This is on point. I'm Begna Chocrobardi. Putzada rang and I grew up in the same Western

Oregon town. We had the same friends, went to the same school. We were both the devoted,

driven, overachieving children of immigrants. When you're a teenager, that's enough to

form a friendship. So I never thought I needed to know more about Putt and her family.

She once talked about how her family had fled Cambodia, but at 16, I did not possess

the awareness or courage to ask her what that really meant. What it meant is that in order

to raise her family in the placid ease of Corvallis Oregon, Putz's mother had to escape

the genocidal killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. That is the story Putt and her family

carried with them every day, but I never knew it. Meanwhile, it was Putt who showed the

true journalistic talent. She went for reporting for our high school newspaper The Crescent

Cryer, to living and reporting in a dozen countries including Cambodia, Thailand and

Afghanistan. I'd lost track of her since high school, each of us moving in our own directions,

trying to find our own way until this year. When I opened Putt's new memoir, Ma and

me, and read the words, Go in the water, there's the crocodile. Come up on land, there's

the tiger. And there it was. That story. Putzada and her mother have carried with

them their entire lives. The story that Putt is so generously willing to share with us

now. Putzada rang. Welcome to one point. Hello, Magna. What did you want to be here?

I feel like it's been more than 20 years since we've talked. My goodness, it sure has

been a minute 30, I think. 30 years? Don't tell anybody.

So listen, I really mean it when I say that I don't know in sort of the blissful ignorance

of teenage life in Corvallis, Oregon. I did not know what it meant, what that story that

you and your family carry with you every single day about escaping from Cambodia. And now

...