MA AND ME

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 façade 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.