"Foreign Fruit" by Katie Goh is an intimate, revealing memoir not only about Goh's life but about the history of the orange. Goh has been comforted and seen by oranges her entire life. Like Goh, Oranges have a complicated history and have gone through waves of being accepted and removed from their orchards. To Goh and many of us, oranges are more then a fruit. With their own complex history there is much to be understood about the citrus.

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!

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.
Posted on Goodreads.

a queer, Malaysian-Chinese-Irish journalist’s personal exploration of her mixed-race identity, braided into an ambition 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 🍊

Beautifully written, "Foreign Fruit" shares the story of one woman's journey and is braided together with fruit. Katie Goh's story is heartfelt and raw, and reading it caused me to empathize, and think more about the bounty of fruit, and life, delicious and fleeting, that we sometimes take for granted. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. Pub Date: May 6, 2025.

#ForeignFruit

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.