My country and I had changed in ways that I did not recognize. Traveling made me realize that I still harbor a residual shame for being gay. It took launching myself from the contexts of America and my motherland in order to recognize this. The healing happens as we return.
We took a trip to the river on our last day in Phnom Penh before some of our family members flew home. river cruise on the Tonlé Sap, climbing aboard a vessel outfitted for parties. Tables and chairs were placed on the upper deck, between palm trees strung with lights. My mom chose to sit alone on the lower level, on a fake leather sofa. After she did not join the rest on the upper deck I went down to sit across from her.
Do you not want to see this view? I asked. Feel the breeze?
My mother replied, “I can see how this river appears.” This was my life along this river, many years ago.
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 ghost of my mother had found her. I left her there in her reverie and hopped up the staircase to join my siblings, in-laws, nieces and nephews. Mom eventually climbed the stairs. We sipped Angkor Beer and took photos of Phnom Penh, the surrounding fishing villages, and the setting sun.
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. My family and i started our journey on a ship nearly fifty years before. It seemed improbable, but also right, to finish on a boat. This time no one ran from the war. By the fall the river will turn around 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 flow of the river represents the movement and soul of the nation. You may be pushed to go in one direction, but eventually, you will learn to relax, until the rhythms of the earth force you to turn around. You can blame hydraulics, gravity or larger gears.
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 Raang was published for the first time in Edge of the WorldAlden J. Jones (Blair 2025).
