Long Beach, California… A “suburb” of Los Angeles (just 20 miles away), on the Pacific coast. Long Beach is a city of nearly half a million people, the most ethnically diverse city in the United States. Besides this, Long Beach has one of the world’s largest shipping ports (for my whole life I had never seen such a wide huge massive extended port!), with a large oil industry since oil in the area is found both underground and offshore. 
Long Beach Asian community includes a large Cambodian community, considered the second-largest Cambodian community outside of Asia (after Paris, France) with 50 000 Cambodian American people or Americans from Cambodian descent. The Cambodian community of Long Beach is mostly visible in a neighborhood along Anaheim Street, between Atlantic and Junipero Streets. In 2007, the “Little Phnom Penh” became “Cambodia Town” - http://www.cambodiatown.org/ - with an official recognition from the city of Long Beach.
Long Beach is a place that makes Cambodian people proud! Even though the integration has not always been easy, even though some people in the Cambodian community still face big challenges to be able to make it here in the USA (language, jobs, wages, health, studies, education, “weight” of the past, identity struggle…), the Cambodian people in the US are proud of Long Beach for the actions, the results and the impacts that the community here has built in the city…
. . See more stories about the Cambodian Americans in the archives of this blog! ..
