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Pages From Pages From Reang Maandme Interior Word 1
Pages From Pages From Reang Maandme Interior Word 1
CAMBODIA
; CROCODILE AND TIGER
;
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
;
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.”