Although I was not crazy about Pung's memoir, Unpolished Gem, I was wild about her novel Lucy and Linh. Pung sets the stage for being raised in a harsh environment with this anecdote about her father and the fruit trees on their property.
When we first moved in, my father too great care to water the plum tree at the front and the apricot tree at the back. After a while he got too busy and said it was a waste of water. "Let the rain take care of it," he said, but the rain was as half-arsed in its drippings as everything else around here, and eventually the apricot tree dried up. The plum tree survived but bore sour pellets.
Bastard NYPL snatched back my digital copy, so I don't know what other passages I'd highlighted.
Mostly I was taken with the story of this first gen fancy school student dealing with the superior snoots and ignorant do-gooders are her new school. There's an epistolary conceipt that I found predictable but not annoyingly so.