The book is described as nonlinear and “challenging”, and I know I’m an adult with two arts degrees but it’s....not that challenging. It’s a super compelling book from what I read. It’s written as a letter from a Vietnamese-American man to his illiterate mother, who works in a nail salon and is the daughter of a former survival sex worker and an occupying American soldier during the Vietnam War. 

The passage they had to read is in the sample text; it describes the narrator as a child, pulling grey hairs from his grandmother’s head at her request, listening to her tell stories as repayment. It’s written in evocative but straightforward prose, though admittedly you don’t get the immediate context that his grandmother’s story of her beautiful purple dress is actually her telling him about finding clients to sleep with. Still, his responses to these comments are frequently more impenetrable than the text they were looking at, which is hilarious to me. Not to slam these kids, I’m sure they’re doing their best and I don’t know how well I’d do with this passage in a high-stress environment at their age, but it’s not like...James Joyce or Ralph Ellison levels of what-the-hell.