The following is an excerpt from Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh. She is a Scotland-based writer and editor from the north of Ireland.
Foreign Fruit is a blend of memoir and cultural history, using the orange as a lens to explore themes of identity, migration, and belonging. As Goh traces the fruit’s global journey, she parallels it with her own search for self as a queer woman of Chinese-Malaysian-Irish descent growing up in Northern Ireland. It is now available to purchase from Tin House.
In 2019, I flew over the ancient Silk Roads. Leaving from Dublin, my plane crossed over Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and India before descending over the Straits of Malacca, where ships journey along the maritime Silk Roads, to land in what was firmly modern Kuala Lumpur.
It was September, and West Malaysia was engulfed by haze. Palm oil plantations had been razed by slash-and-burn clearance fires in Indonesia; forest fires were raging in Borneo, Thailand, and Vietnam; and Southeast Asia had been plunged into a pol-luted cloud.
I was in Malaysia to be with my Ah Ma. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer at the end of the previous year. I had already planned to stay with my Auntie Sian for three months—the longest I could stay in the country without a visa—but Ah Ma’s illness gave the trip a sudden urgency. Each year since I was a child, I had spent weeks with my Irish grandmother. We had no language barrier and spoke with ease. I knew her intimately. But my Malaysian grandmother existed mostly in my childhood memories. We could not converse freely; she had emigrated from China as a girl and learned English as a young bride in Malaysia. I could not speak Longyan or Mandarin. We conversed in fragmented English and spoke about each other to my father or aunt, and they translated for us. And now she had cancer. Her death, once unimaginable to me, now loomed as a foregone conclusion. I was consumed by pangs of fear that I would run out of time and she would disappear from me before I could ask her about the things I had always wanted to know: about her childhood in Longyan, her memories of Japanese-occupied China, her experience of immigrating to British-occupied Malaya, the joys and sorrows that had marked her life. This trip to Malaysia took on a new meaning for me. I wanted to help care for Ah Ma as she underwent her treat-ment, but I also wanted to make sense of her past. It might be my last chance.
***
While Auntie Sian drove the three of us to the market, Ah Ma patted at her wig as if to check it was still there. There was no haze that Saturday morning and, above KL’s concrete, the sky was a sure blue. Ah Ma and my aunt spoke to each other in Chinese, about friends’ sons and lunch plans and what we would bring to a potluck dinner in my aunt’s building later that week. In the back seat I was content to watch flocks of sparrows shoot above the treetops which lined suburban streets.
The Saturday market was held in a multi-storey concrete block in Petaling Jaya, a satellite city on the outskirts of KL. Cars were parked at the base of the complex and shoppers walked up wide concrete ramps to enter the sheltered marketplace. We were there to buy next week’s groceries and a bulk of fresh gin-ger roots—my aunt had read that raw ginger was the secret to successfully regrowing hair after chemotherapy.
In the heart of the market Ah Ma and Auntie Sian disappeared to haggle with the ginger seller while I wandered away to dis-cover tofu that emerged glossy from buckets of water to be sold by the brick. Tables buckled under the weight of kuih seri muka cut into lime squares and crates of haphazardly piled fruit glowed in the dull hollows of concrete walls. Alone, without my aunt and grandmother, I stood out as a foreigner, pale and beguiled by the food on display. The women behind the stalls followed me with curious eyes. Tourists did not come to this market. I won-dered if I was another orang putih—a white person—to them, or if some part of my body gave away a different heritage.
I stopped in front of a stall to pick out some fruit, one of the few food purchases Auntie Sian entrusted to me when we went shopping. The proprietor was a middle-aged Chinese man, charismatic and loud as he squabbled with a group of young women over his prices. He exclaimed each time a number was offered and gestured to his wares. I didn’t understand what he was saying to them in Cantonese, but I understood the essence. Did they not know this was the freshest fruit at the market? Green apples imported from Australia! Papayas plucked fresh this morning! I dodged around them as a bartering battle began and moved closer to the piles of fruit: spiky rambutans, shelled mangosteens, and scaly dragon fruit. I fought the urge to reach out and touch the rind with my fingers. If I picked up a fruit, the stall owner might consider it sold and my aunt would never forgive such bad market tactics.
“Ah!” The stall’s owner was finished with his customers, who were dropping papayas into their plastic bags, and had noticed me. He held out a fist. With the indulgent showmanship of a salesman, he turned his hand over and unfurled his fingers from around a fruit. Its skin shone under the market’s fluorescent lights.
“Oh.” I stared, cross-eyed, at it, unsure if I should take it.
“Organic, fresh . . . no chemicals,” the man said, serious now. I recognised the fruit resting in his hand as a Java apple. I understood
the seller’s pride. It was a perfect fruit; the shape like an inverted bell or an oily womb. Its skin transitioned from flushed rose to unripe green so gradually that I couldn’t see the exact spot where nature had decided to switch colour palettes. An artist might spend a lifetime trying to replicate that ombré in watercolour paint.
The seller broke his own spell first, pulled his hand back, and the fruit disappeared. He was merry again and chuckled at the stunned expression on my face.
“Kate?” My aunt appeared beside me, rustling with plastic bags. Ah Ma and the stall owner began to haggle over prices in rapid Chinese.
We brought a small bag of Java apples home and I ate one that evening, after dinner, the flesh snapping off in a crisp crunch with each bite. As I ate the fruit, Ah Ma left the table and returned with a small red jewellery pouch.
“What’s this?” I tipped it over the palm of my hand and gold cascaded out in a single chain. On the end was a beautiful, strange pendant. It was two globes, one slightly bigger than the other, connected by a narrow belt. I couldn’t recognise the shape of it.
“Is it an hourglass?” I asked my grandmother, holding it up to the light.
She replied in Chinese and then translated herself: “Gourd.” My aunt came to look. “You know the gourd vegetable, Kate? The calabash? In China, they used to hollow them out and use them as bottles.” She nudged the gold pendant with a finger-nail. “I think it means luck?” She turned and conferred with Ah Ma in Longyan. “Luck and healing, maybe? This was Ah Ma’s necklace. That sort of charm is passed to girls.”
I fastened it around my neck. Ah Ma beamed a satisfied smile back and patted my arm. I thanked her.
“Only granddaughter lah,” she said as she shuffled in her plastic slippers from the room.
A fruit is a seed-bearing vessel. It is, quite literally, a fertilised ovary. Its one job is to disseminate the genes of its plant as far as it can, so that an offspring plant may grow and continue the lineage of the parent plant. Fruit tastes so deliciously sweet because it has evolved to appeal to our taste buds, as well as to the taste buds of all kinds of mammals and birds. We are the fruit-carrying vehicle through which plants have spread their seeds throughout the world. A citrus fruit is a hesperidium, a type of berry that develops a tough rind which covers the ovary wall—the white sponge which gets trapped under our finger-nails as we peel an orange.
A gourd is also a kind of fruit. After Ah Ma gave me the necklace, I searched online for the traditional meaning of the calabash. It is, like many symbols revered in Chinese culture, connected to auspiciousness: the first character of its Chinese name, 葫芦 (húlu), has a similar pronunciation to 福 (fu), meaning “fortune,” and its shape resembles the figure eight, considered a lucky number. Many cultures in Asia and Africa hollow out gourds and turn them into bottles, bowls, decora-tions, and musical instruments. In ancient China, doctors carried medicine inside the bottle gourd, and the vegetable became associated with longevity, health, and strength. Femininity, too, was connected to the calabash, its bloated belly implying an impregnated womb.
I wondered why Ah Ma had decided to pass it to me now. Around the time that she had been diagnosed with cancer, my maternal grandmother had been too, with lymphoma. Inheri-tance was something I was considering more now than before their diagnoses. Perhaps Ah Ma was thinking about it too, as she began to sort through her jewellery boxes to decide what to pass on to her daughter, her granddaughter, and her sisters.
There is material inheritance, but there is also what gets passed down through our genetics. In KL, I had reread Susan Sontag’s book Illness as Metaphor, written while Sontag was liv-ing with breast cancer in 1978. I was struck by how she imagined illness as a place. “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Sontag writes. “Sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”48 Having two grandmothers undergoing chemotherapy at the same time felt like I had walked right up to the borders of that other place. My grandmothers had migrated, and I was still on the other side, trying to see what lay ahead of me.
When my mother was going through menopause, she suffered terrible pain and discomfort. “You have this to look for-ward to,” she said to me, her words partially a joke and partially a promise. “My mother was exactly the same.”
Growing up I had been told that I had inherited my pater-nal grandmother’s hands and my maternal grandmother’s chin. If I had inherited these features from my grandmothers, then surely their cancers would be waiting somewhere inside me too? Ever since I was a teenager, I had been concerned with origins but I hadn’t given much thought to endings. Here was a future unfurling before me, a blank page already outlined.
The narrative of every living creature—plant or animal—begins and ends the same, with a birth and a death. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe this middle—this journey between destinations—as a plateau, and for them it is a place of excitement where divergence and possi-bility occur.49 In geology, the plateau is a high flat land, typically surrounded by mountains. The Tibetan Plateau, where the first wild orange is thought to have been cultivated, is often called the roof of the world because it is this planet’s vastest plateau. Its grasslands and lakes pass through eight national borders without hindrance. The plateau is liberated from a singular origin point and exists without the burden of a beginning or ending. It is where new connections can be formed, and old ones left behind.
In Malaysia, I felt bordered by beginnings and endings. Every moment in my family’s history had led me to this moment, to be sitting here in Kuala Lumpur with my grandmother’s necklace around my throat, with inherited illness on my mind. Life seemed like a road that I had been plodding along before I had sense enough to look up and take in my surroundings. I was no longer at the beginning now, nor was I at the end. I was in the middle of a plateau and any borders were of my own making. Perhaps there was still enough time to bypass them. Perhaps there was still enough time for the road leading from the past into the future to diverge and graft and multiply.
Excerpted from Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh. Published with permission from Tin House. Copyright © 2025 by Katie Goh.