Ma and Me

December 1, 2021

When Reang was 11 months old, her family fled Cambodia, and she survived only because her mother thrust her seemingly lifeless baby on the medical staff at the U.S. naval base in the Philippines where the family first landed. Reang grew up seeking to be the perfect Cambodian daughter and was especially close to her mother, a tie that frayed when Reang came out in her twenties and snapped altogether when Reang, at age 40, married a woman. Journalist Reang here considers inherited trauma and the weight of cultural and filial obligation. (For another view of such trauma, see Anthony Veasna So's excellent story collection, Afterparties.)

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2022
Piercing memoir of a mother-daughter relationship and their experiences coming to America as refugees from the Cambodian civil war in the 1970s. In 1975, when Reang was a baby, her mother carried her onto one of the last boats out of war-torn Cambodia, fleeing the Khmer Rouge's murderous regime. Sickly and malnourished, she would not have survived without the strength and devotion of her mother. Reang, a veteran journalist, and her mother were close in their early years in the U.S., navigating their new lives in Corvallis, Oregon. "For a long time, I believed I owed Ma my life: whatever she wanted me to be, I would be; whatever she wanted me to do, I would do," writes the author. "I tried to live an immaculate existence, tucking my flaws behind a fa�ade of perfection." Her memoir derives from talks that she recorded with her mother beginning in 2011, the first time her parents openly shared their memories with their daughter. The relationship between her parents had been unhappy since they first married in 1967. Her college-educated mother wanted to follow her own path, but she was coerced into following her society's traditions and married against her will at age 22. The tension was a constant problem in the marriage, compounded by the many children and cousins who needed care and the pressure they endured as refugees in a strange land. The other primary thread in the narrative is Reang's eloquent examination of her identity as a gay woman and her mother's inability to accept it. As she writes, when she told her mother that "I planned to marry my partner--a woman--the scaffolding of our bond collapsed, spewing splinters too deep to tweeze out." Through it all, Reang has remained dutiful and thankful for her mother's many sacrifices: "I would become the keeper of our culture, the vessel for her secrets and sadness, the captive audience for all her stories." Well-wrought vignettes of a complicated mother-daughter bond.

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Starred review from March 21, 2022
Familial ties and the scars of war are exquisitely examined in this luminous debut from journalist Reang. The author, who emigrated from Cambodia to Corvallis, Wash., as an infant with her family during the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime, recalls her’s father difficulty adapting to life in the U.S., a struggle that drove him to violence and a nervous breakdown. For Reang, it delivered a sobering truth that “those of us who come from war can never fully escape it.” This sentiment echoes throughout her lyrical narrative, as she traces how, after coming out in her 20s, her unwavering relationship with her “Ma” took a similar hit: “I was the single flaw in the beautiful fiction of a family Ma spun for the Khmer community.” Things came to a head, years later, when Reang’s mother refused to attend her wedding. Despite this, Reang resolved “to build a bridge of story that brings us back together” by investigating her mother’s “snarled and suppressed” history alongside her own life path—from navigating the fraught realities of displacement as a child to training reporters in Phnom Penh as a journalist. In wringing compassion from her complicated legacy, Reang offers a nuanced mediation on love, identity, and belonging. This story of survival radiates with resilience and hope.

April 1, 2022

This must-read debut memoir by journalist Reang stands at the crossroads between upholding familial and cultural obligation and navigating the challenges of transculturalism in American society. Reminiscent of Memoirs of a Geisha with its lyricism, parables, and honest nature, Reang's writing tracks the interconnected lives of a mother and daughter who escape the Cambodian genocide but live with guilt for having survived. Reang writes, "I had lived a life a slave to sang khun, but I could never repay my mother." "Sang khun," the debt a child owes to their parents for having created them, is the lingering tie between Reang and her mother. This tie is tested when Reang comes out as a lesbian to her mother; it's truly severed decades later, when she tells her mother she's marrying a woman. The chapter entitled "Afghanistan" is notable for its abrupt shift from first-person to second-person narration, which purposefully disrupts the flow of the story, adopting an urgent tone to enmesh the reader in wartime Afghanistan. VERDICT A lyrical, disarmingly honest memoir of family ties and self-discovery.--Paige Pagan

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 1, 2022
This compelling, accomplished memoir unpacks the intersections of identity and their effects on journalist Reang's relationship with her mother. Framed by two weddings--Ma's unwanted, inescapable wedding in 1967 Cambodia and Reang's gay wedding in 2017 Washington State, which Ma refused to attend--the 40 intervening years dealt too much of life's most difficult times. On a trip with Ma in 1990 to visit family back in Cambodia, the scope of the Khmer Rouge genocide was laid bare for Reang on a tour of Tuol Sleng prison. In Oregon, where the family had immigrated after escaping Cambodia by boat, Reang bore witness to a violent father who would be institutionalized at one point, almost kill a cousin, and cyclically assault Ma, and whom Reang loves but cannot forgive. In ways that took Reang decades to see, Ma, forever pushing her global, far-flung, home-avoidant daughter to find a man and marry him, was deeply shaped by her experiences and culture. Reang's marrying a woman nearly broke their intense bond. Food, language, family, career, displacement, community, and love form a powerful web in this brave, deep-think of a narrative about expectations and the stories that bind us to, and divide us from, those we love.

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