Katie Goh’s “Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange” bills itself as a memoir constructed alongside an odyssey of the orange. This caught my attention. I had been searching for something to scratch this particular genre-clash itch. Something with a personal narrative that makes a small aspect of the world make more sense — maybe in an annoying philosophical way, but in a grounded one too. One that transforms my preconceptions of something I already know. A weird mesh of microhistory and memoir, something along the lines of Lulu Miller’s “Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life,” or Caitlin Doughty’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory.” These books accomplished this blend well. They had a dynamic personal narrative. Their nonfiction subject felt justified. “Foreign Fruit” also felt promising. It even had a lengthy subtitle. I eagerly peeled back the bright orange cover to the pithy pages, ready to completely re-envision the orange.
“Foreign Fruit” has all of the markings of what the emerging memoir-microhistory genre demands. It has philosophy, or clumsily-implemented mentions of rhizomes and symbolic myth. It has a segmented personal narrative, starting, ending and interspersed with one moment where Goh — after hearing about six Asian women who had been murdered during the rise in Asian hate crimes fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic — describes eating five oranges back to back at her kitchen table. And, finally, it has the orange, containing “metaphors, dreams, mythologies, superstitions, parables, and histories, all held within its tough rind.” Goh completes most of the criteria for books of this sort, but what she doesn’t manage to pull off is something more integral.
Goh can’t seem to pin down exactly what this book is about. She muses about different aspects of what the orange could mean, what the clementine’s origins could have been. Even the central concept of oranges is something she expands to all citrus fruits, occasionally jumping into pomelos and fruit as a whole. She introduces so many starting points, so many paths the orange could take, that exploring them all would exceed the scope of the barely 200-page novel.
Goh clearly has a passion for and a curiosity about oranges, but she lacks an angle. The more explicitly nonfiction passages feel rote and limited. In one chapter, she describes a trip she took explicitly for the writing of this book, but in others the historical context is introduced only by a paragraph break, completely severed from her own narrative or reasons to be looking into the niches of the orange’s history. It’s disjointed. She says of her research trip that she “knew (she) would soon be reaching the end of the orange’s journey.” But it’s hard to see why, when she had spent the previous chapter discussing pomelo farmers. This conflation of the central orange metaphor with other citrus stories becomes way too broad for us to ever feel like we are making any headway into the historical part of the novel.
This sweepingly shallow look feels intentional, but it doesn’t work. Vague and vast conclusions about what oranges mean to her and orange history as a whole are summed up with: Everything depends. She explicitly brings in the philosophical concept of rhizomes — that everything is connected, vastly and equally. You can’t draw conclusions one way or another about the oranges, or people whose lives have been shaped by the fruit, the farmers and the immigrants and the dead, because everything is simply too interlocked to extricate. It’s an easy concept to find a false sense of importance in, but it’s not easy to find tangibility in. And the concept is definitely not easy to construct a book around, especially one that doesn’t spend enough time fleshing out the connections it wants to expose in order to then dispel its meaning.
I don’t think I could have told you why oranges were selected as the book’s topic until the penultimate chapter, “Southern California.” Even then, it feels as if oranges were selected because of this section. It’s a tight narrative, an effective, building mini-saga that effectively connects everything she wants it to: Manifest Destiny, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and how to face this history while grappling with her own origins. Side by side, she discusses the construction of the myth of orange juice and the 1871 Chinatown massacre. Slices of the American machine are examined and peeled like an orange. In a book of otherwise flat and stretching anecdotes, it makes you wonder if the essays she says the book originated from might have been better off untouched by the influence of the citrus, left to find their own roots.
To draw on her favored metaphor, Goh’s book plateaus a 1,000 times. Her story of origins, myth, fear and pomelos stretches and shifts, but rarely builds. It has its moments, but they recede back into the mess of the pulp. Oranges aren’t linear. Perhaps history isn’t, either. But Goh’s memoir proves that, just maybe, books should be.
Daily Arts Writer Cora Rolfes can be reached at corolfes@umich.edu.
