In her courageous debut memoir, “Ma and Me,” Putsata Reang tells her story of immigrating from Cambodia to America and navigating racism, homophobia and a complicated relationship with her mother.
During her talk, “Resisting erasure through storytelling,” at the Whatcom County Arts Festival on Friday, March 15 at the Bellingham Ferry Terminal, Reang connected the book’s themes to modern issues and encouraged her audience to share their stories.
In 1975, Reang’s family fled Cambodia to escape the Civil War, as the Khmer Rouge communist regime began a genocide that would claim 2 million lives. Reang was a baby at that time, and hardly survived the journey.
Growing up, Reang internalized the times her mother told her she was weak and sickly, and began writing her own narrative, working as an award-winning journalist along the West Coast, at The Seattle Times and across the globe.
Reang has spent almost 10 years working outside of the U.S. as a journalist, in places like Afghanistan and Cambodia where journalists have been assassinated for reporting about the environment, politics and corruption in education.
Originally, Reang wanted to write about her parents’ struggle with survivor’s guilt having escaped the war, but as the writing evolved into a memoir, the central tension became her mother’s adverse reaction to Reang coming out.
As a writer and queer woman, Reang said she has learned not to take freedom for granted, whether that be freedom of speech or freedom of love.
“From the beginning of the book, [my] mother had zero freedom to choose, and at the end … I had every right and freedom to choose love and who to marry,” Reang said.
Reang’s mother did not speak to her for a year after she came out, but now her mother recognizes that Reang is not fundamentally different from the person she has always been.
Throughout the process of writing her memoir and speaking about war, immigration and coming out, Reang found that many of the people who connected with her story are people who don’t look like her.
Since writing “Ma and Me,” Reang has experienced things that she hadn’t deemed possible, such as when a reader was so inspired by her talk that she came out to both her dad and to Reang when she met her, or the time Reang spoke with her neighbor who was her political opposite, but they both learned they had more in common than originally anticipated.
“If I had a single message for my fellow Washingtonians [it would be to] make sure we keep ourselves in check,” Reang said. “We’re not better than any other. We can’t sit here and think, ‘there’s so much racism in the Deep South,’ for example. No, we have racism here.”
Now, Reang is living in Seattle working on an anthology of queer travel writing that will come out in 2025, and traveling throughout the state to share “Ma and Me.”
“If we’re brave enough to tell our stories, it’s bound to have an impact on people,” Reang said.
