is anyone prepared for an early morning collect phone call from an inmate at the county jail especially when the call comes from your mother who's been arrested for shooting a man who dared to mess with her mango tree and that is how The Mango Tree A Memoir of Fruit Florida and Felony by Annabelle Tometich begins welcome to between the covers I'm Anne Bocock Anabelle Tometich went from medical school reject to line cook to journalist to author and we're glad she did she spent 18 years as a food writer editor and restaurant critic she is an award winning writer and her highly acclaimed Memoir The Mango Tree A Memoir of Fruit Florida and Felony is beautifully written and one I could not put down welcome Annabelle thank you so much an the story is beautiful the story is complex I mean this parts are heavy this this is a journey it is your Filipino American journey you're navigating multiple cultures and it also will resonate with anyone who has ever felt other than right so let's start way back before you even came into the picture we need to know your parents tell me about your mother Joe yeah so my mother Josephina is a central figure in this book uh she was born in Metro Manila and um the the probably one of the poorest neighborhoods of Metro Manila called son Andre bukid and I think from a very young age she realized that she did not want to be there and that she wanted something better for herself and for her life and uh from a young age she also understood that to get that and to get out of Manila she had to become a nurse because there was a very robust nursing pipeline put in place by you know America during their occupation of the Philippines in the early part of the 20th century and that system allowed certain people to get into Healthcare and come to the US to kind of fill these jobs that uh for whatever reasons you know American workers weren't able to come in and take so yeah that was that was the one side this one you know very Filipino side of me and then I had this very white father who's from New England and who had a very different life than my mother a very privileged and comfortable and safe and you know kind of just cushy life um and the two of them end up meeting at a hospital in Fort Meers Florida and you know and that's where we're going to pick up the story yes from the first page we we see there are these issues of fitting in issues of acceptance there is a courtroom scene where you're looking around and you think they are not like us we are not like them right explain that yeah and kind of in that statement I count myself in the we you know I count myself in the the do good who are you know on this one side of the courtroom bench as opposed to the first appearance criminals or alleged criminals who were on the other side of the courtroom bench um and I am kind of seeing things as you know my mother has broken the law and that makes her a bad person and I am here trying to do the best I can as this good person to perhaps help her out or figure the situation out and and you know move things forward for her um and I think throughout the course of the book and throughout the course of reflecting on you know my family and my childhood and everything I came to realize that you know there aren't those distinctions those distinctions are aren't exactly real I would love to hear this in your voice the way you wrote and if you could read that passage I believe it's on page four certainly yeah so yeah this is in the Lee County courtroom during my mother's first appearance hearing um when Mom called from jail that morning I didn't freak out if 35 years with my mother had taught me anything it was not to freak out I called my sister my brother that close friend of ours who's a defense attorney I led with Mom shot a man's car window out I followed with he was messing with her mangoes they got it I know mom loves us in her own Josephina ttic way I'm equally certain she loves her mango trees deeply fondly unabashedly I'd put her banana trees in a close second for her tropical affections followed by her atis calamansi avocado and Tamarind trees if her pineapples are fruiting that throws it all off if her pineapples are fruiting that throws it all off the equation is totally different at its core this book is honest and honesty can be painful you write about your childhood home there was anger there was violence your Mother's Rage at times was all consuming what does this do to a child oh I know right I mean I think it can do a lot of things to a child I think you know maybe one of the things I didn't write as much about is is kind of the how these different tensions put different pressures on different members of the family but as the eldest daughter you know the pressures that I faced were very specific and very different than what my siblings kind of had to deal with um and I think I'm very fortunate in a lot of ways to not have an addictive personality and to kind of fall into things that are relative L safe socially speaking um but I was a very compulsive very obsessive child uh i' have throughout the book there's an obsession with numbers and counting and trying to make this world add up that really did not add up in all these other different ways um and I think just as easily that Obsession could have been drugs or alcohol or something much more you know deteriorating um and in a way I think that's lucky but um yeah there you I had to grow up I had to grow up very very early on um my father passed when I was nine my sister was 5 years old our brother was 9 months old uh and you know there was a big a big question mark of like where do we go from here and the answer was you know even more so than I already had been I needed to step up and become that other parent in the house at at you know 10 11 years old you know truly more than just survival you you you really did Thrive and it it's you know to your to your credit remarkable book your grandmother your your father's mother I there's no other way to say it she was a racist oh yeah and there are words that I can't say on public television that that she said do you writing this did you look at it differently from the child's view than you do now as an adult do you see her differently now 100 well in for for years and years I didn't realize she was racist she was Grandma you know like I never ever realized I remember the first time I heard the word microaggression I think it was after college or in college sometime around then I was like microaggressions and there you know these little slights that you hear and that you kind of internalize and that aren't overt forms of racism but are these gentle digs of racism that kind of stick with you for all these years and the examples they were giving I was like that's just how my grandmother would talk to me every single day there was no realization as a kid that that was what was going on um and then you know so I grew up with this very kind of innocent idea of my grandmother and you know she lost her son and she died um when I was very fairly young and then as an adult it was like this flip-flop of like oh my gosh grandma was racist like Grandma you know did like she didn't just hate my mother because my mother was my mother she hated my mother because she was brown and because she saw my mother as deluding her Bloodlines you know um and that's kind of a oh my goodness you know and then you start thinking of yourself in all these different ways of like if I internalized all of that as kindness and goodness then like what else have I internalized as kindness and goodness that is in fact not not such thing um so yeah there's there were a lot of Revelations that came about that I really hadn't considered before kind of sitting down to put all this together that was a huge one you mentioned your father your father died when you were nine and you wrote something that that I I had to underline and it said I knew my dad for only nine years I often wonder if I'm remembering him or Magnum PI whose eighth season overlapped neat with Lou tomic's fatherhood yeah and I read it and I underlined it and I said that is a power even saying it now that that did a number on me yeah I mean to be honest when I try to like pull up images of my dad like they are sometime images of Magnum PI you know there sometimes Tom celik is there and I'm like no no no that's not your father and I'll have to look at pictures sometimes because I was so young when he passed um and I think part of this book and part of you know what once I started writing it cuz I don't think I I did not set out to write a memoir first of all like I would never ever set out to write a memoir um I thought it was going to be a cookbook and I thought it would be a cookbook with these like quirky essays about my childhood and I kind of realized that the quirky essays weren't getting to the heart of What mattered um and the Heart of What mattered were the was this you know very interesting and unique childhood and all of these kind of racial things that formed this person I've become today um and also this kind of respons possibility of you know doing Justice to these people and especially Our Father um because like I said my sister and brother were so young when he passed so these kind of photograph memories that I have they don't even have that um or these blurry memories I have they don't even have that uh and a part of me really just wanted to even if it never became a book if it never went anywhere or sold or anything like that I would have this kind of you know recording of my memory of our childhood and this picture that I wanted to rebuild of Our Father who my sister and brother didn't get to experience um and that was that was a big motivation for sure stepping back this book is a beautiful way to have a conversation about identity about belonging I imagine you hear that from readers a lot yes yes very much so and it's interesting vers you know talking to readers in Florida versus talking to readers in other parts of the country um I think it's it's interesting how few stories are written out of Southwest Florida you know how few stories come out of Fort Meers in specific um so readers there are always kind of like it's it's beautiful to see my hometown on the page you know and to see it kind of accurately and honestly rendered as you know hopefully I have in this book and then to get outside of Florida and to connect with Filipino readers and Filipino American readers and Asian-American readers and you know readers of all these kind of other classes that we as we talked about um is even more fascinating to me because I thought this story was so odd you know and so different and I didn't know that it would be you know all that relatable necessarily but there's just all these little aspects of it that people have been able to latch on to that I never ever imagined possible was there ever a moment of hesitation about sharing some of these personal stories very much so yeah um it's funny because if you take any kind of writing work Workshop or thing like that they tell you just write the story that you need to write in the moment and if it goes anywhere you'll cross those bridges when you come to them um and so I did I I was very much like okay we're just going to write it as I remember it um you know imbue all those emotions that I remember into these scenes that I'm trying to Cobble together and everything um and then the bridges come and you have to cross them and you have to figure out okay how much of this story am I honestly willing to divulge how much of you know this reality am I honestly willing to put out there and you know how can I understand the sacrifices that will mean of relationships or um you know my sister or brother talking to me ever again um and I was very careful uh I was very careful to one be incredibly honest but then to two like make sure that the people I cared about most were okay with that Honesty were okay with that being out there um and honestly for me that met my sister and brother um I they were the first people I went to kind of saying if you're not okay with this like I can change things I can alter things you know I can have two brothers I can have two sisters um like it's Memoir it's not autobiography um you know there's room to play I feel like as long as you're being very honest with the emotions of the of this situation and um they both read it and you know uh I think my sister put it very nicely she said this is the story you had to write about our childhood and I was like okay I can work with that your mother mother was an amazing woman she was smart she was ambitious she was complicated with a Capital C yes and something else that that you wrote and I believe I I have this verbatim parents are capable of serious Soul crushing harm now my take away from that is that parents have their own so stories that are separate from ours and do we need to show Grace oh I know yeah and how do you define grace how what is Grace in these situations um and honestly to me I think Grace was incredibly important and for me that kind of meant you know being brutally honest but not just about the bad times about all the times you know because there were wonderful times in there too and there was reasons for the bad times um and they weren't always Justified and they weren't always you know reasons that I would ever repeat with my own children but there were reasons there um and I feel like for me Grace was painting a picture that had all of those reasons in it and all of those motivations and all of those textures and layers and things um because my mother is so incredibly complicated um and she was so brilliant you know like to to get to where she has from where she came from is not you know that is it's an exponential leap um for anybody and I think that was a huge realization of you know this woman who I was very willing to kind of like two- dimensionalize into this flattened you know evil mom kind of role was like well no when you look at it there's so much more there um and it's actually pretty remarkable if you can get over if I can get over my own you know preconceived notions of her you know and I and I think you learned that on on your trip when when you've traveled with with your mother to the Philippines yeah that was honestly my favorite sections to write with the Manila chapters and for a while like this book had way too many words for a long time and there was a whole like act that was like just devoted to that month I spent the family spent in Manila when I was 11 years old after after our dad died um because it was revelatory it was life-changing like it was it was Paradigm shifting you know you grew up thinking like life is this and then all of a sudden you're like nope there's this and there's this and there's this and there's this and you know this whole world opened up to me of like that this is not normal like the life we have in the US in so many ways is not normal and that this mother I had in the US is not this is not all of her it's not all of this person you know that there's so much more personhood to my mom than just like raising three kids in Robert elely County Florida there's so much more to her and just the absolute mind-blowing nature of that trip is still for me you know I mean it shapes so much of who I am you spent a long time trying to Define your own identity and that is not unusual at all for for Multicultural children what you also spent 18 years doing is being a food critic but you wrote under a different name you wrote Under a name where people thought the writer was a man yeah a french guy yep why why a French man yeah so yeah I um I started writing restaurant reviews for The News Press in 2005 or six right in the mid 2000s and I wrote the reviews under this pen name Jean labou who many readers assumed was a man and you know a white guy a french guy a lot of the letters were addressed to like dear moner labou and like Sher laou um things like that and um it was it was a name that had been at the paper so it wasn't like I didn't create the name I kind of inherited it it started I think the very first Jean leof review ran in December of 1979 so it was a well-established kind of figure thing at our local newspaper for years and years and years before I took on the role um but I loved it like I loved it because it meant not having to be me you know it meant not having to have all these complications because just to be this French food guy was like oh that's easy versus like all the complications of like half Philippina half Yugoslavian but I'm not sure if it's Serbian or montenegrian or Bosnian you know that that's complicated B Jean La was that was the best thing ever just to be like and people took me seriously as him you know um which maybe they would have as myself but I was not willing to take that risk because it was much easier just to be like oh well he says it's good so you should all think it's good too you know or he says it's not good trust John exactly there was so much trust there in so many different ways and I think for me it was like oh like this is power you know just to have people trust you without knowing you and you know like that was that was also kind of Paradigm shifting let's not forget about medical school what happened there yes yeah um well you know as the daughter of an Asian mother there are certain acceptable career paths and one of them is medical school um and I was good at it you know I was like good at math and good at science and so I thought you know like okay we'll just do that like it makes everybody happy and that seems like a solid reasonable path um and then I graduated and I took a year off and I traveled a lot I think I read a couple of Anthony Bourdain books at the time as one does and um I realized like I had really no desire to go to medical school um but I wasn't going to just not go I was like during the travels I had been to Hawaii um I had been you know other parts of the country um around the world and I was like I I loved Hawaii because it was the first time that you know me this like 5 foot n HOA girl who's you know not quite Asian but not quite way I I fit in like everyone looked like me in Hawaii and I was like well I'm going to apply to the University of Hawaii medical school and if they accept me then it's meant to be then I will have you know the cards will show that I am meant to be a doctor um I didn't do any research I was just like you know if this is the plan then we're following it and I applied and I realized later they accept like 12 uh out ofate applicants every year um and I did not get accepted I the rejection letter arrived swiftly in a very thin envelope and I was like I took it as this like Grand sign from the universe like you were not meant to go to medical school you were meant to do something else because this one place rejected you and um yeah so that was when I I really delved into food um I had always loved cooking like cooking when I was a kid was just kind of a necessity that I had to learn uh but as I got older I I kind of figured out just the power that's there when you know how to make a meal when you know how to take these ingredients that you know alone are inedible and nothing and you know how to put them together into something that not only feeds people but kind of like connects people um there is power there there really is yeah I loved that viewers have to read the book to get this reference and and you did bring it up just for for a second earlier but numbers are an obsession for you how how does that work and do you have a favorite number oh I still do yes um favorite number is 49 um because well I didn't even learn this until later but I was born at 9:49 in the morning um also very obsessed with nine because I was a September baby so ninth month of the year my father died when I was nine I've always thought there's kind of something there um but it's funny because like I'm not a numerologist like I don't go beyond just these little coincidences of my own life um but yeah I do think it was just a way to kind of make sense of this chaos you know it was a very chaotic childhood where not a lot of things added up but I could sit there and you know count the dots on my comforter and it would as to nine and I could sit there and count the number of steps it took me to get from my bed to the door and from the door to the bathroom and you know those are just my little ways of like making sense of this weird world that I was in what was the most difficult scene for you to write oh yeah um I think that honestly the white out chapter where my father dies um they saved that for a long time and it's funny because I wrote a lot of this book between June and September of 2020 um which I don't recommend waiting for a pandemic to write your your traumatic childhood memories out onto paper um it's ill advised at best but we were there there I was and um I had this kind of like a lot of these memories were things that I hadn't touched in a very long time um and I was nervous like what happens you know when you go into like the attic of your mind and start opening these boxes that you really haven't bothered to look at in years if if not decades um and I think when I started to this kind of sense of urgency overwhelmed me where I was like okay well now you're looking at this scene you're revisiting this childhood memory you need to write it as fast as you can or else it's going to be gone um and so I was I was careful I was kind of just going through chronologically you know from like when my parents met to when I was born to when you know just kind of getting these things down on paper um as fast as I could because I was very worried about forgetting them for some reason and that was the one that I held off on I was like no we're not going to write like the story of how specifically my father died until like I was ready for that um and it took a little while because that was like the one box that I was like I don't know if I want to touch that um but I think as the rest of the story kind of like coalesced around that little hole it like became apparent that I had to fill that hole in you know and that was just one more thing that really added to how you know abnormal and how not regular I thought our family was um but I held on to that for a long time of just not kind of wanting to go there I can totally understand that after after reading this but because this book is so honest you could not have left right that part of your father's death out yes writing a a an autobi Memoir has to be authentic yours is about as honest as as it gets is there also something very cathartic in getting it out yeah my guess and no um I don't know yeah there is for sure I think there was that fear of you know what is going to happen when I start looking into these boxes and start looking at these old memories you know I think that was very quickly replaced by this idea of like oh gosh like it does doesn't hurt as much anymore you know like it's not as bad as it was when I was a kid going through these things so that was a huge Revelation and then there was also this very unique opportunity to kind of go back to my childhood self and be like it's all okay you know like look at us now we're on we're on Ann's show like we're doing okay you know um and I think that was a fantastic like kind of takeaway of just to be able to like go to that little girl and be like you're going to be good like it's going to suck for a while but you're going to be good you know time does does a number on us anyway and when you Revisited certain parts when you were writing them from the book did do you look at them differently oh I know yeah and so I do yes um I do now I think you know a lot of the book is in firstperson narration child you know a child's eye view of it all um which when I was replaying it all is how you know is how I saw it it's genely how I remembered it was you know being back in my childhood body and kind of seeing this like mindboggling world around me um and I I think the journalist and me wanted to stay true to that perspective of just like here's what happened here's how I experienced it um but there were times and actually a lot of the editing process with my agent and my editor was like we need to know what you think about this now and so a lot of the edits that I had to do was kind of like breaking from that childhood perspective and going in as my adult self and being you know trying to make sense of these things and trying to rationalize these things or at least just show you know how that childhood view has changed over the course of decades and over the course of a life lived Annabelle ttic it has been a delight to have you here today so fun thank you so the book is the mango tree A Memoir of fruit Florida and felony I'm Anne boock please join me on the next between the covers