Book
Ma and Me
Ma and Me is a 2022 memoir by Putsata Reang about her bond with her mother, who carried her out of Cambodia as a baby in 1975.[1] It follows the family from their escape to a new life in Corvallis, Oregon, and through the strain on mother and daughter when Reang chose to marry a woman.[1][2]
About the book
The book opens with the Khmer tale of the crocodile and the tiger: go into the water and there is the crocodile; come up on land and there is the tiger. The two animals stand for the hard choices Reang's parents faced, and they appear on the cover. Folk tales in her mother's voice recur through the book.[2][3]
Reang was 11 months old when her family fled the Khmer Rouge in 1975, on one of the last boats out of Cambodia.[1][4] They spent 23 days on an overcrowded navy vessel. When the baby seemed lifeless, her mother, Ma, refused the captain's order to throw her overboard, and American military nurses and doctors at a naval base in the Philippines saved her life. The story became family legend.[4] The memoir also recalls the US bombing of eastern Cambodia during the Vietnam War, which is believed to have helped the rise of the Khmer Rouge.[5]
The family of eight settled in rural Corvallis, sponsored by two churches. Reang grew up Presbyterian because her parents felt they had to repay the kindness, a duty the book explains as sang khun.[2][5] Her mother cleaned office buildings and served meals to Oregon State students, and her father washed dishes at a diner.[2] Reang tried to be a dutiful Cambodian daughter, working beside Ma in the berry fields each summer.[4]
Reang's parents married in 1967. Her mother, college educated, wanted her own path, but was pressed by tradition into a marriage she did not want.[1] Reang came to see that one reason she returned to Cambodia as an adult was to live the life her mother might have had.[2] She first went back at sixteen, and later worked as a journalist in Cambodia and Afghanistan.[5][2] When she came out to her mother in her twenties, Ma called it a phase. At forty, Reang told her she was marrying a woman, April, and their bond broke in two.[4][5] The two weddings, Ma's and Reang's, frame the book, which also tells of the later healing between mother and daughter.[2][5] Its themes include inherited trauma, migration, Cambodian cultural and filial duty, and queer identity.[1][6]
Writing
Reang first set out to write about her parents' escape and their survivor's guilt. That changed after a 2016 New York Times Modern Love essay on her relationship with her mother. She calls the result an "accidental memoir," written over six years and ten drafts.[2][3] The book draws on conversations she recorded with her mother from 2011, with long passages in her mother's voice.[1][2] Her editor, Daphne Durham, drew the early reporting-style drafts toward emotion and memory.[2]
Publication and editions
MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, published the book on May 17, 2022, in a 400-page edition, ISBN 978-0-374-27926-4.[1]
Reception
Kirkus Reviews called it "well-wrought vignettes of a complicated mother-daughter bond."[1] The book received the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography.[1] Reang discussed it at a Northwest Passages book club event in Spokane with Kiantha Duncan in July 2022, and KUOW's book club took it up in 2025.[3][5]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Kirkus Reviews, Ma and Me
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 The Spokesman-Review, Author Putsata Reang reflects on 'Ma and Me,' her accidental memoir (July 27, 2022)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Goodreads, Ma and Me
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 KUOW, Memoirist Putsata Reang talks about the 'complicated love' of America, Cambodia and her mother
- ↑ The Spokesman-Review, Putsata Reang reflects on identity growing up as a child of refugees (July 22, 2022)