By Robert O’Neill/AP
Lowell’s Tsongas Arena, usually home to hockey games and rock concerts, was filled with the sights and sounds of Cambodian culture on April 14 as thousands celebrated the Massachusetts community’s biggest holiday.
An estimated 6,000 crammed into the hall to bid farewell to the Year of the Dragon and usher in the year 2545 in the Khmer calendar, the Year of the Snake.
The crowd gathered to enjoy a day-long celebration involving religious ceremonies, traditional dances performed in ornate gilded dresses, and American chart-toppers sung in Khmer.
“Once a year we enjoy this,” said Saroeun Trate, 42, of Lowell, as he watched the festival with his wife and three children, who, unlike their parents, were born in the United States.
The throngs of small children running around were evidence of the vibrant community’s growth. Since refugees first began coming to the area to escape the killing fields of Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s, Lowell has grown into the second largest Cambodian population in the United States — behind only Long Beach, Calif.
Lowell is now the most heavily Asian American city in Massachusetts, with 16.55 percent of the city’s population, according to the latest census data, and Cambodian Americans are the largest Asian group in the city.
In Lowell’s Lower Highland neighborhood, stores have names such as Angkor Hair Design and Video Phnom Meas Thruei. The city also has a new Buddhist temple and a sprawling Cambodian supermarket.
The community is also growing in political clout. U.S. Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., was the event’s keynote speaker. City Councilman Rithy Uong is the first Cambodian in the United States to hold public office.
Whereas the city’s Cambodian Water Festival in August drew an estimated crowd of 40,000 last summer, Saturday’s event was billed as the largest Khmer New Year’s festival in the United States, according to the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association, which organized the event.
The event is organized as a way of keeping cultural traditions alive, as well as bringing the community together, said Sophy Theam, 24, who coordinated the event.
Away from the stage, around the arena’s busy concourse, where vendors sold everything from pizza to traditional sweet New Year’s treats, friends were indeed reuniting.
“We’re catching up with old friends,” said Neah Kim, 31, as she and her parents gathered around the man who was their dentist before they left Cambodia for the United States in 1979. They had not seen him since.
Kim, who grew up in New York, away from other Cambodian Americans, was attending her “first festival,” she said. She came to see whether she would want to move to Lowell after she graduates from nursing school in Boston later this year.
Non-Cambodians also came to the arena to get a feeling for a culture that they have grown close to.
Robert Nassau, 60, and his wife Nancy Storrow, 55, drove from Putney, Vt., to attend the festival. The couple had only recently returned from Cambodia after volunteering at a hospital for a month, and while in Lowell, visited relatives of people they had met at the hospital.
“It’s wonderful to see that they’re connected, and they’re getting the young people connected to the culture,” Nassau said.
But Trate, watching a Cambodian American magician on stage with his children, said it was hard sometimes to bridge the two cultures.
“Probably they like American customs more,” he said, as his 10-year-old son Sophany gave the magician’s tricks a lukewarm response. |
