Katie Goh: “I want people to engage with the politics of oranges”

Katie Goh’s debut book, Foreign Fruit, is part memoir, part botanical history, and part cultural criticism. It follows the journey of the orange – from its origins on the Tibetan plateau as a hybrid of pomelo and mandarin to the neatly waxed, netted fruit stacked high in supermarket aisles. Along the way, she unpacks how the orange is tied to colonialism, migration, resilience, and survival.

For the Irish-born, now Edinburgh-based writer and critic Goh – who grew up in a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish household – peeling an orange isn’t just peeling an orange. She wanted to see what stories she could unravel from its long ribboning peel. Foreign Fruit is about pulling apart the segments of history, myth, and meaning wrapped inside its tough rind. Across centuries, the fruit has been a symbol of both fortune and misfortune, pleasure and suffering, God and doom. It’s a souvenir of the past, carrying with it stories of trade, conquest, and adaptation.

Her own story is entwined in this citrus odyssey. She traces the fruit’s journey from her grandparents’ ancestral village in Longyan, China, to Lunar New Year festivities with extended family in Kuala Lumpur, and finally to the orange groves of California – reflecting on her family history and identity along the way.

When Huck spoke to Goh over Zoom last month, she laughed and admitted she’s somehow become the unofficial spokesperson for oranges. Not that she minds – she’s not sick of them yet.

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Let’s start with the title of the book Foreign Fruit. I guess, even in the name itself, it feels like such a loaded title that’s deeply personal to you.

Wow, we’re straight in the deep end already. Yeah, you’re right. I kept thinking, ‘Am I the foreign fruit? Trying to make it in an alien environment?’ At the end of the day, it’s a book about oranges, but it was important for me to capture the other side of the book, which is so much about my heritage, especially as a queer woman of East and South East Asian descent, through different times where I felt ‘foreign’ or ‘exotic’. The orange is such a mundane fruit and an object that a lot of us would pick up and take for granted. I suppose in the book, I wanted to ‘other’ the orange a little bit and turn it into this foreign, cringe, beguiling object that moved from China along the Silk Roads to Europe and America. I wanted people to think a little bit differently about something so common. Plus, alliteration is always nice, and the title has stayed like that since the proposal.

Foreign Fruit is described as a ‘hybrid memoir’, which combines memoir, history of the orange, and cultural analysis. How did you approach structuring the book to weave these different threads together?

I’ve always been interested in personal writing that tackles historical big-picture writing but also takes the self into account. I guess, for me, it began with Covid. At that time, there was a sharp rise in Anti-Asian racism and hate crimes. I was looking into finding a way to write about that as a person of mixed race heritage in the UK and how that feels connected to the world and things like diaspora, history and violence. The orange became a useful metaphor and a way of framing how meaning changes and how something can transform over time. I was interested in finding a way to write about yourself that moves beyond the framework of very basic identity politics that are really common in magazines, online articles and newspapers. It’s the sort of writing I used to do a lot of, actually, very topical things – why racism is bad or these black and white moments – but it just flattened people’s experiences. The orange tells us about history, the way it’s moved across the world and also bigger issues like globalisation, climate change and migration. I wanted to capture that hybridity and not feel like I had to segment things into categories. To me, it is what it feels like to be a person in the world. Not one thing is separate from the other, but how it’s a mixture of these things weaving together. This was my attempt at trying to capture that feeling.

Exactly, I feel that as a person of colour, we’re constantly wary of only getting the space to talk about identity, race and pain through a very specific lens. It’s almost this tick-box trauma-mining tightrope.

I did a lot of that style of writing when I first started out as a journalist. I don’t feel like I’m above it at all, but it’s so sad, like, at that time, it was the only way to get into newspapers and magazines. I think that says a lot about the industry more than the individual writers wanting to write about these things.

Considering this, were you wary of sharing intimate details of your life? Especially the moments of seeing your family for the first time after Covid. Was it particularly challenging or cathartic to write these reflective moments?

Yeah, it was emotional to write, but it was also kind of important as well. I really want to capture my experiences, put memories down on paper and have the space to revisit. I don’t think anyone in my family is really angry about it, but I don’t think I’ll go back to our family village for a long time in the future. But it felt special to be more intimate and tender. 

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Did you feel like your approach to writing changed when you first started compared to the end? Did it help you process a lot of things?

It’s one of those things where you begin writing it, and then you’ve got a million more questions and end up more confused. I think that’s a good thing. It feels more real than closing the Word document and being like, “Wow, I know everything about what it's like to be a person of colour.” I think that would be worrying and concerning. For someone who didn’t study history that much at school, I’m surprised that history became such a big part of the book. I think it’s challenging because you can easily romanticise the past or how we can project our own interpretations onto things, which is something that historians have wrestled with for a very long time. I started out wondering where oranges came from. I wasn’t expecting to end up writing a book about ancient Chinese markets, the Empire and scurvy. I think the orange helped me jump between different times and places.

How do you think we can engage with fruit and not take it for granted? There’s so much history in terms of larger themes of movement and power. How can people engage with this more critically while still celebrating its joys?

It starts with education. So much of British history is wrapped up in empire. How it was all about conquering lands and extracting natural resources and how that intersects with globalisation and supply chains. I don’t think people put that together a lot of the time. Food has always been political in terms of who has access to food, how food is delivered to us and how food is used as a bargaining chip. Look at Gaza and how Palestinians were forced to cut down their decades-old orange and olive trees. Cutting down ancient trees so that they could use it as fuel whenever they were being besieged by Israeli forces. That is such a shocking image. I want people to engage with the politics of oranges and, by extension, the natural world as well.

What was the most surprising and unexpected thing you learned while writing this book?

I learnt a lot about myself. What it feels like to be a person in a world that’s very violent with a lot of suffering. I ultimately had a joyous experience when writing, but there were challenging parts where I had to research and write about terrible massacres and violence. Those things felt very far away in history, but they were things that felt close to me. I think that was because so much of the writing was connecting the dots across time. How oranges have moved and how they survived across history. I’m blown away by oranges' resilience and their ability to adapt to new climates and survive, which felt really encouraging.

Fruit can be both a source of comfort and a reminder of displacement. How do you think we can reconcile these tensions in the way we talk about food and migration?

We've become very detached from the natural world. Few of us will visit or work on a farm, and we don't see the labour that goes into it. We take things like an orange, a carrot or a slice of bacon for granted every day and how much energy has gone into producing those things. During the Covid lockdowns, I did some gardening for the first time and grew my own vegetables. I wish I could have grown oranges, but they would not have survived in Ireland. It was an enlightening experience that took months for all these things to grow, and then I ate them all within a second, and they were gone. It’s so wonderful to see something grow from seed to plant and nurture yourself. I think for those tensions you talk about, we really need to be more connected to the food we eat and think more thoughtfully about where things come from, the supply chain structure and the food industry.

Foreign Fruit is published by Canongate on May 8.

Angela Hui is a food and culture writer. Follow her on Instagram.

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