Memoirist Putsata Reang talks about the 'complicated love' for America, Cambodia, and Ma

This is the KUOW Book Club, and we just finished reading "Ma and Me" by Putsata Reang. I'm your club guide, Katie Campbell. Let's get into it.

I

f I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: My favorite part of this job is having the opportunity to talk to incredibly talented writers, to pick their brains about their processes, and to get to know them beyond the words on the page.

At the end of each author interview, I think, "Wow. That was the best one yet." I get excited. I genuinely mean it every time.

RELATED: Subscribe to the KUOW Book Club newsletter here

But you must believe me, reader, when I say I felt that even more when I finished my interview with Reang — felt it in my whole body, in my heart. It was like we shared a deeply satisfying meal of all our favorite foods, and to have another bite would have been too much to handle. I am continuously stunned by our authors' grace and honesty and willingness to put it all on the table. Reang put it all on the table and served it up in heaping quantities of heart and soul.

"It" being her story and all it took to write this stunning memoir.

"I'm so privileged that my mom, well, both my my mom and dad, that they took time over the course of years as I was working on this book and interviewing them to share the details they did," Reang told me. "Because I was, essentially, dragging my parents back into their trauma by just merely being a journalist and asking them questions. It's something that weighs heavily on me as both a journalist and as a daughter, because you don't want to harm your parents. And at the same time, the journalist in me had urgent questions that I wanted answers to.

"What I learned over the course of writing this book and interviewing my own parents and interviewing relatives and my friends was that, no, sometimes you have to stop. That it's not worth bringing somebody over the edge and plunging them back into a traumatic experience to serve yourself and to serve your story, that sometimes a story can be told without the harm and the damage."

Reang had to delve into her own trauma, too. And in asking for her parents' stories, she was asking for pieces of her own. The experience of fleeing Cambodia, fleeing the Khmer Rouge, was a deeply painful time for her parents, fully realized adults who knew what they were leaving behind — their home, culture, and loved ones, but violence, too. At 11 months old, Reang had no awareness. But this memoir shows how much it impacted her anyway, and how much she deserves the answers she sought.

"One of the things that I had to learn over the course of writing this book was that some stories simply aren't mine to tell," she said. "Some are. And there are some stories that I don't owe a reader that can only be mine and should only be mine. ...If I could do anything for listeners who are even considering writing memoir, it's to disabuse folks of this notion that you have to say everything in your book."

That may be hard to believe, coming from this author who gave her readers so much, who said so much. Consider this reflection on her return to Cambodia — first as a teen, then as an adult — and the push and pull of her Cambodian and American identities:

"Identity has always been in flux for me," Reang said. "Growing up, there was a time when I was a kid where I thought I was only American, because I didn't know any better. ...But later on, when I did go to Cambodia, I realized there's this whole other part of me, this whole other half of me that I didn't even know existed."

Later, she would learn that the U.S., the place she called home and loved — still loves, Reang's clear about that — had bombed her homeland. During the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger directed a secret bombing campaign called Operation Menu, during which the U.S. bombed Eastern Cambodia. The bombings are believed to have killed tens of thousands of civilians and contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. Operation Menu also, effectively, contributed to Reang's family eventually fleeing to safety in the U.S.

RELATED: Author Putsata Reang describes life as a refugee when 'you cannot go in the water or come up on land'

"When I learned that, it really dismantled me in a way that I had not expected," Reang said. "I had placed America, like so many immigrants do, on this pedestal of [being] the greatest country. We have all these opportunities here. If you have a dream, you can go after it and make it come true. And then I get to this fact that... America bombed my country, which destabilized Cambodia, opening the door for the Khmer Rouge to enter and take control, which then required my family to leave and America opening its doors to us.

"To take a line from one of my favorite novelists, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who says, 'America, if you want to know why we are here in your country, because you were in our countries first.' To me, that says it all."

Yet Reang's parents felt indebted to the U.S., in much the same way she felt indebted to them. We see how that concept of debt shaped Reang's life, even in ways that are smaller than the forced migration of a people:

"Good and worthy." What a heavy load to carry at any age.

As a gay woman, Reang felt less than "good and worthy" many times throughout the book. I was glad to learn that her Ma has grown in the years since the book was published, and they have been able to heal together (you really must listen to our conversation above, reader).

I could write another thousand words about Reang's reflections on the love she found with April, the woman who would become her wife, and the work Reang does with her students in Burien to help them express themselves through writing.

But on that note of "good and worthy," I want to instead let Reang have the last word, with a note that struck me as we spoke and challenged the concept of "good and worthy" in a context that is much bigger than ourselves.

"April 17 will be the 50th anniversary of my family leaving Cambodia," she told me. "Now, what we left was a regime and a new form of government, communism, vis-à-vis the Khmer Rouge, where, if you were a journalist, a teacher, an artist, a doctor, an engineer, you were immediately pulled aside and slaughtered.

"Here I am in my own country of America, where, if you are a teacher, you're being targeted because of the knowledge you're imparting on children. ... Doctors, because doctors help people come into the versions of themselves that they have always felt that they were or... I'll just come right out and say it, performing abortions. In my country, doctors were targeted for saving lives under a regime that was intent on ending lives to the tune of 2 million in Cambodia. Journalists, why? Because we have the audacity to tell the truth. This is the moment we're in right now. And I think it's shaken my foundation to know that here we are coming up on the 50-year anniversary of what my family left, and we've arrived at that same place here in America, in my country."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Spoiler alert: In case you missed it, the KUOW Book Club partnered with Seattle Public Library for this year's Seattle Reads.

RELATED: Seattle Reads + KUOW Book Club: Celebrating National Poetry Month with local voices

That means we'll be reading "You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World" in April. "You Are Here" is a poetry anthology that was edited by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The collection features 50 American poets who were invited "to observe and reflect on their local landscape." Among them are Seattle-area poets Laura Da' and Cedar Sigo.

We'll have more information about the reading schedule and live interview/poetry reading later this month.