Kati Goh grew up in the north of Ireland, worlds away from her ancestral home in Longyan, China. In Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange, Goh writes about the origins of the orange and her search into her Chinese heritage. This essay in Orion is an excerpt from the book: a short yet powerful piece on identity, migration, and violence.
The orange is a souvenir of history. Across time, its appearance 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, all held within its tough rind. So what happens, then, when the fruit is peeled and each segment—each moment of history, each meaning across time—is pulled apart?
It is the exhilarating intensity of taking a tangerine apart that gets closest to expressing just how strange, how varied, how intoxicating it is to be a person existing in our world. Unlike the apple with its wholeness of the flesh, the orange can be taken apart and put back together again, segment by segment, skin over skin. It can be remade.
More picks on identity
The Secret Pattern
“Filtered only through headlines, China had become a political entity more than a physical place where I had grown up, where half of my family still lived.”
Being an Asian Southerner Means Being an Anomaly, Squared
“This is how I know an Asian South exists: I miss it.”
Generation Connie
“Growing up, I thought being named after Connie Chung made me unique. Then I found out about the rest of us.”
When Food Is the Only Narrative We Consume
“Chinese culture can’t be made bite-sized for mass consumption.”
What’s Not in a Name?
“Names are choices—just usually not ours.”
Learning to Live with Durians Again
“It is a strange sort of alienation, when you make the life-changing decision to return home, only to suspect that you no longer belong.”
