seen from Australia
seen from Mexico
seen from Malaysia
seen from Switzerland
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from France
seen from Netherlands
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
seen from France
seen from India
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Poland
seen from Czechia
seen from Poland
seen from France
Each of us inherits the past and we have to choose what to do with it. Some of us ignore it and some of us are motivated by it. Some of us wield the weight of history as a weapon. Others paint it into still lifes, each brushstroke a desire for revelation.
Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
I wish to be remade.
Unlike the apple with its wholeness of the flesh, the orange can be taken apart and put back together again, segment by segment, skin over skin. It can be remade. 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.
— Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange (Tin House Books, May 6, 2025)
they're not even olives
History is an infinite ribbon of peel and it keeps unravelling, even after the groves are razed, the gods are dead, the villages are abandoned, and the books are written.
Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
Metaphor exists because we need stories to make the terror of being alive tolerable; because sometimes we don’t have the heart to stare at it straight on, to pull it from the shadows and expose all its facets to the light.
Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
As a child I thought loving two places—embodying two places in one body—meant dividing yourself. Now, I know that the act of loving multiplies the heart; it does not segment it.
Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
When a myth branches, a single story is free to grow towards various meanings.
Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
If the world were fair, destruction and creation would take the same effort. It is far too easy to destroy something. A red strike through a sentence. A flame through a forest. A fist through a flower’s roots. What took life a hundred years to create could be felled in mere minutes.
— Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange (Tin House Books, May 6, 2025)
