Per person, oranges are the most consumed fruit in the world. Across the world, no matter how remote or cold or incongruous a climate is, oranges will be there. What stories could I unravel from the orange's long ribboning peel? What new meanings could I find in its variousness, as it moves from east to west and from familiar to foreign? What begins as a curiosity into the origins of the orange soon becomes a far-reaching odyssey of citrus for Katie Goh. Katie follows the complicated history of the orange from east-to-west and west-to-east, from a luxury item of European kings and Chinese emperors, to a modest fruit people take for granted. This investigation parallels Katie's powerful search into her own heritage.
The beauty of this narrative is Goh’s ability to pull together disparate snippets of personal and global history into a coherent and entertaining story ... She effortlessly slips between the present and the past to make these links, to tie together her commentary on the modern state of things to the history of citrus ... There’s solid storytelling throughout the book following the early Citrons to the Mediterranean basin by way of the Silk Road, of how British sailors would lose their teeth from scurvy until the realization that citrus fruits kept the disease at bay, and the creation of juice concentrate. If there is one thing missing, it’s that citrus history has so many diverse origin myths. Every orange varietal we eat today was created or discovered, and some of this history is overlooked. Goh of course is not writing an encyclopedia, but rather curating the history to tell a story ... The narrative diverges into tangents at times too ... Goh has succeeded in writing a compelling narrative about the history of citrus. There are details that might have been glossed over, but only for the sake of creating a compelling narrative.
An elegant hybrid memoir about hybridity that pulls apart mythologies of colonialism, inheritance and identity like the segments of a citrus fruit ... Goh refuses simple stories, instead conjuring a complex, finely woven exploration of the citrus and the self ... Throughout, finely detailed cinematic present-tense descriptions of historical scenes plunge readers into the past, showcasing Goh's talents as a prose stylist. In this, Foreign Fruit sidesteps a common pitfall of hybrid memoir, where the inquiry into the outside world can be less compelling than the personal journey. Yet as the book progresses, Goh's choice to construct that personal journey around literal journeys hamstrings opportunities for sustained reflection ... While Goh has stopped 'crushing [her]self to tell a convenient story,' using the orange as a 'model for hybrid existence' only gets her so far in Foreign Fruit. Yet the journey offers much food for thought, and readers will never see supermarket displays of oranges the same way again.
The motif of the familial fruit plate may ring true, but it has become comically overused, calcifying into a well-worn trope — the stuff of indistinct college admission essays and faux-lyrical remembrances for lost relatives ... Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange, a book by Chinese-Malaysian-Irish writer Katie Goh, is 200 pages of that cliché ... The connection between the two feels forced at times, like fitting a satsuma into a pear-shaped hole ... Fruit as a stand-in for the self? Asian diaspora identity as a clash between east and west? We’ve been here before. Often. ... This journey, while not especially cohesive, is both instructive and interesting enough, if you’re a history buff. It’s the other half of the book that gets tiresome fast ... The book is full of such somber musings, rehashed until they blur into a never-ending chorus of angst that’s familiar to anyone who grew up in between cultures. Every memoir and personal essay is navel-gazing, to some degree, but Goh’s account is painfully so. There’s precious little respite from the repetitive barrage ... Goh is sharpest when she writes about art, a discipline she knows well ... She smartly threads the needle between the aesthetic appreciation and sociohistorical critique without tilting into bromides ... If only Foreign Fruit were consistently full of this level of criticism and analysis! But inevitably, Goh retreats into herself, punishingly conscious of her own insecurity, complicity and guilt.
