Dated
Lowell,
Massachusetts, a former mill town of the red-brick-and-waterfall variety
25 miles north of Boston, has proportionally more Cambodians and
Cambodian-Americans than nearly any other city in the country: as many
as 30,000, out of a population of slightly more than 100,000. These are
largely refugees and the families of refugees from the Khmer Rouge, the
Maoist extremists who, from 1975 to 1979, destroyed Cambodia’s economy;
shot, tortured, or starved to death nearly two million of its people;
and forced millions more into a slave network of unimaginably harsh
labor camps. Lowell’s Cambodian neighborhood is lined with dilapidated
rowhouses and stores that sell liquor behind bullet-proof glass,
although the town’s leaders are trying to rebrand it as a tourist
destination: “Little Cambodia.”
More @ New Republic
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