Between Two Rivers

I never expected to love oranges the way I did in Belgium. Not because they were any different from the oranges I’d eaten in America. Not because they were ever in short supply, despite not being native to the Low Countries. And certainly not because they were the only fruit I ate away from home. (Shoutout to the many other fruits I cooked and baked with—pears, apples, strawberries, mangoes, and especially pineapples—plus the others I craved, like peaches.) Rather, by just a few too many overlapping circumstances to be called “coincidence,” oranges ended up populating my days, nights, and even my imagination.

The first and probably most memorable thing to say about oranges is that I developed an unlikely reputation among friends and colleagues for the way I eat them: never peeled, only sliced. Indeed, for years I thought slicing them was the only way to eat them. If Mom or Dad decided to buy oranges from ShopRite or Hong Kong Supermarket or 99 Ranch, it meant I’d be cutting them after dinner for all of us to share. No family banquet of ours, meanwhile, ever concluded without a plate of fridge-cold freshly cut oranges, placed brusquely by casino-suited waiters alongside large bowls of red or mung bean dessert soup on the large lazy Susan. Besides, why would anyone brave the exasperation of using their fingernails to claw their way through thick peel and stringy pith, only to stain their hands in sticky, sugary juice?

So when I started bringing oranges to the office kitchen and slicing them, my colleagues looked surprised (and in many cases, impressed). “You know you can just peel them like a normal person, right?” my one colleague E. teased—not that I took it as such, since I kept slicing into the flesh through softly gritted teeth. But the initial spectacle soon gave way to ritual, so much so that a few of us would linger longer after lunch to savor the citrus slices together.

In that sense, then, oranges seemed like a natural fit for my life and habits in Belgium: a common fruit made more precious, if you will, by the way I chose to prepare it (though I still maintain, no matter what E. says, that slicing oranges should be the default method of consuming them). But the fruit found other ways to occupy my mind as well. For one, I learned in Dutch class that the word for the orange fruit, sinaasappel, translates to “Chinese apple”—a clear nod to their arrival in the Low Countries via Eurasian trade routes. (In a strange but subtle way, the linguistic correspondence made sense to my own experience, as we were just as likely to share oranges for dessert as apples or any other sliceable fruit.) For another, it gradually dawned on me, one who’d always loved green, that orange was in fact my favorite color, a fact that I could trace to a series of clothing choices and mishaps. When my mother and I went shopping years ago in China to pick out raincoats, I opted for a bright orange one, thinking it would make me stand out in all conditions. (It didn’t.) When, on a blustery spring walk in rural Flanders, I tripped on a patch of mud and scraped my puffy orange coat against barbed-wire fence, I watched the down feathers scattering in the wind as though they were my disappearing life force. (I still wear the coat, mind you, thanks in no small part to the miraculous sewing work of my dear friend S., who generously patched up the tears with her own orange threads.) And when I searched for a new winter hat and scarf at the Uniqlo in Brussels, I instinctively chose an orange hat and blue-and-orange plaid scarf, no questions asked. (That permutation, funnily enough, nearly turned me into a living and breathing version of the Dutch flag.)

Even more poignant than these quirks, however, was the experience of losing someone so dear whose life also revolved around the sweetness and joy of fruit. When my grandmother, the renowned painter Zhang Tongyun (張彤雲), passed away at the age of ninety-four in October 2022, I cried at my office desk as I thought immediately of what became her most beloved work: an oil painting of a peeled tangerine, which she captured—ironically, but not coincidentally—in photorealistic detail. (I won’t debate the distinctions between oranges and tangerines here.) More than her technique, I recalled her immense generosity, fierce laughter, and warm spirit: all qualities that she no doubt channeled into the precise strokes of her paintbrush. 

Of all the reasons why oranges became a beloved fixture in my life, this is certainly the most important one. More often than not in my three years in Belgium, I ate oranges in the company of wonderful friends and colleagues, and I did my best to channel the tangerine energy my grandmother emitted in our years of conversation. And with each slice I shared, I learned something more about my companions than I—we—would have if we’d let ourselves peel our own fruit. 

These days, of course, I keep the oranges largely to myself. But in the silence surrounding each slice, in the unfolding of the arced peel, in the sinking of teeth into juicy flesh, I think fondly about my orange dreams, my orange memories, my orange imaginary.