Putsata Reang in Conversation with Kailee Haong

Putsata Reang is an award-winning author and journalist whose writings have appeared in a variety of national and international publications, including the New York Times, Politico, the Guardian, Ms, The Seattle Times and the San Jose Mercury News. Her debut memoir, Ma and Me, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association prize for Nonfiction, and was a finalist for a Dayton Literary Peace Prize and Lambda Literary Prize. Putsata was born in Cambodia, and raised in rural Oregon.

When I first read Ma and Me, I thought very selfishly: I hope I get to meet this author someday. It isn’t often that people like myself can see the many facets of our identities reflected right back at us from the page. I devoured the memoir. In many ways, it helped me further understand myself, and make sense of the many gaps in my own family’s coming-to-America and surviving-in-America stories. It was a treasure to speak with Putsata over such an intimate and emotional book. Ma and Me and our conversation will forever remind me that to be Khmer and to be queer is such a gift.  Putsata and I met over coffee in a quiet corner at Ada’s Technical Books and Cafe in Seattle in August 2025.  –KHE

Very early on in your memoir you introduce readers to a Khmer saying, “Go into the water, there’s the crocodile. Come up on land, there’s the tiger.” In many ways, this motif rings true throughout the memoir. How do you feel like the act of writing and publishing this novel fits into this saying? Did you feel that same sense of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” in getting your family story out into the world?

Oh, my gosh. You know, first of all, this book has been out for three years, and nobody’s ever asked me such a thoughtful question like that, so I’m on my heels here trying to respond. Well, actually, I can think of one thing. The crocodile and the tiger moment for me was something that actually comes up a lot when I teach memoir, and I get this question regularly: “How do you write about people who are still alive?”


I’m thinking of my father in particular, because I had to make a difficult decision about what I was going to write about him and share about him and what I wasn’t. And one of those “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” things is that, I realized after the fact—he didn’t appear in very early drafts of my book. I couldn’t go there because the experiences and memories I had were still so raw—and unprocessed, to be perfectly frank. But what I realized was that if I was making the decision to write memoir, I had to reckon with myself to say, “Put, if you’re going to do this, you’re going to do it all the way or you’re not going to do it at all. You have to commit, and if you’re not willing to be vulnerable, then you have no business doing this thing.”

How did including that part of your father’s story change the shape of your novel?








I realize with writing about my father, it became one of those things—if I didn’t include him, a key component of the book would have fallen apart, which is to say that one of the big themes is war. The wars between countries, the wars between people, the wars inside of ourselves. My father was such a key piece of that scene and the metaphor of war, because of the war he physically experienced in Cambodia, fighting Khmer Rouge, and then the war he brought to our home in Corvallis, Oregon—his violence in our home. I think the book would have felt very different if I didn’t have that in there. Really that was like the big secret in our family, all of that violence. If I didn’t put it in, then what’s the story really? I also can’t imagine not having the scene of me protecting my mother and stabbing my father with a pencil, because I became a writer, you know? There’s no way I could have imagined that for myself at that young age. It’s almost as if the ancestors had already set the path for me. The literal weapon that I used as a pencil to physically defend my mother would be the weapon that I used in some ways, to advocate for myself and to kind of write my way towards some kind of peace between my mom and I.








There is a near constant battle of trying to understand one’s questionable and confusing actions while balancing the context of the traumas they have endured. I see this a lot in the way you write about and translate the actions of your father. Particularly in the way that you describe him as “difficult, in the way he made a war within the walls of our home after we had already escaped the war in our country.” You write that you had your experience and understanding of who he was as you were growing up, but that you learned another side of him from your mother’s recollections. How did hearing her stories further shape your feelings toward him?








I’m thinking of two things in particular. One, I did not know he fought the Khmer Rouge. I did not know he was sent to the front lines until I started interviewing them for the book. And it’s amazing how one piece of information can completely change a perception of a person or a situation or even your own memories. When I found out that my father went to the front lines, even though he was never trained for combat, he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, this kid in his 20s, being told to go there and fight this enemy, and who is this enemy anyways? That information really pushed me out of my comfort zone and challenged me to, for the first time in my life, put myself into his shoes, and to imagine if I was him at that age—young family, trying to do the best that I could to be a father, but then I’m being asked to go to the front lines, I just can’t imagine how disorienting that would be. What happened in that moment was for the first time I felt empathy for him. And my God, I was in my mid 40s when he told me that. It took me all that time to begin to feel empathy for him, and then the empathy, as a close cousin to compassion, I went there, I went all the way to forgiveness, and that was all over the course of interviewing him and doing this book.


The second thing that I think about is how I grew up and how our early lives get formed by those childhood memories, and those were so hard for me. In my head, in those childhood memories my dad was the enemy in our family. And suddenly, my mom’s telling me about how he was so tender when she was pregnant with their first child, and how he would tie the string to his ankle and her wrist and said, “Yank it, if you need to go to the bathroom, or if you need something to eat, or if you need me to put more wood under the coals,” after their first baby was born. There was this tenderness that she spoke of. It really forced me to reconsider who my mother was in my life, and who my father was in our family’s lives.








We learn quickly what Ma expects of a good Cambodian daughter. Dutiful, devoted, not one to make waves. What makes a good Cambodian mother?








Wow. This is an amazing interview. I’m gonna have to write about this interview. I feel like what makes a good mother is somebody who can accept their children. Unconditionally. But what I’m forgetting within that answer is the cultural context. You and I know this cultural context well. Within the American context, as we understand, love is supposed to be unconditional, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. In the Cambodian context, no—there’s a lot of fucking conditions. It is conditional. It’s transactional. It’s all they see. It’s not to say that the Khmer culture is wrong, it’s just to say that that’s a very different worldview than Western culture.


I’ll answer it this way. What makes a good Khmer mother is somebody who will always fight for their kids and somebody who wants the best for their children. Somebody who has knowledge to pass down as a form of inheritance. Another way to answer that question would be to say, unconditional love. But again, that’s this Western idea, and I can’t expect to impose that on my mom, not being American. That’s one of the big tensions that I have to live with. And here’s the thing that I’m missing: I’m not a mother. If I were a mother, I might be better equipped to answer that question in a more meaningful way. One of the very big parts to me about being a mother is that you will just fight for your kids, no matter what. As an aunt to ten nieces and nephews, that’s what I do, too. All of this is a long way of saying that what makes a great mother is that protective instinct. I think it’s the same for any mother, really.








Interviewing your mother was a large part of the creation and end-result of your memoir, including a lot of painful recollections. What was challenging?








I think it was hard for me to hold the fact that my father harmed my mom, even before I was born. I feel like suddenly I got emotional. It’s hard for me to hold even now. Instinctively, I’m just very overprotective of my mom. I had to sit with a lot of that stuff, a lot of the stories my mom told me, and it wasn’t easy. Luckily, I had a good therapist, and I actually ended up getting another therapist while I was writing the memoir, because once I hit the point at which I was writing about going to Afghanistan, I was ready to just walk away—to give the advance money back to the publisher like, “Screw it, fuck this shit.” It’s fucking hard. Excuse my language, it was hard. One of the things that I try to do is try to take myself out of the equation. Like I’m not the granddaughter or the daughter or the niece of these people I’m writing about. I tried to use that journalist side of me so you could have a little bit of remove, and that helped, and that actually is how I was able to write the Afghanistan chapter. I wrote it in second person, because it was still extremely emotional to me.








What did you learn about your mom throughout the process of listening to her stories and translating for her? What did you learn about yourself?








In terms of the process of writing itself, what made it easy is that Ma is such a great storyteller. She’s so detailed and so descriptive. You just get mesmerized, because it is so natural for her to tell an amazing story. The level of detail that she gives is phenomenal. So it was super easy for me to write these scenes because she’d already given me the material. But yeah. I mean, the truth is, like, my mom can break people. You know, my friend Tessa Hulls wrote a graphic memoir called Feeding Ghosts. She almost quit. And the reason why I met her and how we became friends is because we have the same editor. One day I got a text from my editor—my book hadn’t come out yet, but I think it was in production. And Tessa was still in draft mode of hers, and she was at a writer’s residency, and I get this text from our editor saying, “Hey, Put, so I have a writer in Seattle. I think you guys should meet. And can you do me a favor? She wants to quit. Can you just go talk to her?” Tessa was in the exact same spot I was. I said, “You know what? Set it aside, go do something else. Don’t look at it for a week, and then come back to it and see how you feel.” You immerse yourself into a lot of your family’s stories and they’re heavy to hold. They’re really, really heavy to hold. And they’re extraordinarily disorienting, too, because your family stories are your stories, too. And then how do you, as an individual, fit within the context of your family’s history and all those stories?


Even though I teach memoir, I tell people, “Don’t do it, because you will really suffer.” But there’s an upshot! There is that cathartic piece of it. Would I have forgiven my father if there was no Ma and Me? Maybe, maybe not. But it took going down that path of interviewing him and my mom and learning those stories for me to begin those necessary steps toward forgiveness. I have a feeling I might have forgiven him eventually, but it would have taken a lot longer. There was absolute healing that happened with my mom, too, because once I learned that she didn’t want to marry my dad, that she had to, and her whole thing was, “Oh, I’m an independent, educated woman,” I felt so much empathy for her because I was like, “My life is exactly the life she had envisioned for herself.” I thought about what she couldn’t have because culture prevented her from having that. We have something really important in common, which is that both of us wanted freedom. And I could get it because I was in America, but she couldn’t get it because she was in Cambodia at the time, so my compassion for my mom really increased.








Is there anything you feel might have gotten lost in translation?








Oh, a lot, a lot. I tried my best when she was speaking Khmer to translate what I knew, but even with my limited Khmer, I’m sure I bumbled things. Some of the things I had lost in translation, they’re not so big, but maybe some nuanced things. Like, for example, when Ma would tell me some folk tale or some of the myths and whatnot. I think that in the hands of a trained translator, they probably would have come out better than they did in my attempt at translation, but I did the best I could. Language is definitely a blind spot for me because, probably when I was in first grade or second grade, I was speaking English all the time and completely stopped speaking Khmer, and I regret it deeply.








There are sections in the book that are italicized. I take it those are a little bit more of a direct translation or retelling. How did you go about deciding what to transcribe literally, or in other words, what to allow your mother to tell, versus retelling her stories through narration on your end?








I didn’t. My editor did. My editor at one point, said to me, “Your mom has such a distinct voice. Why don’t you let her speak for herself?” I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “Why don’t you just let her tell her own stories?” I was like, “Oh, I can do that?” She says, “Of course you can.”








What else stood out about the writing or editing process?








It wasn’t super easy. There were some parts of writing this book that were so easy, because my editor just made a decision, so that was good for me. Well, one of the things I should tell you—thank God—is that my editor is half Chinese and half white. And I say thank God, because you know, publishing is a very white world still, and one of the worries I had in the book was that I would have to write it for a mainstream audience, and I didn’t want to do that. Really, I just wanted to write it for my nieces and nephews.








You’ve traveled all over, mostly because of your journalism career and following stories wherever they take you, but I noticed that of the places in the US that you’ve lived and called home, they’re exclusively places in the Northwest. Corvallis, Eugene, Spokane, Seattle. Have you found the landscapes of the northwest shape your writing in any way?








Oh, God, they 100 percent shape my writing. I feel like the kind of writing that I do, it’s a bit poetic, and I feel like the landscape itself is poetic. Though I live in Washington, I call myself an Oregonian. I feel more loyal to Oregon just because it’s where I spent all my early years. The land is so beautiful. You know, I think a lot about this idea that when you grow up in a place, you meet yourself in the landscape. That’s what Corvallis, Oregon does for me. The sense of place is so strong—like, immediately, just the wheat fields on either side of I-5 before you hit the Corvallis exit. Then you go into the exit, and you’re just driving on this two-lane highway. It’s farm fields on either side, and the whole way, in the distance, there’s foothills. You can see Marys Peak throughout most of the Willamette Valley. When I go there, I feel such a sense of peace and calm. And when I have been in places, like Afghanistan, that are not peaceful or calm, I think about Corvallis. I had to remind myself that those places exist, and that place actually exists inside of me because when you grow up in a place, it becomes part of who you are.


You know what people would tell me? “You could take Put out of Cambodia, but you can’t take Cambodia out of Put.” Even though I didn’t live in Cambodia, other than as an adult, as a journalist, just being of a place shapes who you are. It’s still home to me. It’s in my heart. A sense of place is absolutely critical to shaping who we are in our identities. You know how you can locate yourself within a landscape? It’s that. Places are very important. When you write your memoir, make sure you talk about it.








On place, I want to talk a little bit more about your return to Cambodia. In the book, you describe finding “the parts of you that had gone dormant” and falling in love with a culture and language again and how you found yourself. At what part of this return home did these things begin to click for you?








It took a little bit of time, and I can remember the moment when I understood it was a shift, and it was when my dreams started happening in Khmer. It was amazing. It was amazing because you know, you spend your life in America, and all of your dreams are English, and suddenly you go to this place, that you didn’t grow up in, you didn’t live in, and you start to dream in that language—it was pretty remarkable. I had probably lived in Cambodia for 6 months at that time, and how language came to me was I had this aunt that I write about in the book, my aunt Ming Pheaktra. Ming was ruthless. She was just like, “You need to speak Khmer with me. I’m not gonna respond to you if you speak English.” And so she forced me, and I really had to come up with the words. I would try to ask her, “OK, well, what does this mean, and what does this mean?” And I would just jot it down in my notebook. At night, even though I had a full-time job, every night I would literally drill myself on what these different words mean, and do my best to write some phonetically. After a while, the shift was when I could hold my own in a conversation with Ming, speaking Khmer, and she didn’t have to ask me, “what did you say?” because I was actually pronouncing things correctly. That was exciting for me.








A follow-up question, but a little bit of a selfish one: Any advice for other Khmer people who want to visit the homeland someday?








Go. Not someday, go right now. Someday is too far away. Just go right now. Why wait?  I want to tell every Cambodian person whether you’re half or a fourth or 100 percent Khmer to just go back, because there was something so powerful about it. Even if it wasn’t your beginnings, because you were born here, Cambodia will always be your homeland because it’s your family’s homeland, and there’s something about returning to one’s beginning, or one’s family’s beginnings, that is so powerful. I almost don’t have the words for it, the kind of connection that I felt, and the kind of existential questions that came up for me, even as a teenager.


Have you read Natasha Tretheway’s book Memorial Drive? She talks about this idea that there are thresholds in our lives. You are one version of yourself before you cross that threshold, and then when you cross that threshold, you become changed. And a lot of times irreversibly or irrevocably changed. And it’s not just one threshold; there are many thresholds that happen in our lives. For me, it was at age 16, leaving the U.S., the place I called home, and going to Cambodia, this place that my mom told me about—everything in my world just shifted in that moment. Everything I thought of myself, everything I thought of my community of Corvallis, my friends—just everything changed, and I realized, “Oh, there is this whole other part of me. What’s that about?”








In another interview, you mentioned that you didn’t intend to write a story about your relationship with your mother. At what point during your writing and exploration of this book did you realize that it was definitely going to be a book that explored that relationship? What lessons did it teach you along the way?








I blame my editor on that, too. I’m so mad at her on that. The book that I wanted to write was about my parents and their own reckoning with survivor’s guilt. But what happened was my editor, or the woman who would become my editor, had read the story I had in the New York Times’s “Modern Love,” and she fell in love with the story. I didn’t know this until later. I already signed the book deal and everything, for the book about my parents, right? Yeah. She had a plan all along. So we have a coffee together that ends up lasting, I don’t know, two and a half hours or something, and over that coffee, she tells me, “Oh, I read your essay in the New York Times… Could you write a little bit more about that, write about your mom?” I was like, “Oh, hell, no, I am so not touching that.” And literally, I went home and I was like, these are the things I will not write about: being gay, my father’s violence—








Everything your book turned out to be?








Oh god, all of it! It was a classic bait and switch. But, you know, I’m glad she did. That’s what makes her a great editor—also, because she knew the story that needed to be told even before I did. I’m so glad because one of the things that I do now is I’ve been traveling around the country and talking about key themes of the book. Before I wrote the book, I think I knew two gay Khmer people. Now, probably 30, maybe even 40. That is pretty spectacular. That’s payday.








The act of memoir writing and remembering is exhausting. How do you take care of yourself and balance out the heaviness associated with memoir writing?








Oh, that is a very big question. I go for a lot of long walks. Cooking—which is kind of my own form of meditation. Reaching out to friends—I can’t begin to tell you how important that is if you decide to commit to memoir. I want to really emphasize: have a friend. Have a friend who knows you’re gonna be doing this, and who you’ll have access to all the time. For me, that friend was Loung Ung. I didn’t know she was gonna be that person for me, but that’s just how it happened. She’s somebody I called when I was really struggling to write about Afghanistan. I’m smiling thinking about it now because of how lucky I am to have somebody like her. She understood PTSD, and I would describe to her that I was having nightmares, like, really severe nightmares during the time I was working on the Afghanistan chapter. And Loung was like, “Oh, my god, you’re having flashbacks. This is PTSD.” I would wake up in a sweat, and ask like, “Why is this happening?” It was because I hadn’t processed that experience at all. I just shoved it down. Thankfully I had Luong to call and talk to, and we actually talked about that in New York when we were co-teaching.


So my advice is: do not try to do this alone if you’re gonna write memoir. You write alone, but you create a community. In other words, people are gonna have to read this eventually, so you might as well share. Self-care also means taking breaks, which I didn’t know. I thought, as a writer, that every day I have to go and write. No. You can write when you’re going on a walk, and you can write when you’re out on Lake Washington on your paddle board—that’s part of it too. And just resting in your brain is part of it. You can’t just keep going all the time.








In reading about your process of coming out, I couldn’t help but think about how people who are really excellent at telling other people’s stories—like journalists—might struggle to tell their own. I know I felt that way during my coming out process, and I saw a bit of that reflected through your journey, too. In what ways did you find that being able to write and tell other’s stories either helped or hampered your ability to tell your own?








You saved the hard questions. I think that you’re right. I think that a lot of times, when we spend our lives telling other people’s stories, there’s no vulnerability involved, right? You’re literally asking somebody a question and then doing what you can as a writer and using your talent to turn that into a story. Then, when you have to turn the lens on yourself, suddenly you’re just like, “Oh, yeah, there are some truths that are really, really hard to sit with on that,” which is why I wanted to run away from the idea of writing about being gay.


I think that in terms of the coming out process for me, one of the things that made it really hard was that I still felt my own shame. When I think about that a little bit, again, my friends came to the rescue, I told a couple of coworkers—I worked at the San Jose Mercury News at the time—and one of my friends who I told at the time, she invited me to her apartment, and then she turned on Diana Ross’s song, “I’m coming out.” And she’s like, “You’re gonna do this, Put, you’re gonna be great!” My mom was gonna fly in that night. I’ll never forget that kindness. So in that moment when I actually came out to my mom, Alexis’s cheerleading and that song, “I’m coming out” on the stereo were definitely there in that space. And it was hard because when you do that, you can’t take it back. Once those words leave your lips, you cannot take it back. You can’t push it back down. They’re out there. My mom could not unhear me coming out to her. Another threshold moment, as Natasha Tretheway would say.








You mention that Ma didn’t attend your wedding. How have you dealt with that?








When my wife and I got married, my friends were really upset that my parents weren’t coming to the wedding. One of my friends actually was like, “Your mom is acting like a bitch,” and I said, “No, I would never use that word.” And I don’t think she is one. You know, it’s hard for her to see or imagine my life because she was forced into a completely different life. I continue to just want to lead with grace and compassion for her, even though, of course, it hurts—like, probably if I look back on my life, my mom, my parents not being at my wedding was probably one of the biggest daggers. But I’ve gotten over it because then you understand the context for that, you know? Those hard moments, you kind of have to hold all of the different aspects of what’s involved in those moments. They’re not happening in a vacuum. There’s all this history and culture that inform those moments. I feel like it makes us better humans if we can see all those angles, don’t you think?


Here’s what I ended up learning: my mom’s job was done when she gave birth to me. A big part of it anyways. I mean, she still had to keep me alive on the boat and all these other things. And that my job was just to live my life for me, because she has her life for her, too. My older sister was the one who said it to me—“Put, don’t worry about what Mom and dad think. They’re not going to be here one day, and you have to live with you.” That really shook me. And I realized, yeah, she’s right. So it kind of emboldens you to just reach for your true self. There’s this idea of selfhood in my book. What does selfhood look like for you? What does selfhood look like for any of us? The other piece of that equation is, do you have the courage to reach for that? Courage is an inside job. I think about something that Ocean Vuong said, which is that—particularly for immigrants—if there’s a blank page, you have to fill it with your story. Otherwise, you risk somebody else writing it and writing it wrong.








What are you working on these days? Can we anticipate seeing any new writing from you in the future?








My friends in Portland corner me on that exact same question. I am working on a couple of book projects right now. One of them is actually a craft book that Luong and I are going to co-author. I’m probably giving away our secrets right now, I know she gets nervous thinking about that. But I’m gonna completely twist her arm to do this, because we’ve been talking about it for years.


I’m kind of writing towards a book about friendship. I don’t see the shape of it yet, and I don’t fully know what it’s going to be yet, but a key piece of the story is my friendship with my neighbor, Ted. Hard core, lifelong Republican, with his F150 pickup truck in the driveway, and here’s our, like, classic lesbian Subaru in our driveway. His art is this big moose’s head in his house, and ours is like, our artist friends’ stuff. You cannot be more different. And yet we are really, really good friends. Not neighbors. Proximity made us friendly, but listening to each other’s personal stories, I think, really made us friends. Like likes like. As humans, we’re already primed to not engage with something that’s not like us.


The reason I’m fascinated by friendship is because of this current moment we’re in. I’m also being challenged to think about, “Who are my friends?”—and I actually issued this rather demanding question to my white friends. I said, “How will you use your white privilege in the next four years to make change?” And what I mean by that question is what I had to explain to some of them was: Don’t leave it to the brown and black people to be on the streets protesting. Do not leave it to the brown and black people to stand up for ourselves. You and your skin privilege have an opportunity to do something. What are you going to do? So, I’m thinking a lot about friendship right now. I’d like to say, maybe it’ll be a book, maybe it’ll be an essay. I think it might be a book, because of how I’m exploring it. We’ll see.  

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