Along the Himalayan massif, the remnant straggles of ancient citrus groves sprawl. It is here, where the plains of Central, Eastern, and Southern Asia erupt into mountains, where the orange begins its journey eight million years ago.
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Citrus is unpredictable. The speed and ease with which interspecific hybridization can happen means that the genus is perplexing for scientists to trace back in time, never quite maintaining a straight chronology.
DNA is unable to offer neat distinctions among indigenous, naturalized, and mutated species, and history is uncertain of the impact ancient civilizations had in cultivating the fruit. Yet a cryptic past indulges mythmaking, and the first orange warrants an origin story.
In the shadow of a mountain, an insect hurries through a grove. From the mouths of pomelo blossoms, it collects golden pollen. Dazed and a little dozy from the morning’s labour, the creature withdraws; its stained wings weigh its body down on the flight home. All it desires is to deliver its yield back to the hive and rest.
And then—a sweet scent in the air; a ripe, mellow stickiness that lacerates the insect’s drowsy fog. Thrown into a frenzy, it darts to the source: a mandarin tree’s pale flower. Yellow dust brushes off its wings and onto the stigma as the insect sucks nectar from the blossom. Jade leaves quiver in the breeze. Satisfied, with a belly full of sugar, the insect drifts out of the grove, its part in this story concluded.
Yet a cryptic past indulges mythmaking, and the first orange warrants an origin story.
A week later, a spring wind rushes through branches and the fertilized flower collapses. In its place, fruit begins to swell. A mandarin grows, ripens, and disappears into the mouth of an animal that spits the pips, and presses each of the seeds into the earth with a heavy paw. Genomic endlessness offers a sport of a new strain of citrus. Part pomelo, part mandarin, a hybrid grows. Years pass, until the first wild orange falls from the tree.
Fruit spawn trees spawn seeds spawn life. Carried, blown, and dropped by beasts and wind, each orange begins its own journey, taken away from its homeland. Some move south, drawn to the heat of India. Others go east, spreading across the Yunnan province of China, which has subtropical highlands that are so fertile, future scientists will nickname it “the Kingdom of Plants.”
Monsoons from the Tibetan Plateau splinter Yunnan’s earth, and the rivers Mekong, Yangtze, and Salween burst forth to permeate Southeast Asia. Into rushing water, seed-stuffed fruit falls, floating for miles until it washes up on new muddy shores. Across centuries, oranges traverse rivers, forests, and mountains until, one day, a person chances upon a tree.
Sour and tangy, glossy and bright, oranges become beloved in China for the pleasure they bear. Odes to the fruit are composed. One of the earliest mentions of oranges in literature is in the Shūjīng, documents of Chinese antiquity and a record of the divided nation’s past carried from dynasty to dynasty, first compiled by Confucius.
In “Tribute of Yu,” a chapter written about the mythical leader of ancient China in the third century B.C.E., thirty oranges and pomelos are carried in the bundles of island people, offered as tributes in eastern China, along with precious metals, bamboo canes, and elephant teeth.
Oranges appear again in etiquette books, instructing the reader on the most courteous ways to peel the fruit while attending a royal court. Ribbons of bitter peel are added to honey, wine, and tea for flavor, while the whole fruit is placed around temples and homes, its brightness evoking sunshine, flames, and life itself.
The orange becomes as much ornament as food, treasured for its beauty and for what it symbolizes by its skin. During festivities such as Mid-Autumn Festival and Lunar New Year, bright fruit are portents for hope. Oranges and pomelos are left for ancestors and presented to gods in exchange for fertility, joy, and luck.
Oranges beguile early botanists, who become obsessed with cultivating hybrid species. Written in 1178 Ce by Han Yen-Chih, the Chü Lu is the oldest known document dedicated to the orange and describes twenty-eight varieties of the fruit.
By this time, the wild orange’s bitterness has been cultivated into something more palatable. Groves flourish across China and turn the orange into a product of commerce. Soon, the fruit is an industry unto itself, sold at markets and taken out of China to leave for new lands.
In 1646, Giovanni Baptista Ferrari, an Italian botanist, devoted Jesuit, and translator, publishes his masterpiece Hesperides, sive de malorum aureorum cultura et usu, a study of citrus. In between sketches of gardens, citrus cross-sections, and strange hybrids, Ferrari gives the orange his own meaning: “So I bestow upon this little rounded fruit the merited name of an ornament of the world, for in its golden dress it seems a decoration for the earth.”
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.
It has taken on new meanings, found new homes, and now the modern orange is a fruit designed in a laboratory to appeal to our senses, mass-produced to maximize profit, flown in planes to every corner of the world, marketed as wellness in waxy peel. It is a fruit continually mythologized anew by capitalism, religion, art, and history as it moves forward in time. Its future possibilities seem endless.
And yet, it cannot return to its authentic state or its original home. An exile of its first garden, the orange moves where the world takes it, always a stranger who must assimilate to a new home. Would the modern fruit even recognise its own ancestor, that first wild orange that bent its bough to fall to earth and begin its journey?
Line by line, it came to life. First a bowl—arched, effortless, a crescent moon—supported by three squat legs that raised its belly off the table. A confusion of orbs followed, none of them in full view. Piled on top of one another, the imperfect spheres were re-formed as other shapes—triangles, squares, hexagons—cut with sharp edges.
And, here and there, a waxing gibbous, half buried in the yawning mouth of the bowl. Pencil held loose between finger and thumb, my hand guided graphite to line, mark, and shade.
As the sketch emerged from the white haze of the paper, I was no longer conscious of my drifting wrist. My focus was settled on the center of a table where a bowl of unstable citrus sat. I studied each fruit like my life depended on it.
Inside the bowl were kumquats, oranges, and a pomelo. As I sketched the fruit, my eyes flitted between object and sketch, original and creation, absolute and attempt, always returning to settle back on the real bowl.
And yet, the more I sketched, the more unsatisfied I was with my subject. The ceramic’s glaze and the fruit’s skin shone glossy and cosmetic under the kitchen’s spotlights. The scene lacked depth.
I took one of the oranges, sliced it open, and arranged three of its quarters in front of the bowl. The fourth slice I ate. Drying juice from my page, I returned to the still life and surrendered to the work. Schooled instinct guided the grey of my pencil. For the next thirty minutes, nothing existed beyond bowl, citrus, and paper.
An exile of its first garden, the orange moves where the world takes it, always a stranger who must assimilate to a new home.
The sun rose. My grandparents’ alarm clock let out a shrill ring from across my Auntie Sian’s apartment. I finished my sketch. For the first time since I’d arranged the orange, I sat back to inspect the paper.
My errors were immediately obvious. The pomelo’s proportions were all wrong; its edges curved down too soon, its bulky globe diminished to the size of an orange. Or perhaps it was the oranges that were wrong, magnified to be the same size as the pomelo.
The spot-the-difference continued. Occasionally I had simply invented fruit, adding a kumquat into the sketch where I thought one would make a pretty addition. Brow pinching, I turned my attention to the bowl. The sketched ceramic had such a cavernous mouth that it was no wonder I had invented fruit to fill it. Only the orange wedges were a perfect match to the ones that lay an arm’s reach away.
I drummed my pencil against the table. I had been awake since the middle of the night, my brain foggy with jet lag and my body still running on European time. As I inspected the page, my head throbbed. I was sleep-deprived. No one can be expected to perfectly replicate reality on three hours of sleep.
Still, as my eyes darted from sketch to citrus, I was disappointed. In my sketch-book was a pale, smudged representation of what sat in front of me. Still life; dead art for dead nature.
I pushed back my chair and left behind real and imagined fruit. Stretching stiff muscles, I stepped out onto the balcony. It was the summer of 2010, and Kuala Lumpur was waking up.
In the city’s business centre, cleaners filed out with bursting bags of shredded paperwork. At the open-air market where Ah Ma, my grandmother, bartered with Malay and Chinese sellers, stalls were being set out for the morning rush. Drivers stuck in traffic skipped through radio stations. Children walked to school.
In the patch of rainforest that I could glimpse from my aunt’s apartment block, monkeys screeched to one another as they woke. And twenty floors below where I leaned over the balcony railing, Ah Kong, my grandfather, would soon commence his morning qi gong.
My father and I had arrived in KL two evenings ago. We were staying in the apartment of his sister, my Auntie Sian, along with Ah Kong and Ah Ma, and that night we would all be leaving together. My grandparents were visiting the city of Longyan in southern China, where both their families were from.
They hadn’t been back in a few years, and neither my father nor I had ever made the homegoing journey before. My father had grown up in Malaysia, and though I had often come to Malaysia as a child to visit my grandparents, I had never been to China. Some of my uncles and aunts had decided to join as well, so we would be a party of ten.
That night we would fly, first to Shanghai and then onwards to Xiamen, before driving to Longyan in the coastal province of Fujian, which lies across the water from Tai-wan. There, we would be hosted by my grandmother’s cousin and his family. But the true purpose of the visit was to leave the city and travel to the small, rural village where my grandfather’s parents had come from: our family’s place of origin.
My school exams had finished weeks before the trip, and I had devoted my summer to researching Fujian on the internet. The province is famous for its tulou buildings: contained, circular structures that once housed entire villages, built by the Hakka people as long ago as the fifteenth century and as recently as the twentieth century. I scrolled through photographs of these grand buildings, which were fortresses unto themselves, several stories high and perfectly symmetrical.
Tulou translates into English as “earthen building.” They were designed with feng shui precision for and by their inhabitants to exist in harmony with their surrounding rural landscape. Now heritage sites, most of Fujian’s clusters of tulous are no longer occupied—in the twentieth century, most families left their fortified homes and relocated to modern buildings.
But the images of these old, grand ring structures thrilled me. I knew our village would not be a tulou, but still, I let the fantasy run away from reality. As I clicked through photographs, I imagined my ancestors in their open-roofed tulou, where they lived under rain, sun, and stars.
I saw them throw open the gates and cross the threshold into neighboring groves and fields to tend the earth. Their hands pressed to the hard ground and warped trees. I could feel their kinship to their homeland, how it pulsed through the body. There was nothing I desired more than an affinity like that: to a place, to a history, to a sense of belonging.
I was seventeen, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood who was fixated on finding authenticity. Everywhere I looked I saw people who seemed certain of the skin they were in, who claimed their beliefs in a place that was home to them. I was frequently shocked by my classmates, who revealed their desires, miseries, and apathies, and who expressed them out of their bodies and into the world without hesitation.
In hindsight, I doubt all my classmates were quite as certain of themselves as I saw them then. Our school prized success—in academia, sports, and religious dedication—above all else, and the pressure—from teachers, parents, and peers—crushed children. Some students cried in toilet cubicles. Others turned to oblivion to escape the stress, lighting up rollies and swallowing pills.
Life beyond our school gates offered little relief from scrutiny. A Unionist, Protestant stronghold in the northeast of Ireland, our town was the living legacy of centuries of British colonial occupation. Here, religion was wielded in the community with an iron fist.
In July, Orangemen—named for the Protestant King William, not the fruit—marched under red, white, and blue bunting, and on the month’s eleventh night, effigies of Sinn Féin politicians, racist placards, and Irish flags hung from bonfires. After the bank holiday, the politicians who’d joined in with these festivities returned to Stormont to ensure abortion access and same-sex marriage remained criminalized.
Growing up in my corner of northeast Ireland, I saw how bodies that could not assimilate into the majority white, patriarchal, Protestant social order were deemed to be a threat. People who were non-white, queer, Catholic, immigrants—were openly demonized as foreign invaders.
Growing up in my corner of northeast Ireland, I saw how bodies that could not assimilate into the majority white, patriarchal, Protestant social order were deemed to be a threat.
I would see local news reports about Anna Lo, an Alliance Party politician and the only East Asian public figure in the north at the time. I listened to newscasters recount the abuse Lo faced every day: how she was chased in car parks, abused online, hounded as she walked the streets of Belfast. When she decided not to stand for re-election, I was glad. I was convinced that one morning I would wake up to the news of her murder.
I understood that the curtailment of self was paramount for survival. I was privileged—I could pass for white from afar—and so, if I remained vigilant about how I presented myself in public, I could fade into the background. I learned to quiet down, to avoid being recognized as different. I became secretive, refusing to give myself up to even my closest friends. I had seen how even the nicest people could succumb to hatred if provoked.
I existed in a limbo between truth and fabrication, part person and part shadow. And so, as I aged and I saw my classmates articulate themselves as individuals in our small corner of the world with reckless disregard, I was stunned.
Now, as an adult, I recognize that it was only my classmates born into the social majority who embodied the freedom of expression I so admired as a teenager. It was those with bodies which could move through our world without fear, who could afford authenticity.
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Excerpted from Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh. Reprinted with permission from Tin House. © Copyright 2025 by Katie Goh.
