Ma and me :

Material Type	Library	Call Number	Item Barcode	Location
Book	Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library	BIOGRAPHY REANG, PU.	31330009203195	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Carlisle - Gleason Public Library	BIO REANG	32117002126203	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Chelmsford Public Library	BIOG/REANG	31480011587711	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library	B REANG	32120001375532	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Groton Public Library	BIO REANG	37003701974231	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library	B REANG, PUTSATA	30470002004975	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Haverhill Public Library	BIOG/REANG P	31479007546335	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library	B REANG P.	31481005682815	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Newburyport Public Library	BIOGRAPHY REANG P	32128004074408	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library	BIO REANG	31478003687465	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... North Reading - Flint Memorial Library	BIOGRAPHY REANG P	31550002527163	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Salisbury Public Library	92 REA	32131000961248	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Topsfield Town Library	BIO REANG	32133002625623	Searching... Unknown
Book	Searching... Tyngsborough Public Library	B/REANG	32137002170134	Searching... Unknown

Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award.
Finalist for the 2023 Lesbian Memoir/Biography Lambda Literary Award

"A nuanced mediation on love, identity, and belonging. This story of survival radiates with resilience and hope." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This openhearted memoir . . . opens the door to include queer descendants of war survivors into the growing American library of love." --Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show

When Putsata Reang was eleven months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending twenty-three days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. Holding what appeared to be a lifeless baby in her arms, Ma resisted the captain's orders to throw her bundle overboard. Instead, on landing, Ma rushed her baby into the arms of American military nurses and doctors, who saved the child's life. "I had hope, just a little, you were still alive," Ma would tell Put in an oft-repeated story that became family legend.

Over the years, Put lived to please Ma and make her proud, hustling to repay her life debt by becoming the consummate good Cambodian daughter, working steadfastly by Ma's side in the berry fields each summer and eventually building a successful career as an award-winning journalist. But Put's adoration and efforts are no match for Ma's expectations. When she comes out to Ma in her twenties, it's just a phase. When she fails to bring home a Khmer boyfriend, it's because she's not trying hard enough. When, at the age of forty, Put tells Ma she is finally getting married--to a woman--it breaks their bond in two.

In her startling memoir, Reang explores the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial duty. With rare clarity and lyric wisdom, Ma and Me is a stunning, deeply moving memoir about love, debt, and duty.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Familial ties and the scars of war are exquisitely examined in this luminous debut from journalist Reang. The author, who emigrated from Cambodia to Corvallis, Wash., as an infant with her family during the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime, recalls her's father difficulty adapting to life in the U.S., a struggle that drove him to violence and a nervous breakdown. For Reang, it delivered a sobering truth that "those of us who come from war can never fully escape it." This sentiment echoes throughout her lyrical narrative, as she traces how, after coming out in her 20s, her unwavering relationship with her "Ma" took a similar hit: "I was the single flaw in the beautiful fiction of a family Ma spun for the Khmer community." Things came to a head, years later, when Reang's mother refused to attend her wedding. Despite this, Reang resolved "to build a bridge of story that brings us back together" by investigating her mother's "snarled and suppressed" history alongside her own life path--from navigating the fraught realities of displacement as a child to training reporters in Phnom Penh as a journalist. In wringing compassion from her complicated legacy, Reang offers a nuanced mediation on love, identity, and belonging. This story of survival radiates with resilience and hope. (May)

Kirkus Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

This compelling, accomplished memoir unpacks the intersections of identity and their effects on journalist Reang's relationship with her mother. Framed by two weddings--Ma's unwanted, inescapable wedding in 1967 Cambodia and Reang's gay wedding in 2017 Washington State, which Ma refused to attend--the 40 intervening years dealt too much of life's most difficult times. On a trip with Ma in 1990 to visit family back in Cambodia, the scope of the Khmer Rouge genocide was laid bare for Reang on a tour of Tuol Sleng prison. In Oregon, where the family had immigrated after escaping Cambodia by boat, Reang bore witness to a violent father who would be institutionalized at one point, almost kill a cousin, and cyclically assault Ma, and whom Reang loves but cannot forgive. In ways that took Reang decades to see, Ma, forever pushing her global, far-flung, home-avoidant daughter to find a man and marry him, was deeply shaped by her experiences and culture. Reang's marrying a woman nearly broke their intense bond. Food, language, family, career, displacement, community, and love form a powerful web in this brave, deep-think of a narrative about expectations and the stories that bind us to, and divide us from, those we love.

Library Journal Review

This must-read debut memoir by journalist Reang stands at the crossroads between upholding familial and cultural obligation and navigating the challenges of transculturalism in American society. Reminiscent of Memoirs of a Geisha with its lyricism, parables, and honest nature, Reang's writing tracks the interconnected lives of a mother and daughter who escape the Cambodian genocide but live with guilt for having survived. Reang writes, "I had lived a life a slave to sang khun, but I could never repay my mother." "Sang khun," the debt a child owes to their parents for having created them, is the lingering tie between Reang and her mother. This tie is tested when Reang comes out as a lesbian to her mother; it's truly severed decades later, when she tells her mother she's marrying a woman. The chapter entitled "Afghanistan" is notable for its abrupt shift from first-person to second-person narration, which purposefully disrupts the flow of the story, adopting an urgent tone to enmesh the reader in wartime Afghanistan. VERDICT A lyrical, disarmingly honest memoir of family ties and self-discovery.--Paige Pagan

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