Shutterstock
It’s 25 miles from Boston
Lowell, Mass., sits in the Merrimack Valley, about 25 miles northwest of Boston. Most people know it for old textile mills and red brick factories.
But walk through the Lower Highlands neighborhood, and you’ll find Khmer script on shop signs, the smell of stir-fried lemongrass drifting out of restaurant doors, and neighbors talking over bowls of noodles in a language that traces back to Angkor.
Tens of thousands of Cambodian Americans call this city home, making it the second-largest Khmer community in the country after Long Beach, Calif. What built that community is a story that starts with survival.
Shutterstock
Refugees from the Khmer Rouge built a new life here
Cambodian families started arriving in Lowell in the early 1980s…