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On one of our last evenings in Phnom Penh, my siblings and I went to one of my old haunts on the Sisowath Quay, along the Tonlé Sap, where we sipped lychee martinis and dug our forks into pork chops and steaks with mashed potatoes. You can learn a lot by sitting in one place and watching. I sat closest to the window.
As my siblings and I processed what this trip home meant for all of us, every now and then I glanced out the window. I saw little children hawking bootlegged copies of my best friend’s book, First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung’s story of surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide as a little girl. I saw another familiar scene: a shriveled white man in blue jeans and a barely buttoned short-sleeve Hawaiian shirt, walking arm in arm with an inappropriately aged Khmer girl in heels and a skimpy dress along the riverfront.
As a Phnom Penh resident, I used to glare at these white men, hoping my gaze would burn holes into their consciences. I donated to nongovernmental organizations that helped sex trafficked Khmer girls learn trade skills so they could enter livelihoods that didn’t involve exploitation. I warned my young female cousins from poverty-stricken families in the village who wanted to work in the garment factories in Phnom Penh to be aware of and avoid the pimps who recruited from among the factory girls.
But on this night, seeing the old white man with the too-young Khmer girl, I looked away. When you live in a place, you want to change it. You work to make it better. When you’re a tourist, you make a mental note of the wrongness and move on. Only later, when I was back in my own bed and in my own home 7,500 miles away, did I finally feel the bruise that moment left: “What happened to my heart?” I wondered. I felt hollow and ashamed for not feeling more angry and disgusted at being confronted again with the grossly unequal power dynamics of white men and Khmer girls. I felt a stabbing guilt that as a tourist, I was no longer compelled to care.
But in that moment, on the riverside with my siblings, I was distracted by another ghost coming into view. I thought of the man I nearly married, how we used to meet our friends for drinks and dinner in this very restaurant and how we often sat in this exact corner where my siblings and I now sat. How I loved him but not enough. How I had left him, and my country, and a past self that needed to exist in a more honest way than she did in Cambodia.
As my mind wandered and my siblings reflected on their experiences in our homeland, I caught a reflection in the window and glanced out to see a drag queen in a sequined dress, high heels, and a feather boa around her long, broad neck sashay along the sidewalk outside. She walked like she belonged exactly on this street, exactly in this country, and I wondered whether the fact of her existence was a surface-level change or something deeper, something better for my country—a transformation I could support and be proud of.
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).
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