“The spontaneity of citrus, its instability and unreliability when grown from seed, strikes me as an anti-genealogical image full of queer potential.” 🍊✨🙌

a special thank you to Net Galley & Tin House Books for allowing me access to an Advanced Reader’s Copy of Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh!! it’s an absolute privilege to receive an ARC & i’m so honored to be able to share a honest review in exchange.

🍊 publication date: may 6th, 2025

review: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (05/01/25)
whimsical, poetic piece of art & a must-read.

i already began planning who to gift this book to!! knowledge is to be shared, and can’t wait to see the impact this book has on others! this book was perfect for my recent curiosity of learning about the stories we missed from history books! all of which felt perfectly woven in a vivid memoir, ranging from discussions about genetic make-up of a citrus to modern day asian hate crimes.

i had the best experience reading like it’s fun, interesting, and serious when needs to be. it’s also insightful in ways i hadn’t ever considered. despite not always agreeing with Goh, i found myself appreciative of her perspective. fun fact: this book inspired a small research project about exploring hidden impacts of colonization with glass trading beads!

while i could keep praising this book, i do need to end the review! so here is my final message: PLEASE, PLEASE READ THIS BOOK.

Enjoyed this and learned a lot about the history of citrus as well as other topics including Malaysia, old architecture, the Silk Road, Chinese American history etc. lots of topics covered over the course of the book. Maybe too many because the book does start to feel bogged down by information and then takes the reader out of enjoying the family and personal history included. But overall it’s still a good read.

Katie Goh follows the complicated history of the orange from east-to-west and west-to-east, from a luxury item of kings and emperors, to a common everyday fruit. She interweaves the history of the orange from it's beginnings as pomelo and mandarin orange in the Far East, to it's spread via the Silk Road and eventual cultivation all over the world. The varieties and types of oranges or citrus fruit today are numerous as the fruit trees seem mutate easily and its cultivars easy to multiply by propagation and cuttings.

Goh likens her own history to that of the orange, originally from one country but traveled and changed in multiple countries around the world. She grew up in Ireland with a Chinese-Malaysian-Irish ethnic background, and identifies herself as queer. She later returns to Malaysia to her grandmother's country.

Fascinating mix of history and personal memoir, this is an unusual book that many people with a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds could relate to and enjoy.

This is actually more of a personal AND social history of the orange. (Sorry, being nitpicky about the title.) Goh blends her personal experience with oranges and the pandemic and her childhood with the overall history of the orange. If nothing else there's definitely a citrus grove (the UC Riverside Citrus Valley Collection) that I want to try to visit if it's near Los Angeles. Definitely worth your time.

"Foreign Fruit" blends fascinating history with an emotional, deeply personal narrative. The book traces the journey of the orange—a fruit brought to foreign lands by colonizers—while intertwining Goh’s own search for identity.

Katie Goh, a queer, Malaysian-Chinese-Irish journalist, is asked to write about the tragic 2023 murders of 11 Asian-Americans. However, as she contemplates the lives lost, she turns away from the assignment, instead choosing to tell her own story. This leads to a compelling exploration of the orange’s cultural history, something I didn’t expect to find so engrossing.

The narrative sometimes reads like a history textbook, but Goh’s personal insights anchor the story, making it anything but dry. The real strength lies in Goh’s struggle with her identity—torn between cultures and spaces, always questioning where she truly belongs. I found myself connecting with her reflections on life under COVID lockdown, as the anxieties she describes were all too familiar.

Reading this book has left me with a new perspective on something as simple as an orange. Goh’s exploration of its bloody, colonial past will forever change how I think about the fruit on my kitchen counter.

A great memoir needs an effective throughline, and Goh’s focus on the ubiquity of the orange is a fascinating framing device. While investigating the orange, Goh travels to China and Malaysia to clarify her backstory. What she finds is far from a linear story, but it’s an excellent look into the contradictions of personal identity. (Recommendation sent to subscribers of Word Smarts email newsletter)

I'm obsessed with any combination of food writing, nature/science, history, and personal memoir, so I knew this one was my cup of tea! The history of oranges, citrus cultivation, and international trade is truly fascinating, and the way Katie Goh infuses her own family's story into the narrative drew me in right away. A stunning book that will forever change the way you look at your morning grapefruit!

Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh is an outstanding book. I was expecting a microhistory about oranges, or citrus fruit as a whole; I was not expecting an incredibly well-researched social history about culture, society, belonging, searching for one’s place in the world, biases, acceptance, food cultivation, and environmentalism (among other topics). Goh’s book takes readers from Ireland and Malaysa to China, Italy via the Silk Road, France, Russia, and the United States. Readers witness the destructive oppression of Dutch and British colonialism, Communist tyrants, and violent racism. I had never heard of the Los Angeles Riot of 1871, in which nineteen Chinese immigrants were murdered, and no one was held accountable.
Readers are also introduced to the wonders of citrus cultivation; I was also unaware that similar to apples, citrus seeds will not grow true to the parent plant: if you plant a clementine seed you will get some kind of variety of citrus, possibly even a clementine (but don’t count on it). Goh tells us of the origins of many of the citrus varieties we are familiar with today, how the fruit rose to such popularity (aside from being delicious), and its cultural significance in many cultures.
In a fashion similar to Crying in H Mart and My Berlin Kitchen, Goh describes a childhood of feeling like an outsider, growing up in Ireland as the child of an Irish mother and a Chinese-Malaysian father. Her love of her heritage is evident despite her inner struggle to see just where she fits in. Her descriptions of visits to her family in Malaysa are filled with warm childhood memories, and when she returns as an adult she is just as eager to embrace her culture and identity.
This book was a pleasure to read, engaging, informative, completely engrossing. I highly recommend this as a memoir, a microhistory, and as a study of society.

I enjoyed that this book traces the history of the modern orange. The origin of the orange is found in China and specifically in its parents: the pomelo and the mandarin orange. (In fact, all modern citrus is the result of bioengineering. The origin of lemons is citron and sour orange, and grapefruits is pomelo and sweet orange.)

The book also has a somewhat parallel but thankfully shorter glimpse at the biracial Malaysian-Irish author’s background. This is much less interesting than the orange. Her family’s movement is mildly intriguing but I don’t see how it compares to the orange. Moreover, there’s no substantive connection or link, other than the obvious and simplistic China origin. I feel the author made quite the reach to associate her family story with an orange’s. I think she needs to meet more biracial or bicultural Asians of all sorts; then she’ll see that her family’s story is not so unique or emblematic.

The book would have benefited from some tighter editing. Several facts or pieces of information were needlessly repeated, e.g., the author eating 5 oranges when she learned about the Asian women who were shot in Atlanta was told three times (or was it four?)

I appreciated her take on colonialism and capitalism. I could have easily enjoyed the orange’s story alone.

Quotes:

The complexity of Britain’s history had been polished into a tale of empire, royalty, and greatness that was taken as truth. It was a myth so shiny, it blinded.

In the eighteenth century, religion justifies science, which justifies commerce, which justifies colonialism, which justifies violence. It is this cycle of ideology that establishes European dominance in the modern world.

There is a long unspoken history that comes before a society can describe itself as multicultural or diverse or a melting pot. For Britain, this a is a history of violence; of people abducted, displaced, and dispersed.

California’s citrus paradise is a paradise of prejudice.

People of colour are confronted with our history every time we step across the threshold to enter the public world. Our bodies are read like books, to be interpreted, judged, and evaluated.


Thanks to Tin House Books and Net Galley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Was an okay read. Some parts were interesting but others were a bit dry with too many details and dates.

This is not a book about the history of the orange. This book is a memoir. Katie Goh does a nice job explaining how she felt during the Covid-19 lockdowns and the rise of Anti Asian hate. This book is very raw and personal but the synopsis is very misleading. You have been warned.

I felt the author did a great job touching on some heavy topics that she has dealth with her entire life like violence towards people of different religions (author is Muslim), violence towards people LGBTQIA, her heritage and more while mixing this topics with a luscious orange. I felt thar oranges related to her culture...

While some of her personal stories were strong, they did not go to far in depth and barely scratched the surface of why it matters for people to have compassion/empathy towards people that are different. I felt this was well-written and emotional at times, pacing was definitely an issue and I did not feel fully engaged as a reader. I also had the question a few times in my brain "how does an orange and the author's story relate? Why do I care?" I felt kind of of lost in the shuffle as a reader and the point of the book.

I felt the author could have done a better job of relating her personal story and the orange. I understand it is supposed to be a metaphor for her life but I felt myself disconnected from her journey overall enven though the book started off strong. Disappointed.

Cannot recommend.

THanks to Netgalley, Katie Goh and Tinhouse Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Available: 5/6/25

This is a beautifully written meditation on diaspora, the Covid lockdowns and the concurrent rise in anti-Asian violence, identity, family, and belonging.

It also happens to have some really neat orange facts. Did you know Victorian ladies would retire alone to their private rooms to eat their oranges because their juiciness made them seem obscene? I did not and now I do!

I especially liked the passages where Goh wrote about her relationships with her family and with white editors and readers who looked to her for easily digestible narratives of Asian womanhood. They felt intimate and timely in the way that talking about your childhood in therapy is timely

Unfortunately, this book didn’t come together as a whole for me the way I had hoped. The author’s use of oranges as an organizing metaphor felt like the kind of device that would have worked much better in a shorter piece. It felt increasingly strained as the work went on, the similarities between oranges and the author’s autobiography too tenuous. (But I am literal to a fault. You may well disagree!)

I think this book will appeal most to the kind of reader who picks up fiction set in the past or in a foreign-to-them country in order to learn something, who is more interested in character and theme than plot, and who prefers a more literary than conversational authorial voice.

Thank you to the publisher for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

In Foreign Fruit, author Katie Goh covers the history of the orange fruit. It's intertwined with recollections & musings from her own experiences as a Malaysian-Chinese-Irish writer during the COVID-19 pandemic, and other parts of her identity connected with her Asian heritage.

This one was good - I enjoyed it and thought a lot of the connections were really expertly drawn. I found several anecdotes really interesting, some new to me: I had no idea, for example, about the process of grafting & how it's given rise to all these varied citrus fruits from just three original "parent" fruits! The author talks candidly and vulnerably of her own cultural heritage and I really appreciated seeing that developed throughout.

I did struggle, quite a bit, to sit down and start it every time I tried. I think it probably took me a whole month and a half, start to finish, despite it only being about a 200 page book. I think I had some issues with the pacing, maybe? Like, it was all so connected that I sometimes struggled to take a breath and digest everything. I also found some of the historical information quite unengaging, so I would sometimes sit and read 5 or 6 pages before putting it down and getting distracted by other things. All of this is strange, given this style of informational/personal prose is typically exactly what works for me?

Overall, I liked this book, but it didn't quite hit enough for me. I'll be recommending to people interested in Asian diaspora stories, food history, journalists, and/or folks who express interest in postcolonial personal narratives.

"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.