A Change of Guard

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Thursday 29 November 2012

The Healing Fields of Long Beach's Cambodia Town

The next generation of the city's Cambodian-American community steps up to help its elders—and itself
"Our future is fragile, our hope can break.
At any moment, be aware and wide awake.
We gotta be focused, time to concentrate,
like a Buddha on lotus, mind and meditate.
We here now in the Unified States.
The land of opportunity, outcome is what you make.
So full steam ahead, don't worry about the brakes.
A head full of dreams, that idea seems great.
We here now, too much is at stake.
It's a new kind of jungle, and different kind of struggle."
—From praCh Ly's upcoming album, Dalama 3: Memoirs of the Invisible War

John Gilhooley
Long Beach's first Cambodia Town Film Festival Coordinators praCH Ly and Caylee So (center) with their planning committee at the Art Theatre
John Gilhooley
Long Beach's first Cambodia Town Film Festival Coordinators praCH Ly and Caylee So (center) with their planning committee at the Art Theatre
*     *     *
PraCh Ly drives his black Mercedes SUV down Anaheim Street in Long Beach on a warm Thursday afternoon, passing clusters of storefronts with barred windows and squiggly Khmer script. He gazes at the familiar businesses—fabric shops selling jewel-toned sarongs, DVD stores plastered with posters promoting the latest Cambodian titles, and restaurants serving up plates of fresh lok lak beef salad and bowls of mango sticky-rice pudding.
"Over there is where you go after coming back from the clubs," he says, pointing to the nondescript bakery-turned-nightspot Bamboo Island. "You can sing karaoke until, like, 3 a.m."
This is Cambodia Town, the heart of Southern California's Cambodian community, the largest such enclave in the United States, and one of the largest on Earth. And the 33-year-old Ly (he goes by praCh; the spelling is his own) is perhaps its most famous ambassador, a rapper who became an accidental superstar in a country he only knew about through library books and fragmented family tales. Read the rest of the article at OC Weekly.

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