A review by spacestationtrustfund
Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita

5.0

I am merely a character in a poem.

When I was a kid, around once a year my family would travel to visit my maternal grandparents, a journey which meant around 10-12 hours of sitting in a cramped uncomfortable seat next to my younger brother and staring out the window to watch the ground rush past. But I loved the actual experience of visiting my grandparents and all their curiosities, so far removed from the culture to which I was accustomed, and whenever it was time to leave I would wish I could grab onto the land with both fists and pull and pull until I'd dragged it with me across a continent, back home.

This sort of thing is, I think, an experience shared by many people who grew up feeling untethered to one culture or location—immigrants, diaspora, migrants, even those whose family moved frequently. Cultural identity is a slippery thing, prone to deceit, and constantly mutating. I've been reluctant to connect myself to any one specific cultural background, in part because I was lucky enough to be raised by a mother who understood the importance of a multicultural and multilinguistic education (she loved to tell me how my first word, "more," was in sign language). I was born far down south, very close to the beach and the ocean, the kind of place where it would rain while the sun still shone and tourists were as plentiful as locals. But the place I was born was not the place from whence my family came, and the place I live now is neither. The language I speak with my friends is not the same language I speak with my family. I hesitate to define my ethnicity or nationality by anything too specific, because I don't really feel intrinsically connected to any one place or culture or history—I couldn't take it with me, and so it is left behind.

Karen Tei Yamashita's 1997 novel involves a landscape which physically shifts along with the people attached to it, influencing and being influenced by their migration. The plot rapidly deepens like a coastal shelf. Every page is steeped in the immigrant experience, where the eponymous orange represents the diaspora made manifest: the line, invisible yet tangible, slowly being dragged along behind the characters' cultural drift to the point where it's being held together by a single person. Characters shrug out of and into cultural identities like coats from chapter to chapter. Everything has another layer beneath it, another fault line. It unpeels like Yamashita's orange, bright and citrus and full of physicality.

This book made me wish I gave a damn about LA. It also made me want to eat an orange—but hopefully one which does not contain the Tropic of Cancer.