FOREIGN FRUIT

Goh uncovers the history of empires inside a ubiquitous fruit.

“I follow the orange because it offers a model for a hybrid existence and I, too, seek my own meaning in the world,” writes Goh in her multifaceted narration of citrus. She follows the history of the orange in research that spans continents, centuries, and legends. We learn of the orange’s mythic origins in China, the many Silk Roads that brought citrus to Europe, and the shorelines that European colonizers planted with the scurvy-defying fruits. Goh demonstrates how the history of the orange is a history of colonialism, a history of exoticism, and one of convenience. We learn of the bubonic plague, when orange peels were dried and used to mask the smell of sickness. In the 2020 pandemic, the author bought bags of oranges with gloved hands and a masked visage, the fruit distant from its origins, made clinical under fluorescent lights. Artfully interwoven in the narrative is Goh’s own history and that of her family. In rural China, the author meets her relatives, though they speak a dialect unknown to her. In Malaysia, she visits her aging grandmother and discovers pomelo orchards in the wake of tin extraction. And she writes of Ireland, the place of her upbringing and her mother’s family, where oranges are shipped across land and water to meet the desires of citrus-hungry consumers. “Per person, oranges are the most consumed fruit in the world,” she writes, and in these pages the fruit is seen across many essential parts of human history. Oranges expand into metaphors—the way we discuss family trees, hybridity, and naturalization are deconstructed, and their citrine trail reckoned with. Goh’s quest for self-knowledge mirrors the journey of citrus itself. In smart, engrossing prose, Goh teaches us as much about the fruits as about ourselves.

A brilliant history of the orange that, like citrus, defies classification.