Status Updates From Foreign Fruit: A Personal H...

‘—1938-1939,—$600,000 to destroy its surplus citrus—people hungry, needing the fruit—& kerosene sprayed over them—Steinbeck, ‘There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation—sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolise—a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth—& children dying—because a profit cannot be taken from an orange.’ The Grapes of Wrath—banned upon its publication—copies—set on fire—’

‘English colonisers are inexperienced—before they discover grafting, citrus’s inherent nature—promiscuity,—spontaneity,—takes root—The pomelo groves of Tambun were a reminder that sixty years earlier, some Chinese immigrants had planted roots in their new home. To grow a tree is to express loyalty to a future—Ipoh was a palimpsest: of my own childhood memories and of Britain, the country I had hoped to leave behind.’

‘—born in 1937,—Ah Ma left China in the late 1940s,—Purity is an illusion—Even the orange—Their segmented insides lie exposed to the air—a reminder that we are all at the mercy of time—nothing lasts forever—There is a common saying—the first generation survives so the second can be—storytellers—But the truth is somewhere in the middle of that binary: you can never truly assimilate, yet—never fully remain a stranger.’

‘Citrus trees have a promiscuous tendency to breed across varieties—spontaneously, through cross-pollination in the grove, and by design, in the laboratory. In 1997, David Mabberley traced—lineage of all commercial edible fruits in the Citrus genus—Citrus medica, the citron; Citrus maxima, the pomelo; and Citrus reticulata, the mandarin orange—citrus is wanton; hybrids spawn further hybrids—self-pollinating flowers.’

slowly but surely chugging along...... it's just so dry