglements and recent commercialization into an interchangeable consumer product—to write a history of the orange that is also a nuanced exploration of origin, ethnicity, and identity.

Basing an entire book on an extended metaphor is risky, but Goh deftly sustains her chosen analogy by trusting her reader, opting for subtlety and sub-text whenever possible. A section about historic plagues has obvious parallels to COVID, which Goh wisely leaves implicit, allowing the connection to happen in the mind of her reader. She increases the resonance of certain historical episodes by reconstructing them in the present tense, a choice that—along with a richness of detail born of deep research—lends the scenes a startling aliveness. I got chills reading her account of the famine that followed Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” when totalitarian hubris caused crop failures so drastic that birds and mice disappeared from villages, and farmers “dug up the seeds from the earth to eat raw.” Equally harrowing is the account of an 1871 massacre in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, a night of deadly terror Goh conjures with spare, painful details: “Makeshift gallows are created from a wooden awning and a covered wagon,” she writes, “A local landlady cuts down her clothesline to make a rope.”

Goh tells these stories as a way of investigating her own multiple identities. “I grew up mixed race,” she explains in the prologue, “Chinese and white, in the north of Ireland, a place that was 99 percent white when I attended primary school.” This otherness—and the demands of the quickly evolving blogsphere, with its infinite appetite for personal essays—proved to be Goh’s ticket into journalism, and she penned dozens of articles drawing on her various identities. “It was the early 2010s,” she tells us, “and people who suffered systemic, political, cultural violence—namely, people of color, women, queer people—were being encouraged to write their pain away.” Over time, Goh built a flourishing career as a culture writer, with bylines in Vice, The Guardian, and others, and her style of deep-dive, rapid-fire reportage—her articles deliver the information density of an encyclopedia in the swooping cadence of the social media-era internet—suffuses Foreign Fruit, which is readable as a listicle and conversational as a coffee date.

Trading on your identity can be flattening, though, and her career was already feeling extractive when she got an email in March, 2021, requesting an 800-word response to the mass murder of six Asian women in Atlanta, by noon. “Write it from your perspective,” the unnamed editor urged.

Goh balked: “There is only so much pain you can exchange for capital until each transaction is violence in itself.” Instead of filing another reflexive response to the attack, Goh began researching and writing Foreign Fruit, bringing nuance and deep thought to questions of what it means to be foreign, and what it means to belong.

Foreign Fruit is organized roughly geographically: Each of the book’s seven chapters is given a topographic title and focal point, from Goh’s ancestral Chinese village of Longyan to the commercial citrus groves of Southern California. Each region illuminates a step in the orange’s worldwide dispersal, while also anchoring thematic philosophical explorations. In Longyan, we are introduced to the “inherent nature” of citrus—“its promiscuity, its spontaneity, its instability”—that make it such a potent metaphor. The early history of citrus hybridization is blurry, Goh tells us, and “DNA is unable to offer neat distinctions among indigenous, naturalized, and mutated species.” Drawing lines isn’t easy, around fruit or people.

In Vienna, Goh visits an orangerie and contemplates naturalization. In Holland, she considers authenticity and inauthenticity, and when the latter becomes “something new and hybrid and delightful,” as in Dutch copies of Chinese ceramics and the Malaysian curry her father makes from the leftovers of a roast dinner. The story is packed with such tactile images, from the tin, rubber, and nutmeg traded alongside oranges to countless works of orange-adjacent art and literature: Florentine frescos, Dutch still lifes, and “The Land of Sad Oranges” by Ghassan Kanafani. Goh’s language is often visceral and sensuous, whether she’s describing a meal of “salty bean sprouts, bowls of slippery hor fun, [and] spoonfuls of wobbly caramel custard” or the symptoms of scurvy: “once-healed wounds weep and the stench of decay emanates from still-living souls.”

In addition to traveling to the book’s major locales, Goh conducted extensive academic research (the bibliography stretches to ten pages), and her narration moves smoothly, and at well-timed intervals, from first-person and intimate to factual and historical. Recurring characters include aunts, grandparents, and Joseph Stalin, who tried confidently—on the advice of Soviet scientists—to force citrus trees to “acclimate” to winter temperatures. This is also, of course, a metaphor, and the next chapter opens with a scene of Goh deplaning in hot, humid Kuala Lumpur, “back in the climate I was never quite prepared for.”

Origin, nature, and history all matter, Goh’s carefully chosen anecdotes affirm; it’s attempts to flatten, label, and classify a complex web of influences that leads us astray. At one point, Goh takes a DNA test and is inexplicably (by her own admission) disappointed in the perfect 50-50 split of her results: half Southern Chinese, half British and Irish. “I could have told you that for free,” her father quips, but it’s not the results themselves that bother her. Boiling things down to genetics “untangles messy webs of histories, stories, and journeys into neat percentages and pie charts,” and Goh is the first to admit that the book comes to no conclusion.

Despite this resistance to easy resolution, Foreign Fruit feels whole. Progressing from accidental cross-pollination by ancient insects to scientific cultivation in a high-tech enclosure at UC Riverside left me with a sense of chronological completion, while each animating question is explored with a satisfying thoroughness. “I wished to hold variousness in my own skin and exist as all the incorrigible things I am at once,” Goh writes in the prologue, “not peeled and portioned out and made palatable for someone else’s appetite. I sought my own meaning, expressed how I see fit.” In her effort to write beyond the identity-based narrative expected of her, Goh has discovered much about both herself and the world that is worth sharing.