Author Putsata Reang describes life as a refugee when 'you cannot go in the water or come up on land'

March 17, 2025 / 9:02 am

caption: The KUOW Book Club is reading "Ma and Me" by Putsata Reang in March 2025.

This is KUOW's book club, and we just read through the first half of Putsata Reang's memoir "Ma and Me." I'm your guide, Katie Campbell. Let's get into it.

here's a refrain in "Ma and Me" that is repeated and endures throughout Reang's story, and that we must begin with today.

What would you do when you cannot go in the water or come up on land? MA AND ME, PAGE 5

As Reang explains, this comes from a Khmer (pronounced "come-eye") saying: "Joh duc, kapeur; laurng loeur, klah." "Go in the water, there's the crocodile. Come up on land, there's the tiger."

It's a theme through Reang's life and those of her many family members as they fled — or fell victim to — the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. In the first half of "Ma and Me," Reang tells us stories of her family's life in Cambodia before Pol Pot's killing fields lay waste to so many lives. And she relives, through her mother, her parents' harrowing escape just in time, along with an infant Reang, her siblings, and the relatives they could gather in time to be saved.

She includes a sliver of the poem "Home" by Warsan Shire to drive this moment, well, home for the reader:

You have to understand, no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land. WARSAN SHIRE; MA AND ME, PAGE 61

It's in this repeated theme that the reader finds the most enduring message in "Ma and Me," I think: Refugees, like Reang's family, have fled resilient, full lives they've been forced to leave behind in exchange for uncertainty.

Reang says as much herself:

The sea was our best exit. But leaving home was dangerous, too. And where were we leaving to? Nobody knew, the determination having been made by men of higher rank than my father that the water was safer than the land. MA AND ME, PAGE 65

If you're reading along with the group, you know Reang's family made it to the United States, having escaped the Khmer Rouge and the threat of death while they were at sea, searching for a country that would accept them. Baby Reang was sick and near death on that journey, but her mother held onto her long enough to deliver her into the care of American military doctors and nurses stationed at a naval base in the Philippines. This experience created a bond between Reang and her mother, the titular Ma, of course.

In "Ma and Me," Reang pulls no punches in exploring the generational trauma that followed her family to Oregon.

As her parents struggle to establish their family in the U.S., with new jobs and language and customs, their home is, at times, haunted by abuse and, at others, full of family and togetherness. It would be several years before they knew what had become of those left behind in Cambodia.

Reang describes this period in stark terms:

Nobody yet knew that back in Cambodia, our relatives were digging graves, too — their own. After my family had escaped from Cambodia, our relatives were scattered to concentration camps across the country. They worked each day without pay, from sunup to sundown, surviving on a single bowl of watery rice soup. Soon, men, women, and children would drop dead in the fields, dying of disease, torture, and starvation. For others, a more brutal fate awaited, Khmer Rouge leaders would march people to the edge of a mass grave and kick or shove them in, dead or alive. My family knew none of this in Corvallis, all the adults busy with a different kind of surviving. Surviving a new country and culture, and the inevitable, persistent homesickness that afflicts refugees. MA AND ME, PAGE 81

Reang empathetically lays out the nightmare that unfolded in Cambodia while also acknowledging the unique terror her refugees parents experienced in a new land. She manages — in a way only someone who has experienced this for themself can — to show gratitude for the life they had in the States and frustration, even anger at the many circumstances that led them there. Those circumstances include the violence that struck Cambodia as well as those that led her mother to marry her father in the first place.

As we learn through Reang, war and genocide are not the only forces that breed generational trauma.

Her mother had tried to flee marriage long before she fled her homeland. Still, she takes her role as a Khmer mother and wife seriously, putting high expectations on Reang that pull at the threads of their bond, strong as they may be. These expectations, combined with Reang's sense of debt to her mother, serve as a tension that is building toward a break.

Reang frequently addresses that tension head on:

My parents' stories were spellbinding, surprising, and disquieting, doled out over the years spent in their kitchen like poker hands, the deck reshuffled at the start of every visit, and when we were done, I would realize the truth of the connection between my mother and me, which began with a country and the wars we were born into. I would realize that the day a Khmer girl is born is the day she comes into debt, purely by the fact of her existence. That she owes her parents for bringing her into the world, for raising her, and that the only way she can settle the score, or sang khun, is by getting married, when the authority over her is transferred from her parents to her husband. MA AND ME, PAGE 26

Reang spoils her own plot twist early on: There would be no husband to transfer authority over her to.

She tells us on page 24 that "to Ma's mind, my being gay was an unacceptable stain on our family's reputation." Yet as we see through this beautiful memoir, she is also "the one [Ma] always called when she was sad or scared."

In just this first half of the book, Reang has established the bond not only between her and her mother but also between her and her reader. It's impossible not to be invested in their relationship and what it tells us about the world around us, in the U.S. and beyond. It feels especially poignant at a time when refugees' futures seem even more uncertain than ever — a reminder of the rich lives at stake and what it means to start again.

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Spoiler alert: In case you missed it, the KUOW Book Club partnered with Seattle Public Library for this year's Seattle Reads.

That means we'll be reading "You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World" in April. "You Are Here" is a poetry anthology that was edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The collection features 50 American poets who were invited "to observe and reflect on their local landscape." Among them are Seattle-area poets Laura Da' and Cedar Sigo.

We'll have more information about the reading schedule and live interview/poetry reading later this month.

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Katie Campbell
Online Editor/Reporter

Katie joined KUOW's online team as an editor and reporter in 2024, after serving three years as senior producer of the local Morning Edition program. She has covered a variety of local topics, including the Seattle City Council, elections, and breaking news. She also brings readers some levity with a weekly news quiz.
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