GLR July-August 2022

2016 article for the “Modern Love” column in The New York Times (which formed the basis for her book), there’s no word in Khmer for bisexual, so she came out as gay. In that article, she quoted her mother as saying: “You’re crazy. You’re being dis respectful, dishonorable, disloyal. You’re not normal.” They did not speak to each other for long periods of time. Eventually, Reang did find the love of her life, but when she and April married, her parents refused to attend the wedding. Finally, the death of an in-law spurred her mother to begin to speak to her daughter again. ____________________________________________________ Martha E. Stone is the literary editor of this magazine.

A Life of Close Calls

M ARTHA E. S TONE

MA AND ME: A Memoir by Putsata Reang Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 400 pages, $28. J OURNALIST Putsata Reang has written a compelling memoir that offers a glimpse into a world that’s not often encountered in LGBT literature. In 1975, when she was not quite a year old, Putsata Reang and her extended family were refugees, fleeing Cambodia after it fell to the Khmer Rouge. They were at sea for almost a month on an over crowded boat, suffering from hunger and exposure. Literally minutes from death’s door, she was saved by her mother’s ded ication and the American medical staff at Subic Bay in the Philippines, where the boat was finally allowed to dock. About six months later, the family found itself settled in Corvallis, Oregon, thanks to Protestant church groups that had arranged for housing and jobs. From her earliest years, Putsata Reang felt that she was dif ferent from her sisters, preferring to wear boys’ clothes and play with her brother’s toys. She had crushes on other girls and en dured homophobic slurs. She also had a chaotic home life. Her parents were extremely hard workers, but her father brutalized her mother and other family members for years, with her mother sometimes running away for short periods. Both parents refused to talk about what life had been like in Cambodia. After the Cambodian genocide became known, they were able to bring relatives over to the U.S., but they still didn’t talk about the ter rors they’d endured. Fortunately, the Reang siblings and their cousins (who were treated as brothers and sisters) had very close bonds and provided emotional support for each other through out their lives. Reang excelled in school, where she determined to become a foreign correspondent. While her mother was happy about her academic and pro fessional success, she was adamant that Putsata get married and have children. The latter’s desperate need to live up to her mother’s expectations, along with her desire to prove herself worthy of having been saved as an infant, make for some har rowing reading. The author is brutally frank about her attempts at suicide during her college years. But it did get better. She had great success in her career, writing for The Seattle Times and The San Jose Mercury News, winning fellowships and spending long months in Cambodia and other parts of Asia, with a focus on training local journalists to report on corruption in local gov ernment. She is deeply insightful about what it means to be a “foreign correspondent” in the country of one’s birth. She also had to relearn a language that she had spoken until about second grade, and then lost. Over the years, Reang had some affairs with men, but many more with women. When she finally decided to come out to her mother after years of indecision, she found that her mother’s understanding was merely superficial. As she disclosed in a

Pitfalls in Pleasantville

R UTH J OFFRE

SPELL HEAVEN and Other Stories by Toni Mirosevich Counterpoint. 288 pages, $16.95 L INKED STORY COLLECTIONS offer a particular pleasure: the opportunity to explore many different facets of a place or set of characters while still providing a measure of continuity, a narrative through-line that connects these elements. Toni Mirosevich’s collection Spell Heaven pro vides just this pleasure: a chance to settle in, walk around, get a sense of all the characters living in this coastal town full of fish ermen and sailors, nurses and professors, people in comfortable homes alongside those who are down on their luck. Mirosevich’s first-person narrator, a queer writing instructor living with her wife, a nurse, falls closer to the “comfortable” side of that spectrum. Like Mirosevich, the narrator comes from a line of working-class fishermen and sailors, and she often longs to be at sea, on a ship, skating past a storm—even as she settles into a life in a fairly nice neighborhood, where some peo ple are less welcoming than others to their new neighbors, a les bian couple. It’s a good life, and she has a good gig, as the narrator herself points out, but adjusting to middle-class subur bia isn’t easy, and the narrator navigates the neighborhood’s ca sual homophobia with some anxiety. Thankfully, there are no acts of violence or hate crimes in these pages, and the queer characters move through the world with dignity, making friends as they gradually become part of the community. This is what these stories are really all about: connection, empathy, the ability to understand the challenges that other peo ple face and to treat them with grace. In “Who I Used to Be,” the narrator finally strikes up a conversation with Tommy, a drunk she always sees on her daily walks to the pier, where Tommy sits outside the Chat n’ Chew, a small diner. After months of see ing him in passing, she finally gets his story—a familiar tale of a man who once had a family, a house, a job, until he lost it all, one after the other, to life’s vicissitudes. She is content to hear his story and weave it into her understanding of the town. A few stories in the book dive back into her memory and

The G & LR

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