Katie Goh

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Foreign Fruit

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.