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— How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
==That night, as I lay awake trying to sleep, I heard the knock of ripe mangoes falling from the trees that circled the house and ran up and down the street.
The noise ranged, depending on the ripeness, from the plop of a tennis ball to a pulpy sort of splash to the occasional smash when one of them would crash through a car windshield.
We need to cut that tree down, my host mother said the next morning.
She would say it whenever this happened, but they never did.
It was as if they accepted the broken windshields as the price of the mangoes, which we ate as fast as we could.
They had their gardener collect the fruit instead, and replaced the windshields as if they were changing a tablecloth.
And that would be among the first of my object lessons in the ways of the very rich.
Years later, and only when I learned of the deep poverty in Chiapas—the reason they had those walls topped with barbed wire—did I think to question whether it was really just mangoes breaking their windshields—if mango season lasted as long as a summer.==