PART I

CAMBODIA
; CROCODILE AND TIGER

There is a saying in Khmer, the language that left me in my

youth but links me to a land across seas because it plinks off my
mother’s tongue: “Joh duc, kapeur; laurng loeur, klah.” Go
in the water, there’s the crocodile. Come up on land, there’s the
tiger. Ma was twenty-two years old when she had to decide. The
grandmothers in the village scolded her, “You’re too old. Your
father is a drunk. No one will want to marry you.”
Being college-educated and unmarried at age twenty-two
made my mother an anomaly twice over in rural Cambodia.
Her mother married at fifteen; her older sister at eighteen.
Matches made among elders. Her time was coming, she
knew, but as she snuck past her teens and entered her twen-
ties, she hoped to be forgotten.
The boys started coming around before she finished col-
lege. A simple village girl whose feet clapped across her dusty
town in a pair of plastic flip-flops, my mother was raised by a
benevolent uncle who deemed her brain too valuable to waste
in the rice paddies. He told her, “When you get an education,
you can do anything you want.” And she believed him.
These boys, the sons of professors and businessmen,
4 • PUTSATA REANG

followed her straight to her uncle’s door, begging to marry her.

She wanted none of them. She wanted, instead, the thing that
Khmer girls are not born to have or raised to want— dreams.
She dreamed of becoming a businesswoman and traveling the
country. Maybe even the world. She dreamed of living free.
But soon after she finished college, a rumor reached her
ear. Her father, who had been mostly absent from her life,
had arranged her marriage. He came around now that there
was a profit to be made, when the dowry for his daughter
might sustain more months of gambling and drinking. But
Ma’s dreams were bigger than his greed. Before the invita-
tions were sent, she fled.
She traveled east on a local bus that took her to Cambo-
dia’s capital, Phnom Penh, where she transferred to a regional
taxi to Prey Veng province, on the eastern edge of Cambodia,
mere miles from Vietnam. Her older brother lived there. He
was sensible. He was kind. He would, she hoped, hide her.
But it was 1967, and that strip of earth along the Cambodia-
Vietnam border shook and broke open beneath her feet when
bombs from American B-52s burst in the paddies. The night
sky lit up with machine-gun fire from the jungles, and she ran
to the riverbed with her brother and his family, cupping her
ears against the whistle of weapons, curling her body against
the dirt somersaulting all around her.
A thought sprinted across her mind—I could die here. In
the end, a part of her did. Along with an estimated 150,000
Cambodians. Casualties of a Western war imported to Viet-
nam, then stretched into Cambodia. “Collateral damage” was
what the Americans said.
My mother realized she could stay with her brother and die
trying to hide. Or, she could go back home and get married.
 MA AND ME • 5

What do you do when you cannot go in the water or come

up on land?

;
I was two when my mother taught me how to run and hide.
“Mouy, bee, bei . . . rort!” she would say. One, two, three . . .
run!
Rort! Boern! Run! Hide!
And I would scoot off the sofa and skedaddle for a far corner
or a closet or a bedcover and stay perfectly still. Rort boern. A
game we played. I laughed and laughed when she found me,
never successful in tricking her; she always knew where to look.
But then, one year later, another kind of running.
“Get down,” Ma said, hastily fastening her seat belt, eyes
darting. “Keep quiet.”
She had woken us kids from our slumber and rushed us
to the car.
“Like this?” I said, my body laid out on the back seat with
my sister Chan.
She craned her neck to check the rearview mirror.
“Yes, gohn,” she said. “Lower.”
I rolled to the floorboard. My brother, Sope, was jumpy in
his seat.
“Where are we going?” he asked, peering out the passenger-
side window as our mother shoved the car’s gear into reverse
and we shot, like a rocket, clear out of the driveway and into
the lamplit stillness of our street.
“Nov aur sngeam!” she snapped, stay still, her voice starched
with tension, struggling through her tears to shush her babies.
I felt the ridges of the plastic floorboard, cold and gritty,
6 • PUTSATA REANG

stamp their pattern into my cheek, and heard my own wheez-

ing. Before she told us to duck, I had caught a glimpse of
him, standing in the darkened doorway, hands on his hips,
his lips spitting words I could not hear through the closed car
window.
Why were we leaving my father?
There was so much I didn’t yet know, things about my
parents’ lives and our family’s past that I would eventually
come to learn by watching, and later, by asking. I didn’t know,
for instance, that my mother had run away from her husband,
from her family, before. Or that duty was what brought her back
every time—because a Khmer wife stays.
I also did not know that when your mother teaches you to
run and hide, you will keep doing it until it forms into habit,
until it becomes your very best skill.

;
My mother, Sam-Ou Koh Reang, raised four daughters and two
sons—including two of my cousins whom she loved like her
own, not counting five other cousins who had passed through
our home—on a lunch lady’s salary. She called us “gohn,” a
term of endearment reserved for one’s children, and she used it
liberally, whether we were hers or not. We called her “Ma” until
the first stray grays peeked from her hairnet, and then she
became “Yay Thom,” or Big Grandma, because she was the
eldest of her siblings who had escaped the geno- cide in
Cambodia and immigrated to America. And in our culture, to be
the eldest was to be the mother, to have the duty of taking care
of everyone. Ma had a heart big enough to hold us all, and we
thrived.
We graduated high school and then college and then left
 MA AND ME • 7

her, one by one, to go on and become the thing she most wanted
us to be, the kind of people whose offices she’d once dusted and
mopped, who spent their days clacking at a com- puter
keyboard with nameplates on their desks, laser-engraved with
perfectly straight and even letters, rather than stitched in
serrated cursive above the right breast pocket, the way her own
name appeared on her white cafeteria smock.
“Use your brains, not your back,” she told us when we were
kids. “Don’t be like me.”
She urged us all toward academic and professional excel-
lence: Sinaro, Sophea, Motthida, Chanira, Piseth, and me.
From our crowded ranch house on a corner lot in almost all-
white Corvallis, Oregon, we grew up to become experts in
finance, communications, business, and academia. One among
us, Chan, has a doctoral degree. I am a journalist, the one in
the family who wanders, who has always struggled to stay.
That my mother arrived in America without a single dol-
lar or English phrase to help her, that she worked her way up
from being a janitor at Oregon State University’s student
health center to running her own stall at the campus food
hall, slinging chicken cashew stir-fry and rice stick noodles
in two massive woks; that none of her babies ended up “dead
or dealing drugs or under a bridge somewhere,” spoke to her
striving, to her diligence and fortitude in Khmer mothering.
“I just did what I needed to survive,” she’d say to friends
and strangers alike, careful to maintain a mother’s modesty.
She made sure her family survived, too. A single story, a
tale told so many times it has become family legend, proves it.
Just one in a rotation of myriad fables and fictions she spun that
kept us suspended in a warm cocoon of wonder. Except this one
was different.
“This one,” she assured me each time, “is true.”