Foreign Fruit
A Personal History of the Orange
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Foreign Fruit
Buy Now for £19.99
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Narrated by:
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Katie Goh
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By:
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Katie Goh
About this listen
The morning after a white man murdered six Asian women, I ate five oranges. They were not dainty tangerines or pretty satsumas or festive clementines. These were unwieldy, bulging oranges, pock-marked and rind-covered fistfuls of flesh. I ate them all until my body ached.
The orange we know, waxed in vats, gathered in red netting and stacked in supermarket displays, is not the same orange that grew from the first straggling orange grove that took root on the Tibetan plateau, part pomelo and part mandarin. The orange is a souvenir of history. Across time, it 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 within its tough rind. So, what happens when the fruit is peeled and each segment – each moment of history, each meaning in time – is pulled apart?
Critic reviews
'Beautiful, visceral and powerful writing that speaks from the heart and to the heart. I could feel every word. A raw and fascinating book' (ANGELA HUI, author of TAKEAWAY)
'A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it' (KATHERINE MAY, author of WINTERING and ENCHANTMENT)
'Elusive, subverting the popular genre of the "history of things" in elegant ways, Katie Goh writes with as admirable a preciseness about self-othering as she does about botanical history' (JESSICA GAITÁN JOHANNESSON, author of THE NERVES AND THEIR ENDINGS and HOW WE ARE TRANSLATED)
'An encounter not only with the orange, but with the reality of diasporic life in hostile environments. Goh patiently and skilfully reinvents the orange as a means of inventing her identity [. . .] and what we're given is a story more surprising, potent, and various than we could ever have imagined' (AMY KEY, author of ISN'T FOREVER and ARRANGEMENTS IN BLUE)
'I don't know anyone who wouldn't love this book. Airy and rooted, its style as beautiful as its investigations, this is the kind of book that holds in it the unexplored ecosophical inquiries of our time' (SUMANA ROY, author of HOW I BECAME A TREE)
The facts conveyed are not always pleasant since they include details of slavery (historical and modern), references to racially motivated killings and an account of the truly horrific lynching of the Chinese community in LA in 1871, but they are always well presented in Katie Goh's articulate and readable style. The link between manipulating plants to create fruit with certain desirable qualities and eugenics came as a shock - though the connection is clear enough when one thinks about it.
I felt that the author made a convincing parallel between the orange's journey (both in terms of geography and genetics) and that of her family and liked the fact that her research into her family history and the creation of the orange as we know it today has helped her to find her place in the world.
I opted for the audiobook which is read by Katie Goh herself - and who else could have put her case so well?
A thought provoking memoir
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