Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh
In their debut memoir, Edinburgh-based writer Katie Goh traces the history of the orange alongside their own story of migration and identity
Katie Goh’s debut memoir examines the decades and centuries of migration that have blown both the orange and their family across the globe, exploring the effects of capitalism on an everyday table item, forced to grow plump and colourful in metric tonnes to meet global demands.
Goh traces the lineage of the orange – a once great signifier of wealth, reduced to a supermarket staple – alongside their own family tree, following their Chinese-Malaysian and Irish roots and the ways it parallels their relationship with the orange. Foreign Fruit unpacks themes of colonialism and AAPI violence, and how their experience growing up queer and ethnically diverse in the north of Ireland alienated them from their peers. Goh uses the repercussions of these seismic events across the globe to examine their own feelings of otherness and confusion, differences exacerbated by language, time and culture within a single family.
This hybrid memoir blends familial, personal and national histories, pulling apart segments of the past and small bursts of information; facts about the diaspora of the orange are sprinkled in, such as the ways in which Victorian women were expected to retire to private rooms when consuming oranges due to their perceived impropriety. Goh’s writing is careful and sharp. Like themselves, they argue, oranges are the byproduct of generations of adjustment and displacement. Foreign Fruit is a bold work which dissects topical issues from a thoughtful and personal space.
