My country had evolved in ways I could not recognize, and so had I. Traveling helped me see I still have residual shame about being gay; it took launching myself out of the context of America and plunging back into the context of my motherland to see this, to know I have not yet reached the outer frontier of my own reckoning, even though I had written a memoir about being a queer Cambodian refugee. Healing happens in the churn of our returning.
On our last day together in Phnom Penh, before parts of our family flew back to the US, we took a river cruise on the Tonlé Sap, climbing aboard a vessel outfitted for parties. On the upper deck tables and chairs were set up between palm plants strung with lights. My mom chose a seat on the lower deck, alone on a faux leather sofa. When she didn’t join the rest of us on the upper deck, I descended and took a seat across from her.
“Don’t you want to see the view?” I asked. “Feel the breeze?”
“I know what this river looks like,” my mother said. “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 where she—newly married and newly relocated from the village to Phnom Penh—once bought fish from Cham fishermen to prepare for her new husband, would cause memories of another version of herself to come flooding back. I wondered which of my mother’s ghosts had found her. I left my mom there alone in her reverie, and I hopped up the stairs to join my siblings and in-laws and nieces and nephews. Eventually, Mom clambered up the stairs, too. We clinked glasses of Angkor beer and snapped photos of the fishing villages and the sun dropping beneath Phnom Penh’s skyline.
We hadn’t intended to take that river cruise on the Tonlé Sap, but it was suggested by one of my sisters as a fun group activity—the last we’d do together. We started on a boat nearly fifty years ago, my family and I. It felt improbable and right to end on one, too. This time, no one was running from war. By the fall, the river will reverse course again. I’ll have returned to my life in the US and back to my life’s current preoccupation—traveling across my America with a single message: Be who you are.
The movement of the river is the movement of the country is the movement of the human soul. There is sometimes pressure to go one way, and you do, and eventually you learn to relax until the timing of the earth’s own rhythms force you back the other way. Blame it on hydraulics, gravity, or greater gears at work.
Here I was on my last day in Cambodia, on the Tonlé Sap, a river that does the only thing it knows how to do: It goes with the flow until the waters rise once more, and it goes backwards again from the way it came.
“The Return” by Putsata Reang was first published in Edge of the World, edited by Alden Jones (Blair, 2025).
