Foreign Fruit: A Personal Journey Through One Fruit’s Cultivation, Migration and Globalisation

Growing up mixed race and queer in the north of Ireland, Katie Goh felt herself at odds with the culture and politics around her. In her teenage years she embarked on a journey to Longyan in the south of China with her father, to better understand her roots. But she did not find the easy, digestible answers she hoped for, and returned with only more questions about what it means to live authentically and to make sense of her identity. As she aged, she repeatedly sought ways of navigating this tension, and when her grandmother fell ill – in Malaysia – she ventured again to the land of her ancestors, now in her mid-twenties, to seek this authenticity out anew. But like an orange, cultivated through the vagaries of processes like genetic selection and grafting, she found that simple answers – simple fruit, singular, extractable – were impossible.

FOREIGN FRUIT is the author’s endeavor to flesh out these contradictions, to unpeel the layers of personhood; a reflection on identity through the cipher of the metaphorised orange, and as a journey from east-to-west and west-to-east