Ma and Me: A Memoir

Reang was her mother's youngest, with a special bond founded between them when she barely survived their escape from the war and the coming genocide in Cambodia in her mother's arms in 1975. But once they settled in Oregon, Put became the most restless of her children, eventually traveling the world as a journalist (at the Seattle Times among many other places) and finally marrying an American woman, which her mother couldn't bear. Reang's memoir is a compelling story, told with both humor and pain, of their bond and their break, of the duty to family and heritage that Reang often embraces at the same time that she claims her independence, and of two fiercely loving and tireless women carrying the weight of tradition and trauma.