PebHmong Discussion Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: theking on January 04, 2022, 04:52:41 PM
-
Massachusetts’ Sokhary Chau sworn in as 1st Cambodian American mayor in U.S.
‘As a proud Cambodian American, I am standing on the shoulders of many immigrants who came before me to build this city’
BOSTON (AP) — He came to the U.S. as a young refugee, having survived Khmer Rouge’s brutal rule. Now, Sokhary Chau is the nation’s first Cambodian American mayor.
The 49-year-old city councilor in Lowell, Massachusetts, was unanimously picked by his colleagues to assume the body’s top post-Monday, in the process also becoming the city’s first Asian American mayor.
“God bless America, right? I was a refugee, now I’m mayor of a major city in Massachusetts,” Chau said hours after he was officially sworn in. “I don’t know if that could happen anywhere else in the world. I’m still trying to absorb it.”
Chau, in his inaugural remarks, reflected on his family’s perilous escape from Cambodia and the deep immigrant roots in Lowell, about 30 miles north of Boston near the New Hampshire line. It was an early center of America’s textile industry, drawing waves of European and Latin American immigrants over generations.
Today, the city of more than 115,000 residents is nearly 25% Asian and home to the nation’s second-largest Cambodian community.
“As a proud Cambodian American, I am standing on the shoulders of many immigrants who came before me to build this city,” Chau said Monday before a crowd that included his wife and two teenage sons.