My nation had advanced in methods I couldn’t acknowledge, and so had I. Traveling helped me see I nonetheless have residual disgrace about being homosexual; it took launching myself out of the context of America and plunging again into the context of my motherland to see this, to know I’ve not but reached the outer frontier of my very own reckoning, although I had written a memoir about being a queer Cambodian refugee. Healing occurs within the churn of our returning.
On our final day collectively in Phnom Penh, earlier than elements of our household flew again to the US, we took a river cruise on the Tonlé Sap, climbing aboard a vessel outfitted for events. On the higher deck tables and chairs have been arrange between palm vegetation strung with lights. My mother selected a seat on the decrease deck, alone on a fake leather-based couch. When she didn’t be part of the remainder of us on the higher deck, I descended and took a seat throughout from her.
“Don’t you want to see the view?” I requested. “Feel the breeze?”
“I know what this river looks like,” my mom stated. “This was my life, a long time ago, along this river.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that being there, on that boat, on a river the place she—newly married and newly relocated from the village to Phnom Penh—as soon as purchased fish from Cham fishermen to put together for her new husband, would trigger reminiscences of one other model of herself to come flooding again. I puzzled which of my mom’s ghosts had discovered her. I left my mother there alone in her reverie, and I hopped up the steps to be part of my siblings and in-laws and nieces and nephews. Eventually, Mom clambered up the steps, too. We clinked glasses of Angkor beer and snapped pictures of the fishing villages and the solar dropping beneath Phnom Penh’s skyline.
We hadn’t meant to take that river cruise on the Tonlé Sap, however it was recommended by one in every of my sisters as a enjoyable group exercise—the final we’d do collectively. We began on a boat practically fifty years in the past, my household and I. It felt unbelievable and proper to finish on one, too. This time, nobody was operating from struggle. By the autumn, the river will reverse course once more. I’ll have returned to my life within the US and again to my life’s present preoccupation—touring throughout my America with a single message: Be who you’re.
The motion of the river is the motion of the nation is the motion of the human soul. There is usually stress to go a technique, and you do, and ultimately you be taught to calm down till the timing of the earth’s personal rhythms drive you again the opposite method. Blame it on hydraulics, gravity, or larger gears at work.
Here I used to be on my final day in Cambodia, on the Tonlé Sap, a river that does the one factor it is aware of how to do: It goes with the stream till the waters rise as soon as extra, and it goes backwards once more from the way in which it got here.
“The Return” by Putsata Reang was first printed in Edge of the World, edited by Alden Jones (Blair, 2025).