The Many Meanings of the Mango

Mangoes—revered and prized by almost every culture in which they are cultivated—are a migrant fruit.

This is Non-Native Species, a column by Jessica J. Lee on plants, people, and their intertwined migration stories.

When I was nine, two decades after arriving in Canada with almost nothing, my parents turned the hard corner into wealth. It was a feat I could not understand then. They bought a second home: a condo with a mango tree on an island off the coast of Florida. From then on, they eschewed the option of visiting their home countries—Taiwan and Wales—and decided that we would spend every school holiday and summer vacation at the condo. I asked my father if this meant we were rich, but he replied simply that it was inappropriate to talk about money.

I turned my attention instead to the riches I could find outdoors. The condo was on a small island with a building height restriction. Summer afternoons on the Gulf Coast broke into thunderstorms at three p.m. like clockwork. I learned new rhythms. I learned to ride bikes to the Circle K for cherry coke, and how to shuffle my feet on the seabed to avoid stingrays. With the friends I made there, I learned to exchange words like “garbage” for “trash,” “soda” for “pop.” The other kids—who came from Missouri and Ohio—asked if we had penguins where I came from. They asked how it was that my parents had come to be there.

In the backyard, my mother began to garden, with me as her helper. The weather in Florida reminded her of Taiwan: lush growth, heat, humidity. Behind the condo, there stood a mango tree three stories tall. I cannot say how old it was, nor what variety of mango it yielded, but I remember every detail of the shade it cast. I remember the feel of its leaves, the weight of its fruit. The ground around it had a sap-sweet smell, from overripe drupes that fell and returned to the soil.

A few days every summer, she would draw an extendable pole out of the garage. At its end were a bag and blade, fastened to a string and a trigger. When the fruit came in full and ripe, she leaned from the balcony, reaching each drupe with her picking pole. They fell into the canvas bag with a heavy thud. One by one, I transferred them to a white plastic basin, for my mother to rinse and eat in the afternoons and evenings. She ate them alone; I was picky.

It was on one of those days that I learned the Mandarin word for “mango”: 芒果 (mángguǒ), and that the word for “fruit” 果 is also the word for “result” or “consequence.”

*

Mangifera indica carries its origins in its name; the mango comes from India, from the foothills of the Himalayas. Like cashews, sumac, and pistachios, the mango belongs to the Anacardiaceae family of plants, most notable for its irritant plants: poison ivy and poison oak.

When I studied botany during my PhD, our instructor gave us stern warnings about the Anacardiaceae: we should learn to recognize the family by smell (crushed or slashed parts of these plants smell, conveniently, of mangoes) and, should we ever find ourselves doing field research, to handle the sap with care. A picture of rash-inflamed skin flashed up on the PowerPoint under the words “Sap—Beware!!”

The lessons proved valuable: While I hadn’t eaten them as a child, I grew up to learn that I have a mild but rare allergy to mangoes, which means that if I ingest their skin or sap, I can end up with hives and itching skin for days afterwards. It isn’t an exact science; sometimes I break out, and sometimes I don’t. So I eat mangoes rarely, and only in circumstances where I can control their preparation. But despite this—perhaps because eating them is such a rare thing for me—I long for the sweetness of their juice, the redolent smell of that mango tree from childhood.

I long for the sweetness of their juice, the redolent smell of that mango tree from childhood. 

Mangoes—revered and prized by almost every culture in which they are cultivated—are a migrant fruit. I mean this in the obvious way: The plants themselves were spread as a result of human migration from India, Burma, and the Malay Peninsula to China by the seventh century; to East Africa by the tenth, and the Philippines by the fifteenth.

Its movements thereafter mirror colonization; mangoes were cultivated nearly anywhere the trees would survive, from Hawaii to Mexico to Florida to West Africa, spread especially along routes traversed by Spanish and Portuguese colonists and through French and English botanical gardens. Though hundreds of cultivars have been recorded worldwide, today, most commercial varieties of mangoes were developed in Florida; with our help, mangoes have circumnavigated the globe.

This story is contained in languages, too. Across all the languages I speak, the word for mango is simple: mango in English, Mango in German, mangue in French, mangguo in Mandarin. Its name has stayed relatively the same in almost every place in which it appears. “Mango” in English comes first from the Portuguese “manga,” then from Malay, and ultimately from Malayalam “maanga.” Portugal held colonies in India as early as 1505. That we say “mango” is a trace of this legacy.

But to speak of migration, language, and the mango is more complicated than it appears.

The mango can be an uneasy symbol for many: like the coconut, a crude, performative shorthand for tropical places. In E. M. Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India, mangoes are almost obsessively discussed. They are the orientalized objects on which stories hang, the currency with which to treat a guest: “‘But what can we offer to detain them?’ ‘Mangoes, mangoes.’” The fruits are scattered so densely through the text that they are, in one famous passage, likened to a woman’s breasts: “For you I shall arrange a lady with breasts like mangoes.” In Forster’s hands, the notion that mangoes, in many cultures, signify bounty becomes an agonizing thing.

In post-colonial literature in the middle of the twentieth century, by contrast, mentioning mangoes, guavas, plantains, or breadfruit lent legitimacy to a natural world which had, under colonialism, been side-lined against the ideal of European nature reified in literature. In a 1964 essay entitled “Jasmine”, V. S. Naipaul describes a passage of text in which women were likened to all manner of Trinidadian flora; not pejoratively, but as a reclamation. “Fiction or any work of the imagination, whatever its quality,” he writes, “hallows its subject.”

By the end of the century, however, the fate of fruit had shifted once more. The mango had become so ubiquitous as to be deemed cliché. Critics pointed to the opening lines of Arundhati Roy’s 1997 novel The God of Small Things, where “black crows gorged on bright mangoes” and to a wave of “sari-and-mango novels” that followed it. As if exiling the fruit from fiction, the writer Jeet Thayil proclaimed in 2012, “I try to avoid any mention of mangoes, of spices and monsoons.”

In a matter of decades, fruit had become extraordinarily fraught, and mangoes, in particular, had the unfortunate tendency of signifying exoticism for a white gaze.

But when I began to write this essay—deep in the dullness of a quarantined springtime—I started asking friends about mangoes. With limited access to tropical fruit on the bare shelves of the supermarket where I live in Germany, I hadn’t eaten one in months. The replies I received told me something vaster than the trite cliché of sensual tropical fruit.

A Filipina living in Germany told me of the small, candy-like fruit she missed from childhood; I learned that the Philippines are famous for having the best mangoes in the world. I learned of aunts and uncles who posted boxes of Alphonso mangoes across the world for relatives in the United States to eat, clustered around the dining table, all at once. I heard from a Chinese-Malaysian-New Zealander friend who had been taught by an Indo-Swiss friend how best to eat the fruit. These stories weren’t about some tropical Other, but about the traces of a past—of skill and familiarity—that remained after migration.

These stories weren’t about some tropical Other, but about the traces of a past—of skill and familiarity—that remained after migration. 

A more recent wave of essays reflects this sentiment. Dianne Jacob, in her 2016 essay “The Meaning of Mangoes,” writes of the time her father—an Iraqi Jew from Shanghai who’d immigrated to Vancouver—imported a box of mangoes, which he left to ripen in the basement. The air became a “fragrant cloud of tropical musk,” and the mangoes came to signify a kind of forbidden pleasure. Sam Nakahira writes of her grandparents’ Hawaiian mango tree, their unparalleled sweetness, and her fear that in time, those mangoes will simply become memories. K-Ming Chang writes of mangoes, kumquats, guavas, migration, and her mother, such that fruit and the body are intertwined: swelled with sweetness, with water, with rain. Mangoes could be something more, still.

Gathering all these words, I called my mother.

*

Here I, too, will resort to cliché: to Proust and his madeleine. I am fascinated by the way words can be bound tight to past places, by the way a simple question can unfold an entire scene, long thought forgotten. The way a fruit—even just its mention—can carry more than its weight in flesh.

I asked my mother about the mango tree in our garden. My parents divorced some years after they’d bought the condo in Florida, and in the decades after my mother had mentioned more than a few times how much she missed that mango tree and its fruit. “I remember you saying how much you loved them during childhood,” I added. I could not have expected the story she told me then; she was as surprised as I was.

In the summer of 1960, my grandmother and my mother were living in a rented room in the countryside outside Taipei. My grandfather, an air force colonel, lived on an airbase two hours away in Taiwan’s south. My mother was six years old, and spent her time roaming the rice paddies nearby or catching butterflies in the garden.

One evening, on the way home from her work as a secretary for the Nationalist government in Taipei, my grandmother stopped at the fruit market. She bought five kilograms of mangoes—the tiny, yellow-green Taiwanese variety. As the sun set, with an enamel basin at their feet, my mother and her mother sat silent beneath the trellis of the garden on low wooden stools. My grandmother carefully peeled each mango for my mother, who sucked the sugar-sweet fruits clean to their pits. Warm juice dripped from her chin, but also from her hands, her arms. It dripped from her elbows to the dust on the ground.

“This was,” my mother told me over the phone, “one of my happiest memories.”

I didn’t know what to say.

To say that my mother’s relationship with my grandmother was strained would be putting it delicately. I had heard so many stories from her past, and arranged them accordingly: stories of love and beauty featured my grandfather; the violent, painful ones involved my grandmother. There are some stories that are not mine to share.

This was the first happy memory I had heard about my grandmother. The first time she had painted such a scene for me: that countryside home, the garden, the warmth. I thanked my mother for telling me; she thanked me, too, for asking.

She didn’t say anything else; it sufficed, perhaps, to have told me this much. A lifetime later, it was the mango—brimming with more than sweetness—that she was left with.