Foreign Fruit

A Personal History of the Orange

By: Katie Goh

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, pock-marked and rind-covered fistfuls of flesh. I ate them all until my body ached.

The orange we know, waxed in vats, gathered in red netting and stacked in supermarket displays, is not the same orange that grew from the first straggling orange grove that took root on the Tibetan plateau, part pomelo and part mandarin. The orange is a souvenir of history. Across time, it has been a harbinger of God and doom, fortune and failure, pleasure and suffering. It is a fruit containing metaphors, dreams, mythologies, superstitions, parables and histories within its tough rind. So, what happens when the fruit is peeled and each segment - each moment of history, each meaning in time - is pulled apart?

In this distinct, subversive and intimate hybrid memoir, Katie Goh explores the orange as a means of understanding the world, and herself within it. What she finds is a world of violence, colonialism, resilience, survival, adaptation - and of unexpected beauty and sweetness against all odds. The orange's odyssey parallels Katie's search for her own heritage and, drawing on her family history as well as extensive travel and research, she follows it from east-to-west and west-to-east - from Longyan, China, to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur and the groves of California.

Foreign Fruit dissolves the boundaries between social history, self and object. It reminds us that sometimes the humblest object can be capable of changing our lives and highlights our responsibility for the ways in which we tell history. Above all, Foreign Fruit shows how we all change over time - migrating, diversifying, integrating and branching out - to remind us of our shared roots.

©2025 Katie Goh (P)2025 Canongate Books Ltd

Critic reviews

'Beautiful, visceral and powerful writing that speaks from the heart and to the heart. I could feel every word. A raw and fascinating book' (ANGELA HUI, author of TAKEAWAY)

'A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it' (KATHERINE MAY, author of WINTERING and ENCHANTMENT)

'Elusive, subverting the popular genre of the "history of things" in elegant ways, Katie Goh writes with as admirable a preciseness about self-othering as she does about botanical history' (JESSICA GAITÁN JOHANNESSON, author of THE NERVES AND THEIR ENDINGS and HOW WE ARE TRANSLATED)

'An encounter not only with the orange, but with the reality of diasporic life in hostile environments. Goh patiently and skilfully reinvents the orange as a means of inventing her identity [. . .] and what we're given is a story more surprising, potent, and various than we could ever have imagined' (AMY KEY, author of ISN'T FOREVER and ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE)

'I don't know anyone who wouldn't love this book. Airy and rooted, its style as beautiful as its investigations, this is the kind of book that holds in it the unexplored ecosophical inquiries of our time' (SUMANA ROY, author of HOW I BECAME A TREE)