Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange

by Katie Goh

WINNER OF SCOTLAND'S NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS FOR DEBUT NON-FICTION

'A bold new voice' IRISH TIMES
'Visceral . . . I could feel every word' ANGELA HUI
'Thoughtful, poetic and clear-sighted' CECILE PIN

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 reveals is violence, colonialism, resilience, survival, adaptation – and unexpected beauty and sweetness against all odds.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Food, History, LGBT, Audiobook, Queer

254 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 6, 2025

Reviews

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship]

Okay, so I am in a bit of a book slump right now, and also realizing what proportion of the books I have completed this year I should have DNF’d (24%) and what proportion of the ones I did DNF should’ve been sooner (58%), hence calling this at page 42 (it does hit the 20% mark however, being only 201 pages long) despite being the sort of literary memoir I tend to like. The author’s background, growing up mixed-race in Northern Ireland, is pretty interesting, and she seems to have put a lot of thought into her writing, but then she focuses in on the most boring stuff (highly detailed scenes of eating oranges, sketching oranges, etc.).

The other part of the book is what seems like a pretty superficial history of oranges, and while I’m all for mixing memoir and nonfiction, the symbolic connection between oranges and her family history seems a bit belabored. Also, a lot of the history she appears to have made up (!!), writing in great detail imaginary scenes of the pollination of the first orange, the creation of the clementine, etc. Inserting fiction into supposed nonfiction is a big no-thanks from me.

[Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I read this pretty harshly because the author's life so closely mirrors mine (Southern Chinese great-grandparents who fled to British Malaya -> Malaysian Chinese father who moved out west for school and remained -> halfie daughter who doesn't speak Mandarin, the familial dialect, nor Malay yet wished for some unspoken, innate connection to her heritage because she grew up feeling othered), so I felt I had license to nitpick excessively. The author also made the unfortunate choice of making all the short stories have to tie into oranges as a theme. Her explanations of plant genetics are mostly accurate, save for the occasional moments where she is confidently mistaken in the way of someone who has listened to a lot of experts and thinks they have understood. Honestly, I harbored some unacknowledged determination to dislike to book after I read the prologue, but after having finished the whole thing, I have to say it still resonated with me despite that.

From reading the prologue, I thought we were going to have another variation upon the theme of "kids made fun of how my lunch smelled" kind of Asian author writing that I find very, very tiresome. It's important for that story to be told (and it certainly has been, repeatedly), but it does little for me, personally. I never desired to be white, I never felt shamed for being Asian, and I never felt alone in my identity; never mind there being many Asian classmates, there were specifically many half-Asian classmates I had as well, each of varied and unique heritages. If anything, all the second generation kids I went to school with had an almost performative pride in being Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, etc. which I think covered for the fact that many of us could not speak our heritage languages very well or at all and had various other markers of being Americanized (gross!). So that particular kind of extreme self-consciousness I see in many modern Asian authors in the Anglosphere and the hard-won pride that they develop later in life is an issue of another generation, or at least of other places that are far more racially homogeneous.

By far, the short story that left the greatest impression on me was the Longyan chapter. My brother and I had always wanted to plan a trip to China for my dad to celebrate his sixtieth birthday and see our ancestral home in Guangdong, which went out the window due to precautions about Covid, postponed to a retirement that never came. But my dad seemed surprisingly unenthusiastic about it, despite his incessant consumption of Chinese news and Chinese vloggers on YouTube showing the many delights of China to the world. I wonder if it was to preempt any potential disappointment or sense of non-belonging. He prided himself so much on being Chinese that I think China being a foreign land might have been hard.

"They're amazed we still know their dialect." My uncle Bob nudged me with his elbow. "They think we would have forgotten it by know."
...
My father's generation will be the last of our Malaysian family to speak Longyan. Uncle Boon's sons, my cousins, had been raised in Singapore and learned mandatory Mandarin in school. My brothers and I knew no Chinese languages. When our father and aunts and uncles died, there would be no one left who remembered Longyan. Our family's connection to the language and the village would sever as future generations branched farther and farther away from this place that we came from. (31)

My own family speaks Teochew. More accurately, my aunts and uncles speak it, and I doubt any of my Malaysian cousins do. And as the author points out, fewer and fewer people in mainland China speak dialects too, as a result of Mandarin being taught in schools. But even if that weren't the case, I think the severing began long before then. Once, when my dad said he missed hearing Teochew, I found some videos of Teochew theater performances. I remember sitting and watching him expectantly, and after a moment, he said that this Teochew was different, maybe from another village or something. Or maybe from another time; my family left China in the 1910s. That's a lot of time for vocabulary to diverge. Even with Mandarin, which is in no danger of fading out, I saw the temporal dislocation my dad experienced. When he left Malaysia in the late '80s, he had never seen a computer. In his absence, so many terms had been invented or changed, and when he first started listening to Chinese news a few years ago, I think he struggled a bit. Even for my dad, born and raised in Malacca, there was no returning to the Malaysia to which he belonged.

Mythology is born from a desire for belonging. The history that I inherited as a child left me desperate for an origin story, something that could redeem my foreignness, my attempted assimilation, my un-belonging. I thought that journeying to my family's ancestral village in Fujian would give me a story, one that was neat and arching, that could show me a way to move forward. But my attempt to graft the past and future failed. As I left Longyan, I couldn't skirt my disappointment in finding myself a stranger in my ancestor's land. The story I had told myself--one of fantasy, one of a tulou, one of an authentic self--fell away as southern China disappeared out the window... It was not simply language or geographical distance that made me a stranger in the village. History had been severed somewhere. I had thought the roots would be waiting for me, but time passes, wounds heal over, weeds grow. My dream of a homecoming was a mythology I had inherited from the remnants of empire. (41)

Certainly, I have felt a lack of belonging that the author describes so accurately, and when I was young, I also fantasized about finding somewhere where I could experience the same thoughtless, automatic belonging that I saw white Americans glide through the world with. And to do that, I felt I had to declare myself not American, at least not culturally since, obviously, that's my nationality. But now I think it's ridiculous to claim that I'm not American, and to reject my American-ness just reinforces that what we really mean when we say American is WASP. At the same time, this is an admission to the estrangement you experience with your own family, and it's sad and you want to resist it but it's true. It's that quiet moment that Goh shares with her great-grandmother in Longyan: "We then left and stepped up and out of the room to join our family of strangers." (33)

At some point, it feels maybe even insulting to pretend that I am, really, just the same as my cousins who grew up in Malaysia or Argentina. As if as on visits I wouldn't have to trail after older relatives who speak English to translate for me, never directly interfacing with anything in the country that wasn't my family. I couldn't give your a detailed overview of the histories of these countries, nor tell you who governs the provinces where my family lives. The GDP per capita of the US is about $89,000. Ireland's is $134,000. Malaysia's is ~$49,500, and Argentina's is $31,400. Of course we didn't grow up the same as our cousins. Sure, to an average Irishman or the average American, we might be acceptably Malaysian, but to a born-and-raised Malaysian, are we Malaysian? No. In all this talk about assimilating or not assimilating, it seems obvious to me as an adult now that we've already become American or Irish enough to be foreign to our families. The game has already been lost, or won, depending on how you view it.

Authenticity is prized high in culture. We want "authentic" food, "authentic" travel, and "authentic" experiences. "Authentic" may as well be synonymous with "real." But authenticity is a nebulous quality. As the Silk Roads taught us, societies have been exchanging food, ideas, religions, and genetics for thousands of years. I wonder when an inauthentic creation becomes a style in its own right. (82)

Given that the whole book is musings upon hybrids, I found it curious that in her book about family history, the author never really delves into her mother's side and her Irish roots. She mentions that part of the reason her parents stayed in Ireland to stay closer to her mother's parents, but that set of grandparents features not at all in the book. It feels like that kind of studied determination to not belong, to insist upon your own foreignness that I felt as a teenager. In fact, the author has plenty of roots in Ireland, but I guess they don't merit discussion. Why are we still playing this game? I don't know, maybe it's different in Ireland, given its history is more one of emigration than immigration. I don't know if becoming Irish is patriotic mythology in the way that becoming American is.

But besides that, I did like her interrogation of what authenticity means and what its value is. There is no one original culture to which all things hearken back, and it's only "exotic" cultures that we maintain the expectation of authenticity for. It's fine for Europe and the US to hurtle into modernity, but we want everyone else to remain in quaint, unchanging antiquity, often out of concern that western culture is steamrolling everyone else into homogeneity. That may often be the case, but I wonder how much of it is other places simply incorporating new innovations into their own culture.

Anyways, I've already spent much too long psychoanalyzing myself by proxy of this author. It's a pretty decent book.

[Ming · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed that this book traces the history of the modern orange. The origin of the orange is found in China and specifically in its parents: the pomelo and the mandarin orange. (In fact, all modern citrus is the result of bioengineering. The origin of lemons is citron and sour orange, and grapefruits is pomelo and sweet orange.)

The book also has a somewhat parallel but thankfully shorter glimpse at the biracial Malaysian-Irish author’s background. This is much less interesting than the orange. Her family’s movement is mildly intriguing but I don’t see how it compares to the orange. Moreover, there’s no substantive connection or link, other than the obvious and simplistic China origin. I feel the author made quite the reach to associate her family story with an orange’s. I think she needs to meet more biracial or bicultural Asians of all sorts; then she’ll see that her family’s story is not so unique or emblematic.

The book would have benefited from some tighter editing. Several facts or pieces of information were needlessly repeated, e.g., the author eating 5 oranges when she learned about the Asian women who were shot in Atlanta was told three times (or was it four?)

I appreciated her take on colonialism and capitalism. I could have easily enjoyed the orange’s story alone.

Quotes:

The complexity of Britain’s history had been polished into a tale of empire, royalty, and greatness that was taken as truth. It was a myth so shiny, it blinded.

In the eighteenth century, religion justifies science, which justifies commerce, which justifies colonialism, which justifies violence. It is this cycle of ideology that establishes European dominance in the modern world.

There is a long unspoken history that comes before a society can describe itself as multicultural or diverse or a melting pot. For Britain, this a is a history of violence; of people abducted, displaced, and dispersed.

California’s citrus paradise is a paradise of prejudice.

People of colour are confronted with our history every time we step across the threshold to enter the public world. Our bodies are read like books, to be interpreted, judged, and evaluated.


Thanks to Tin House Books and Net Galley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Denise Ruttan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a goal to read more nonfiction this year and I was pleasantly surprised by Foreign Fruit. It was compulsively readable, impeccably reported narrative nonfiction in the style of Seabiscuit or Erik Larson. This book tackled ambitious, far-reaching themes but what brought it down to earth and made it unique was the connective tissue of the deeply personal memoir interspersed with social and cultural history, anthropology, and the ugly legacy of colonialism. It never felt like a lecture because it was interwoven with an intriguing personal story that made me feel emotionally connected to the orange on a personal level.

Katie Goh is a queer, Malaysian-Chinese-Irish journalist who is assigned a story to write about the murder of 11 Asian-Americans at a dance studio in 2023 at a time of rising hate against AAPI folks in the wake of the pandemic. She's asked to write about it from her personal perspective as an Asian-American. She turns down the assignment as she contemplates the violent deaths of six women while staring at five oranges in a bowl. Seeing connections, she turns instead to putting her thoughts in this book, a far-reaching history of the orange that was far more compelling and riveting than I had expected.

The author writes with that distinct journalistic style of objective, impersonal observation of events so I expected this to be a dry retelling of facts, and in parts it was that and could read like an encyclopedia entry as she recited historical accounts. But this narrative is anything but objective. Though the connections between her personal history were loose, this book really shone and read like a novel as Goh examines her inner conflict between standing between two worlds and not knowing which is home and in which place she is a tourist, what belonging means to someone whose identity is enmeshed in liminal spaces in all respects. Like the hybrid history of the orange, a foreign citrus brought to strange lands by colonizers, Goh too lives in the spaces in between cultures as she seeks to find herself and where her personal history fits.

I related to her experiences and emotional reaction to life under covid lockdown because that was my experience and anxieties as well.

For a book that focused such a large piece on the author's personal history, I had hoped for more illumination about her queerness and how that intersected with her cultural identity and her feeling of being trapped in liminal spaces. But it was barely a sentence or two. The author's personal memoir focused instead on her connections with her family and grandmothers, and her journey toward self-acceptance of her mixed-race ethnic identity as she learned about the history of Britain not taught in schools through the lens of the orange.

From California, to Malaysia, to China and the Silk Road, and back to Ireland, this book covered a wide range of topics. Almost too wide to touch deeply on any one of them. I appreciated how the author wove her doubt about her ability to pull it off in the narrative and this got me on her side. It worked best when interspersed with Goh's personal history and turning on its head the journalism faux pas of making yourself the subject of the story.

Because of this book I am now longing for the sweet dribble of fresh citrus, and I will also be thinking of the blood, history and pain that you don't see on the supermarket shelves when you reach for a rich globule of tempting orange fruit with a fascinating and disturbing history.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[freyttsie · Rating 3 out of 5]

a queer, Malaysian-Chinese-Irish journalist’s personal exploration of her mixed-race identity, braided into an ambitious collection of topics: botanical history, anthropology, colonialism, AAPI violence, to name a few. while i thought some sections of the book reached too broadly for me to feel the author’s personal connection to it (which is precisely what i crave in a memoir), i will say there were a handful of really electrifying and beautifully written chapters that gave me lots to think about and will stay with me for a long, long time

thank you to net galley and the publisher for my advanced copy 🍊

[J. Z. Kelley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written meditation on diaspora, the Covid lockdowns and the concurrent rise in anti-Asian violence, identity, family, and belonging.

It also happens to have some really neat orange facts. Did you know Victorian ladies would retire alone to their private rooms to eat their oranges because their juiciness made them seem obscene? I did not and now I do!

I especially liked the passages where Goh wrote about her relationships with her family and with white editors and readers who looked to her for easily digestible narratives of Asian womanhood. They felt intimate and timely in the way that talking about your childhood in therapy is timely

Unfortunately, this book didn’t come together as a whole for me the way I had hoped. The author’s use of oranges as an organizing metaphor felt like the kind of device that would have worked much better in a shorter piece. It felt increasingly strained as the work went on, the similarities between oranges and the author’s autobiography too tenuous. (But I am literal to a fault. You may well disagree!)

I think this book will appeal most to the kind of reader who picks up fiction set in the past or in a foreign-to-them country in order to learn something, who is more interested in character and theme than plot, and who prefers a more literary than conversational authorial voice.

Thank you to the publisher for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

[ritareadthat · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Very history heavy, could be dry at times. I did like the author's incorporation of her personal history.

[alicia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a hard one to rate. It could potentially be rounded up to 3 but it didn't quite hit. I couldn't quite tell if it was meant to primarily be a memoir or a history of the orange. It jumped back and forth between the two often so much so that it was quite jarring. It also mentioned some of the COVID-times AAPI hate crimes but with no real message or commentary. The text was also quite simile-heavy, which took away from the overall book.

[Syd Linders · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a lot longer to finish this book than I expected, given that its only ~200 pages. The subject material is dense and it really made me think. I drank so much orange juice in the course of reading, I would pour myself a big glass and read until I'd finished the glass. Then I'd sit back and think about all I'd read for hours. (It was from concentrate, forgive me, who can afford fresh in this economy.)

Goh's voice and prose is distinctly fresh, clear, and relatable. Her desire to learn where she's come from and feel like she belongs is one that most can relate to. With this relatability, you can feel the disdain for the machine that created our world, that has become our world. Because that's what Goh wants to make clear is the history of the orange: it is a history of violence and subjugation wrapped in a sunny peel. We may enjoy the end result, but that shouldn't change our opinion on what the orange is.

I've read a number of these kind of books that focus on the history of a single thing and how it got here and I must say that Foreign Fruit is the best of them. I think this is because Goh has firmly rooted the story in its context (or, at least, as much as can fit in 200 pages, and even then, she really gets it in there.) She describes how oranges and citrus fruit work, how they are malleable and finnicky to grow, and yet capitalism hammers it into a shape that makes sense to pump out metric tonnes of every day. In the prologue, she describes how she too fit herself into a shape that she could profit off of with her writing and how she is not doing that anymore.

I realize that it probably wouldn't have fit into the book, but I kind of wish she had included something about Anita Bryant's moral crusade against gays and her connection with orange juice and oranges in America. And how the gays used the tactics learned protesting against her to then go on to protest the AIDS crisis. But I understand that isn't necessarily under this book's purview.

Bonus - My personal history of the orange: I am a pretty picky eater (I blame the Autism as taste seems to be the sense that the 'Tism chose to curse) and I didn't like oranges or even orange juice as a kid. I don't really even know why, I think it was the rind and the pips that would get stuck in my teeth. But I loved lemons and limes, so I don't know what was up with little Syd. I started drinking orange juice in College when I realized its utility in alcoholic drinks, mostly Fuzzy Navels which is still my preferred cocktail. (I had a couple of those while reading this too.) But only started drinking it on its own while I was working in fast food in the way that you kind of end up trying everything you serve if you end up working at one place long enough. And I really liked it. I've bought an orange for the first time in my life (and a grapefuit), wanting to try something new.

Thank you to Tin House Books for the ARC. I received the book in advanced upon request and have given my honest review of it.

[Juliet · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tenderly told and insightful reflection on provenance, heritage, belonging and identity. Katie Goh seamlessly weaves memoir with social and historical analysis to create a thought-provoking book.

[Mei · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not really my cup of tea but I feel bad about that. It was quite the narrative feat she attempted and almost felt like not enough of either personal memoir or actual deep history of the orange. A lot of breadth, not much depth. I never felt like I really got to Know anyone or anything.

[Mari · Rating 4 out of 5]

biracial identity and oranges is a combo I never saw coming. loved how she talked about her experiences w/ current events, related them to her background and how she grew up, and her travels to her ancestral home. really enlightening book and I could tell she did a lot of research on it!! the one star off is cause I wish she had photos in the book like PLEASEEEEEEE

[amna m · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up. read (listened) for DEI book club at work :P audiobooks are hard for me sometimes because i feel very influenced to like/dislike the book based on the quality of the audiobook. in this case the author narrated the book themself, which i typically prefer, but honestly i didn’t love their narration :/

[Amy T · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy a memoir that is a page-turner that you can’t put down. Foreign Fruit accomplishes that and more. Katie Goh finds a way to weave the truths of cultures, society and colonialism beautifully. She simultaneously shares emotionally raw and vulnerable stories that make you feel that you’re living along side her throughout her journey.

I enjoyed her history and her story, but as a queer-Asian author, I had hoped she may weave more of her gender identity into her story. Nonetheless, a book worth picking up in 2025 if you enjoy memoirs.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC, I’m leaving this review voluntarily.

[Maddie Mcphail · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally deciding to DNF at around 70%.

When I picked this up I thought it was going to be a historical look on the orange and how it has propelled mankind via delicious juice and pulp. However, this was more of a personal history of the author as she struggles with her identity and family history.

While autobiography can be interesting, I found the comparisons from author to orange lacking on all fronts and drawn together by extremely thin lines. There was no juice left to squeeze and the author’s takes were not refreshing by any measure. (How many orange jokes can I put into one review?)

Not quite my cup of juice.

[Maddie · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF 10% in.

I genuinely thought this was going to be a textbook take on the history of the orange. I feel so dumb saying this bc it’s so obviously a memoir… but you know, I like to go into my books blind so what can I say. I need something for my mental heath right now that isn’t fiction -my usual genre of choice, and just needed facts about oranges. I was so ready for it. What I wasn’t quite ready for was the extra heaviness of Covid-19 and racism. This definitely delivers on the different and fresh take on the mix of memoir and facts on foreign fruit - so don’t let my headspace sway you. But if you thought the book was going to be what I thought it would be, it’s not. I’m honestly so sad I’m not in the right mindset for it right now, and would love to come back to it in the future!

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a uniquely constructed memoir that is both introspective and informative, Katie Goh explores her identity and heritage through the history of the orange. Each chapter takes place in a different part of the world that coincides with Goh’s memories of that place, which she then cleverly connects the orange and its own ties to that location. In doing so, she reveals not only the complex story of a “foreign” fruit making its way around the world, but also her endlessly shifting thoughts of feeling “foreign” herself.

I think Goh did a great job finding a relatively good balance between history and personal narrative that resulted in a book that didn’t read as messy or cumbersome. It was intriguing to follow her journey and the orange to different parts of the world, as well as how she was able to explore the complexities of identity and history in a clear and succinct fashion. I really appreciated how she highlighted the impact of colonization and imperialism, not only in the development and global spreading of the orange, but also on her as a biracial person whose heritage is Chinese Malaysian and Irish. I almost got the sense that even Goh was a bit surprised by the overlaps of her history with the orange’s own, that it was rather serendipitous that she was able to explore all of this in such a meaningful way.

Something I would have liked for Goh to have explored further in this memoir is her queer identity. She lightly touched on this, but it wasn’t nearly as much as her exploration of being biracial. I felt the synopsis was slightly misleading in the way it gave the impression that queerness would be discussed far more than it actually was. I also found some parts a bit repetitive, most notably the frequent mention of the Atlanta spa shooting. I understood what she was trying to get at, but it seemed unnecessary after the fourth or fifth time.

Overall, though, this memoir was an insightful read, and I’d say Goh succeeded in using the orange as a metaphor without it getting tedious or heavy-handed.

Note: Many thanks to the publisher for sending me an ARC.

[Dana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Presenting a history of the orange as analogy to herself as a hybrid of heritage.

The writing is great! The early connections between oranges and immigration are also really nice and she lets the reader understand them instead of writing a lovely sentence and then saying, “I mean this in case you didn’t get it”. She leaves room for us to think.
Some examples:
“I wished to be remade. I wished to hold variousness in my own skin and exist as all the incorrigible things I am at once—not peeled and portioned out and made palatable for someone else’s appetite. I sought my own meaning, expressed how I see fit.”

“When does a fruit become more than a creation of nature? When do the borders of skin become an ornament, a commodity, a mythology, a world? Across history, the orange has been cultivated until its origins have been lost.”

“Severed from their parent tree, offspring buds will adapt to their new rootstock, and soon they will thrive across the continent. A single tree grows to be a grove until, one day, the gardener pauses under the green boughs and realises he can no longer tell which is the original parent tree that came from a place far away in the east. The assimilation is complete.”

“I wonder when an inauthentic creation becomes a style in its own right.”

At some point, we leave oranges and personal history aside to cover colonialism. Initially it is a smooth and recognizable transition—the tunnel being Dutch Golden Age era paintings.
Oddly the history presented remains largely Western Eurocentric. Even the comments about colonialism leaves out China’s centuries of imperialism and expansion. This struck me as a missed opportunity given she seems to be writing partly as a way to discover the history of herself, her ancestry, and the orange.
She does cover post-1949 Mao-induced Chinese famine. She misses that Louis Dreyfus Company gets shipping containers for orange juice from China.

Sometimes the tangents became circumstantial, other times went off and never connected. History that is important, but not sure how it is relevant to her theme. She even questions it herself after recounting violent and gorey details of a 1871 massacre of Chinese people in LA. The only connection seeming to be the survivors hid in an orange grove and violence against Asians in America. She mentions two other events—a white man murdering six Asian women, which seems be the seed that started this book, and an Asian man shooting 11 other Asian people at a dance studio in 2023.

She shares how disconnected it can feel being a strange person in a strange land (Fujian, China) and treated as a strange person in her homeland (Northern Ireland). I appreciated reading it but she didn’t go much deeper. Its unclear how she feels in Kuala Lumpur, but the writing led me to think she is most comfortable there. She mentions nothing about her thoughts and experiences of being queer, just that she is.

The first half was 4.5 stars and it got looser and a little lost in the second half. Its very well researched —256 references! There are no boring filler pages. Its worth a read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tin House for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

[Nandita Banik · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received my copy of Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange through the giveaway, and while I was excited for the book based on the synopsis, I did not want to raise my expectations too high. I was pleasantly surprised and happy by how much the book covered in terms of Katie's relationship to her identity, oranges, and the intersectional history between oranges and Chinese culture. I learned so much about how oranges are created, farmed, industrialized and how people of color have played such a critical role in the development of the citrus fruit family. I think at times the description of Katie being in the middle of two cultures felt a little repetitive, but there were many beautiful paragraphs about the history of citrus fruits and its relationship to structural discrimination and oppression. As I visited Coit Tower this weekend at SF, I saw the orange murals in a new light, realizing and appreciating that the depth of rich history this book provided me on how people of color raised this industry only to be overshadowed by whitewashed marketing.

"Chinese workers are replaced with Japanese immigrants, who are later replaced with Mexican and Filipino workers. In California's orange groves, a strict racial and class hierarchy is established. Immigrant, indigenous, and poor people do the heavy labor, while a small crop of upper-class white men manage the production lines, own the groves, and grow rich from citrus."

Would recommend!

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be exceptionally dense. A lot of history kind of thrown at you instead of woven into Goh’s personal history.

So much of it was interesting and I learned a lot from this book. I just wish it was presented in a different way that wasn’t so much “anecdote, dense history, another anecdote, some more dense history”

Beautifully written and very obviously well researched. Colonialism and Eugenics are SO BAD!!

[Natasia Langfelder · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is like being stuck in a nightmare where you have to read the entirety of the Wikipedia entry for oranges only it’s hundreds of pages long. I wish Sandra Bernhardt had been there to ask Katie goh, “who wants to read about the history of oranges” before she even started writing the book. I wish the manatees had told Katie goh to write about her Ah Ma instead. Giving the book 2 stars instead of one because Goh seems like a nice person.

[Pacific Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mixing together both a memoir and also the history of the orange was a fascinating read. You always want to find books that make you feel something and this did. I felt inspired by the poetic prose, angry at the injustices of the past, and pensive throughout my reading experience. At some points perhaps it felt like a bit of an info dump but overall a very solid read that more people should discover. Have not heard this book talked about enough.

[Bobbi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I’ve done myself a disservice by not reading this book physically and highlighting an annotating as I go. I did a full audio read, and I feel like I didn’t absorb some of the really really wonderful metaphors that the author had weaving history and her personal life in the concept of the orange. I really enjoyed this, but I think I would’ve enjoyed it way more if I was able to take it in with my eyeballs rather than my ears.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this - somewhat different to what I would normally read, but the reviews were great. Personal, reflective and highly creative this book teaches you things, makes you think I and small all at once! Recommend!!

[Jennifer Pullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A blend of memoir, research, and national and family history, using oranges traveling along ancient and modern global trade routes as a lens through which to think about colonialism, and true hybridity of identity and culture. A must read!

[Anne Crean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned so much about oranges and colonialism 🍊

[Sam L · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book with broad apeel.

[BlanCus Cus · Rating 5 out of 5]

personal stories and factual history book combine in a very interesting way where citrus are the main character

[Anya · Rating 4 out of 5]

this made me even MORE excited for sumo orange season

the book was interesting (and repetitive)

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir ripe with metaphor—Katie Goh traces time using the history of the orange, exploring the plurality of the fruit’s existence against the backdrop of human movement. In one anecdote, for example, she shares myths surrounding the creation of the clementine that are interwoven with French occupation of Algeria. In this book, the story of the orange intersects with histories of empire, violence, migration, and more.

I really enjoyed how the author spoke about feeling disconnected from her heritage despite her best efforts to be more in tune with her family’s roots. The struggle of feeling “authentic”, or “enough”, resonated so much.

All in all, the writing was very accessible, even in the more scientific and philosophical sections.