Putsata Reang, author, journalist and Seattle educator, will be speaking about her memoir “Ma and Me” at the Spring Symposium on Apr. 21. The event will be held in Weinstein Auditorium from 2:00–5:00 p.m.
Despite being a writer for most of her career, Reang originally never intended to write a memoir. She describes herself as a private person. She says that this is why she went into journalism — because it allowed her to write other people’s stories instead of her own. But when Reang took a creative writing class, it became clear she could no longer avoid telling her own story.
“I did everything I could to not write about that. I was trying to write about other conflicts, conflicts with my sisters, just stupid stuff,” said Reang. “Eventually, I had to write a story about my conflict with my mom. And that’s essentially the story that I workshopped in class. It left my classmates just in tears, including my teacher.”
Even after her teacher pulled her aside and told her to publish her story, Reang resisted. She was worried about her mother’s reaction to such a personal experience being published. But Reang’s teacher wasn’t the only one who thought she should share her experiences.
“Eventually, my sister talked me into it and said, ‘You know what? There’s probably a lot of people out there who’ve had a similar experience, who are immigrants or who are refugees and are gay, and they don’t know how to make sense of their situations and maybe are struggling, and your story could make a difference.’ And it was that conversation that made me really think, ‘Okay, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can write a book,’” Reang said.
In 2022, Macmillan published Reang’s book “Ma and Me: A Memoir.”
“My book has a lot to do with how when my family escaped [Cambodia], my mom ended up saving my life on the boat that carried us out of our country. As I grew up, I had to reckon with this question of what I owed my mother for saving me, which was a question both as a debt, but also as the duty of being a Cambodian daughter,” Reang said. “‘Ma and Me’ is my memoir of really coming to terms with my own identity as somebody who’s a queer Cambodian refugee.”
Reang’s memoir tells the story of her mother saving her life when she refused to throw her infant daughter overboard during Reang’s family’s escape to the United States from the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. Beyond her feelings of “debt and duty” to her mother for saving her life, Reang also had to grapple with her queerness, an aspect of her identity that her mother could not accept.
“I knew since I was a kid that I was gay,” Reang said. “I basically shoved those feelings down, and I tried my best to follow through with what I believed was my lane, which was that I was going to grow up and find a husband to marry just like my mom and my sisters have done. And I didn’t really allow myself room to be who I was because of those twin weights of debt and duty.”
Even with her initial uncertainty, publishing a memoir became a way for Reang to come to terms with her past and her relationship with her mother. However, Reang says she still occasionally feels uncomfortable with her experiences being published for the world to see.
“My book has been out for two years. I’ve been on a speaking tour all of last year and a big chunk of this year,” Reang said. “It still feels very strange to me that my pain is on public display. I don’t really know how to articulate it.”
Despite this, Reang finds comfort in knowing that by sharing her own story, she might be able to provide reassurance to others who have lived through similar hardships.
“There’s this idea that even though we’ve never met, there’s something very universal to who we are, and there are these universal truths. And one of those universal truths is that you and I both experience pain,” Reang said. “It doesn’t matter what skin color we have or what sexual orientation or gender we are or religion. None of that matters. It’s a human condition to experience pain. I think that that’s what personal stories do is that when we hear somebody’s story or engage with somebody’s personal story, it does help us feel a little bit less alone.”
Reang hopes her writing will encourage more people to find the bravery to share their own stories, creating the potential to bridge gaps between people and bring them together.
“I think a lot about something my mom told me: ‘One chopstick is easy to break, but a handful of chopsticks is unbreakable.’ And of course, what she means is that we are better together, like critical mass,” Reang said. “And because I’m a journalist, I want to replace the word chopstick with story. One story can be broken, but a handful of stories is unbreakable.”
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