“The Mango Tree” is a memoir about the childhood of a mixed-race Filipina in South Florida.

The Mango Tree begins with a phone call: journalist Annabelle Tometich learns that her mother was arrested for shooting a man with a BB gun who was trying to take mangoes from her garden. What follows is a memoir of a wealthy but turbulent upbringing in a half-white, half-Filipino family in Fort Myers, Florida. In today's episode, NPR's Scott Simon asks Tometich about the moment she realized the violence in her home wasn't normal and what that mango tree meant to her immigrant mother.

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