“There’s always hope, even if it’s just a little,” Putsata Reang concludes in her New York Times Modern Love column from 2016. She’s talking about her relationship with her Ma, newly fraught after Reang moved in with her girlfriend, April. Eight years later, Reang’s memoir Ma and Me charts the story that led to that fallout and has continued since, culminating in her and April’s marriage. Revealing insight into her Ma’s own upbringing, Ma and Me paints a portrait of generational trauma as sedimentary. In this story, the shadows of genocide and displacement build upon each other just as Ma is chiastic to Me. “Trauma had been accruing inside me,” Reang writes, “some passed from Ma and Pa, and now […] I was weighed down by the trauma I had collected on my own.”

Reang’s Ma fled the Khmer Rouge in 1975 with her husband, children, and extended family. On the boat leaving Cambodia, Reang was an infant and so sick she appeared dead. Resisting the captain’s orders to throw her off the boat to avoid spreading disease, Reang’s Ma pleaded that she was a Buddhist and had to bury her child on land. It was a miracle that Reang survived. Her and her family settled in the U.S. with the sponsorship of two local churches, such an anomaly in white Corvallis, Oregon that their arrival made front-page news. Reang grew up working class and became a journalist, successful enough to buy a house and send her parents on vacations. But as she grew up she suffered with mental illness, struggled to meet her parents’ expectations, and ultimately came to a crossroads between living truthfully and fulfilling her duties as a daughter. What could easily fall into a tragic American dream narrative and a vilification of refugee parents, Reang turns into a nuanced study of home, filial piety, and parenthood as a passage of both wounds and salves.

Reang writes that the trauma inflicted upon her parents by the Cambodian genocide is “a constant shadow” cast across the lives of her and her siblings. It is also a constant shadow cast across the memoir, and yet Reang carves out moments for light. She recounts the exaggerated reflex for fleeing danger she inherited from her parents and how it chased her through cities, countries, and relationships. She explains how her Ma married a man to fulfill her duties to her own mother, and how Reang is now expected to do the same. But she also talks about the foods her Ma taught her to make — salt-roasted, fileted, and pan-fried fish, pounded nuc mam, meat loaf, lasagna, spaghetti — and how they helped her cope when her Ma stopped calling. Reang’s Ma, or the imprint she left, serves to heal even when she herself is the offender. Trauma and tradition do not stratify in separate planes.

As its title suggests, this memoir is not simply about Reang grappling with her Ma’s rejection; it is about them both. Ma and Me refuses to isolate Reang’s experiences from her Ma’s, or her Ma’s from Reang’s. It opens with an author’s note in which Reang discloses that her Ma’s stories, which especially inform “Part I: Cambodia,” were recorded following her Pa’s heart attack in 2010. Reang writes that her Pa’s brush with death ignited in her Ma, “…a need to empty herself of the many stories and secrets she had kept inside.” She also notes that she has transcribed and translated her Ma’s words from Khmer into English, immediately establishing their stories as intertwined. When we read, from the perspective of Reang’s Ma, “You want to know about my marriage?”, we read Reang’s interpretation of her Ma’s words; a conversation between mother and daughter.

When it comes to the memoir’s consideration of queerness, it is not so much a study of contemporary lesbian culture as it is a portrait of a woman growing into her identity. And more than both these things, it is about finding home in people. We follow Reang as she spends her twenties and thirties moving sporadically for journalism jobs, from Oregon to Cambodia to Washington to Afghanistan to Thailand. While she moves she also grapples with her sexuality, meeting other queer people who help her understand who she is and what she wants out of life. Meeting April teaches Reang that home is not a place, but a person, a lesson which complicates the memoir’s assertions about migration and family. Reang does not reject her family in favor of a chosen family, as happens in many queer narratives. Rather, she is stuck in something more realistic and complex —  a contention, a constant push and pull between acceptance and rejection on both sides. 

Reang’s career in journalism is the vehicle for Reang’s travels, but the driver is an itch for movement and exploration. Her home in Washington, where she has settled down with her wife April, is near an airport, just like her childhood home in Corvallis. Reang explains that this soothes her because she knows she can fly somewhere else whenever she needs. It is in this resistance to stagnation that we see further gaps between the generations: where Reang craves movement, her migrant parents seek stability and fear excessive travel. They fear queerness for similar reasons, desiring acceptance in their community and validation that they have parented well. One of Reang’s great strengths is her ability to render these details: her friends and family with full dimensionality, as people thoroughly informed by their experiences and (often) motivated by hope.

Ma and Me does not end on quite the same hopeful note as Reang’s essay from 2016, though it does offer its own modes of hopefulness. One leaves this memoir with heartache for all parties; by the end we understand Reang’s Ma’s distaste for queerness almost as well as we understand Reang’s anguish. Reang invites us to see her Ma’s rejection as a mechanism of her own grief, a reaction to losing her own dreams and failing to meet her own expectations. This, the memoir seems to contend, does not degrade the significance of Reang’s grief. The Khmer saying that inspires Ma and Me’s cover — “Joh duc, kapeur; laurng louer, klah” (Go in the water, there’s the crocodile. Come up on land, there’s the tiger) — echoes both the affliction of existing between crises and Reang’s resistance to good versus bad. While didactic in nature, the adage of the crocodile and the tiger provides something less prescriptive: an observation of generational connection and disconnection, of something with both a past and a future.