In 1985 I returned to Lowell after a four-year period of traveling around the United States. Upon re-entering the city, I was immediately struck by the transformation that was taking place there. Walking Lowell's streets, I came across public art and new hotels in place of the drab and depressed world I had known as a teenager. I found previously vacant mill buildings being renovated and occupied by a burgeoning high-tech industry, and new facilities and exhibits being constructed to present the Industrial Revolution of the turn of the century to the general public. But it was also clear that this transformation involved more than just a physical renovation of red brick buildings or re-invigoration of Lowell's economy. Another wave of new arrivals was finding its way there.

At an amazing rate the city was becoming home to a growing number of Southeast Asians, mostly Cambodians, in the process of being resettled from refugee camps in Thailand. Almost overnight, Cambodian groceries and stores had sprung up on Market Street where the Greek community of my parents' generation was once centered. Likewise, the tenements that once housed the Greek and French-Canadian immigrants and their offspring had become home to the large extended families of these Cambodian refugees. Yet unlike their predecessors these new arrivals were of a cultural and socio-economic background completely different from what the city had previously known. It was an extraordinary thing for me to see Cambodian mothers dressed in colorful sarongs and sandals carrying exotic fruits and twenty-five pound sacks of rice from the Phnom Penh Grocery just down the street from the Demoulas Supermarket. The face and heart of Lowell was indeed changing, and I was not far behind.

My interest in this new addition to Lowell's ethnic landscape led me to the International Institute, where I found work as an English teacher. Six months later in an amazing twist of fate I found myself married to a wonderful Cambodian woman and completely immersed in the culture and language of her native country. It became the central focus of my new life to understand the reasons behind the incredible influx of Cambodians to Lowell. I wanted to know the individual lives behind the smiling faces that surrounded us, to find out who my wife was and what were the specific events that brought her to this city and into my life. It was one thing to read that over one million Cambodians had died of starvation, disease and execution between 1975 and 1979 under Pol Pot's "reign of terror." But it was an entirely different thing to experience on a personal level what this kind of devastation means for those who have survived it.

In the course of living and working with Cambodians I discovered that behind everything, the religion, traditions, language, etc., is the survivor. More than anything else this is what defines who these people are, who my wife is. Moreover, I learned that for the survivor to be able to heal the wounds of the past and go on with his life, it is essential that his or her story be told to the world and that that story be heard. We, the larger society, have but to listen and learn.

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