A hauntingly beautiful hybrid memoir that uses the journey and cultivation of a single fruit – the orange – to reckon with the author’s own identity and unpack themes of globalisation, colonialism and migration.
A sharp-sweet memoir of change, identity and hybridity. I loved it - KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering
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?
In this distinct, subversive and intimate hybrid memoir, Katie Goh explores the orange as a means of understanding the world, and herself within it. What she finds is a world of violence, colonialism, resilience, survival, adaptation – and of unexpected beauty and sweetness against all odds.
