Home Sweet Orange

Published in Peatsmoke Journal, Spring 2024.

When I visited San Diego I was delighted with the dotted little surprises that could be spied in backyards, resplendent at every stop sign throughout the drive to my Mom’s apartment rental: orange trees ripe with orange fruit. I visited my mom and brother ever since they moved to California. Vancouver is too dreary and cold to grow these trees, which crave the full sun yet produce fleshy, watery fruit protected in its colourful rind. These were different to me than those with South Africa stickers that my parents bought. The store-bought variety were obligatory fruit servings that my mom insisted upon after dinner. I whined about my sticky fingers and mouth, yellow pulp between my teeth for what I considered to be unsubstantial sweetness in return. But it was a completely different matter to see oranges growing in the wild- or at least, the domesticated nature of someone’s backyard.

I’ve never eaten an orange fresh from the tree. I’ve tried lemons in Italy, so strong and vibrant it was like a zingy punch. I’ve tried peaches from the tree in the Okanagan Valley, juicy and seductive fruits. Lychee and durian so fresh the ants were still crawling in Cagayan de Oro, my dad’s hometown. Strawberries cleaned from the straw and mud in Trois-Rivières, apples snapped off branches during the crisp picking season. But the oranges of California that I could spot were all on private land in someone’s backyard. My family doesn’t know anyone with an orange tree, and only a few people with their own backyards. We've been nearly perpetual renters except for when my parents saved and borrowed money from relatives to buy a duplex unit that we lived in for two years.

The orange for me became a symbol for home ownership, something I have complex and often conflicting feelings about. I think about buying a home in San Diego one day, partly for a place to live in with endless sun and the liveliness of my SoCal family, and partly for building wealth in a place where my money would go further and I could have a backyard compared to what one could buy in my housing bubble hometown. And a backyard can grow an orange tree.

California has lots of beloved tree species that are in fact invasive to these regions. The oranges and lemons must have originally come by way of European trade during the pioneering of the Wild West, sourced from Spain and Italy. Orange County and parts of San Diego County had important orange agricultural industries back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, until Florida unbuckled southern California’s orange belt. The eucalyptus tree thrives in California. They line the endless freeways for miles like tall, genteel guardians of your journey, wishing you safety and slowness as the expensive cars change lanes in ways that imitate a spiral DNA helix. But the eucalyptus is native to Australia. It was brought by Australians during the California Gold Rush to be a renewable source of building material for the newly colonised state. They didn’t use it for building as much as they thought, and the tree easily spread into the arid landscape.

Even the iconic palm tree, long a symbol of the hot and fast, lavish and star-studded mirage of California, is not native to there. Some originate from Mexico and more species were introduced in the 1700s by Spanish missionaries, much like the oranges. They were cultivated by developers in the cowboy days to encourage newcomers to populate the West, then filmed as staples of the southern California skylines during the infancy of Old Hollywood. Only one species of short palm in the Mojave Desert is native to California. I learned in Barbados that biologically speaking, palm trees belong to the family of grasses, not true trees. Palms are the tallest grasses, some species even taller than the giant bamboo of Southeast Asia.

These four invasive species of tree make me wonder about other questions regarding scales and spectrums, tools which help me communicate and validate my understanding of nuances. At what point does a species stop being invasive, if it ever does? How long must a species thrive in a foreign biological habitat before it becomes symbiotic with the other organisms there, one of the members of the community? Many Californians argue that the eucalyptus has been in the state for long enough that it is part of California’s landscape, and there is no disputing the dream that the palm trees lend to the state’s identity. Ireland’s staple carbohydrate, potatoes, were introduced to the green isles from colonizers returning from South America, where thousands of varieties were cultivated. I wish I could taste even a hundred different varieties of potatoes, since I’ve never met a potato dish I didn’t like. Horses were domesticated on the extreme hot and cold steppes of Central Asia and ran with humans all the way to new wild corners, making feral homes in the swamps of the Camargue in France. How many generations before the invasion becomes a new part of the food chain and altered environment? Do they become less invasive if they commit less harm to the local ecosystem? Strictly speaking, of course, to plant and animal species. People moving for better opportunities shouldn’t be considered invasive; I should know.

Within the generations in my lineage that I’ve gotten to meet in this lifetime, there has already been great migration. My parents and at least five hundred years’ worth of ancestors grew up in the Philippines, plus the occasional Spanish, Chinese, and Italian-American great-grandparent with their own tales of travel landing on Philippine soil. In America my Dad marveled at apples in a market since they were expensive in the Philippines, less common than oranges from China. My dad went to Virginia first, then Brooklyn, New York where he and my mom met. I was born there and wonder how different I would be if we had stayed.

My parents tell me we were the only Asian family among a neighbourhood of Puerto Ricans. If I had grown up as the visible outsider I would have been conflicted about my racial heritage compared to now, where in this timeline I spent my grade school years in a predominantly Filipino school. If we’d stayed, I would have been personally affected by the attack on 9/11 since I would have been in my first week of a Grade 2 classroom, might even have heard the event since it was just a walk away via the Brooklyn Bridge. Before that could have happened my parents had moved our little family to Vancouver. They say they didn’t like the harsh East Coast winters, but it was also because the work visas were expiring soon. Thankfully Canada offered a visa, too. When life gives you oranges, make orange juice.

Once we landed in Vancouver we had a series of moves every few years. Beyond the New York apartments I don’t remember, my childhood was lived in the Marine Drive basement, the Fraser apartment, the Hoy House I, Dad’s apartment, Tita Benny’s basement, Tita Digna’s basement, and the Surrey townhouse. One of them had an apple tree that dropped small, sour inedible apples that were shriveled and hard like a bitter, stone fruit heart. I dream of seasonal living with Vancouver’s ten P.M. sunsets, San Diego’s plump, sweet oranges in the winter harvest, and a new countryside of my choosing during the rainy ordinary time between New Year’s and summer solstice. It’s possible that this urge for a semi-nomadic lifestyle came from a childhood and coming-of-age filled with my own mini-migrations.

At the end of Grade 11 my mom and brother moved to San Diego to live with her new husband, but my sister and I didn’t want to adjust to a new country as teenagers. We loved Vancouver. We turned down the option to move with them. It’s another fork in the crossroads of the travels of my life. At seventeen I was very moldable to new values and ways of being. Would I have developed yet another American alter ego, never to exist like my tough-talking Brooklyn would-have-been? A tan, boba-drinking freeway driver who spent weekends at EDM raves in the desert and no longer noticed the orange trees at stop signs?

I don’t think my family’s migration story is over. After my dad retired, my sister graduated from university, and I gained another unplanned year in banking, I realized that there were neither commitments nor foundations binding us to Vancouver. For me the combination of no longer being in school, entering the self-assuredness of my late-twenties, people moving away for education or job offers, and undergoing the isolation of a pandemic meant that my friend and acquaintance circles had shrunk. I realized that after a quarter century in Canada, this offshoot of the family tree had only the memories and the handful of precious friends we had as the legacy that we had lived in Vancouver.

Like a scraggly citrus tree blooming fruit from a sandstone red cliff, I saw my hometown undergo dramatic change in infrastructure and public life from a gritty, nondescript working town to a globally respected cosmopolitan destination. During that development a housing bubble with a stubborn rind formed and hasn’t popped, pricing out many first-time buyers in their 20s, 30s and even 40s.

For many years Vancouver has ranked with Toronto and New York as one of the most expensive cities to buy a property in in North America, so it had long been ingrained in my mind that it was very hard to buy a place to live if you didn’t have a down payment contribution from family. So I was dazed and confused when I learned that over ten years I had cobbled up enough to get approved for a mortgage on a one-bedroom condo in a growing area of Surrey, a neighbouring suburb. My frugal budgeting habits served the idea of “saving for a rainy day”, there being lots of rainy days in places where oranges don’t grow. My parents helped me focus on saving. They contributed towards my education fund, a little every month since I was born so that it paid for three years of tuition at my Canadian university.

During my condo hunt I wondered whether I was a class traitor or if I was “moving up in the world”. An orange tree is established enough to yield fruit five years into its fifty-year lifespan, and at twenty-seven I wondered if I would live beyond a hundred. I felt guilty that in addition to a place I could call home and mine, I wanted a property for equity. I wanted it to appreciate in value and to rent it whenever I wanted to travel. This way I could have a home and a financial asset that wouldn’t anchor me if I wanted to roam, as my restless spirit does.

Would that make me another parasitic landlord? Since age seventeen I had viewed society through lenses of systems of oppression, and I was cognizant of gender, race, and class constructs that provided uneven disadvantages to people with intersections of identity. Was my individualistic goal to buy a property at odds with this system of beliefs? What was with the obsession with ownership of land? What if it was for my family’s liberation, in the reaching sense of the child for whom they had crossed an ocean and then a continent finally “making it” in Canada by building generational wealth through housing equity? I pushed these troubling thoughts aside, deciding that this was one of the allowances where systemic change would occur beyond my lifetime, and so I might as well play ball under the slow-moving machinations of capitalism while trying to dismantle it in other areas.

I almost bought the yardless, 527 square feet condominium in Surrey. My preferred two-bedroom condo listings were out of my budget. I had signed the offer with my conditions and issued a bank draft for the confirmation deposit, the last step before I’d be locked in to pay the rest of the down payment. But I hesitated the day before the offer expired. As a teenager I resented living in the Surrey townhouse and getting separated from my school friends at a time when I was most sensitive to peer acceptance, after my mother and grandparents had done the exact same thing and bought there since it was cheaper. Was I going to follow her footsteps and settle for a compromise? Maybe the orange didn’t fall too far from the tree after all. I returned to the bank and deposited the cheque back into my account. I knew it wasn’t truly what I wanted; Surrey hadn’t felt like home the first time.

When I went to San Diego in March it felt like coming home. Orange and lemon trees waved a welcome to me on the drive to my mom’s apartment. The temperate coastal rainforest and the desert have always been biomes where I immediately felt at home. This is from someone whose ancestors hail primarily from the tropics of the Philippines, showing that it only takes one generation of introduction to a new land for a person to become at home in the ecosystem. The leafy palm trees lined the hazy orange horizon, shaggy-haired like the skateboarders and surfers of California and slender like everyone and my mother’s body type aspirations here.

My mother offered me orange juice squeezed from oranges from Costco. She likes to drink a glass of five oranges and one grapefruit every night before bed as one of her many rituals for eternal youth. Evenings were noisy at my mom’s house, between her juicer pulverizing the pulp and Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune blaring on the tv to compete. It was delicious and sweet, thicker than the juice from a carton. “Buy a house here, anak ko,” she pleaded. “Not in Vancouver. Move to California and then I can live in it and pay you rent, and we’ll be together.”

The invasive orange tree has thrived for long enough that it helped build the wealth of Orange County. The eucalyptus’ flammable bark presents a hazard in a drought-choked state, yet it provides habitat for migrating native birds and seasonal monarch butterflies living the semi-nomadic dream. The palm trees provide scant shade, consume lots of water, and catch fire easily, but for their exoticism and elegance no one disputes their belonging on California sidewalks. My family and I carved out rocky starts in New York, Vancouver, and San Diego until we had an untethered branch network of our friends, the toil and time of life savings, and a collection of local knowledge to unpeel and share about these areas we called home.

Mom had heard me tell her that it was unlikely we’d live together again now that I was grown, yet she didn’t give up hope. Her saying it solidified my idea for the same thing, to buy elsewhere what was beyond reach in my hometown, to have family close so I could stay whenever I wished and travel whenever I wanted, all in one solution. I drank her store bought, pulp-free orange juice in big gulps. Maybe one day the oranges would be fresh from the tree. They would be seedy like the risky start of new opportunities and dusty with the inescapable desert and smog of San Diego.

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