Per person, oranges are the most consumed fruit in the world. Across the world, no matter how remote or cold or incongruous a climate is, oranges will be there.

What stories could I unravel from the orange's long ribboning peel? What new meanings could I find in its variousness, as it moves from east to west and from familiar to foreign?

What begins as a curiosity into the origins of the orange soon becomes a far-reaching odyssey of citrus for Katie Goh. Katie follows the complicated history of the orange from east-to-west and west-to-east, from a luxury item of European kings and Chinese emperors, to a modest fruit people take for granted. This investigation parallels Katie’s powerful search into her own heritage. Growing up queer in a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish household in the north of Ireland, Katie felt herself at odds with the culture and politics around her. As a teenager, Katie visits her ancestral home in Longyan, China, with her family to better understand her roots, but doesn’t find the easy, digestible answers she hoped for.

In her mid-twenties, when her grandmother falls ill, she ventures again to the land of her ancestors, Malaysia, where more questions of self and belonging are raised. In her travels and reflections, she navigates histories that she wants to understand, but has never truly felt a part of. Like the story of the orange, Katie finds that simple and extractable explanations—even about a seemingly simple fruit—are impossible. The story that unfolds is Katie’s incredible endeavor to flesh out these contradictions, to unpeel the layers of personhood; a reflection on identity through the cipher of the orange. Along the way, the orange becomes so much more than just a fruit—it emerges as a symbol, a metaphor, and a guide. Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange is a searching, wide-ranging, seamless weaving of storytelling with research and a meditative, deeply moving encounter with the orange and the self.

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KATIE GOH is a writer and editor at Extra Teeth literary magazine. She writes about culture and social issues for publications including i-D, the Guardian, Independent, VICE, Huck, Nylon, Dazed, and Crack. Her writing has been shortlisted for BBC Scotland and Wigtown Book Festival’s Anne Brown Essay Prize, PPA Scotland’s Young Journalist of the Year Award and the University of Glasgow’s Kavya Prize. Katie became a member of the UK Critics Circle in 2020 and her book of essays The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters was a Reviewer’s Choice for Big Issue’s Independent Books of 2021 and shortlisted for the inaugural Kavya Prize in 2022. She currently lives in Edinburgh.