A relatively new immigrant group in the United States, Cambodians arrived in large numbers only after the 1975 U.S. military withdrawal from Southeast Asia. The region's resulting volatility included Cambodia's overthrow by the brutal Khmer Rouge. The four-year reign of terror by these Communist extremists resulted in the deaths of an estimated two million Cambodians in what has become known as the "killing fields." Many early Cambodian evacuees settled in Long Beach, which today contains the largest concentration of Cambodians in the United States. Later arrivals, survivors of the Khmer Rouge trauma, were drawn to Long Beach by family and friends, jobs, the coastal climate, and access to the Port of Long Beach's Asian imports. Long Beach has since become the political, economic, and cultural center of activities influencing Cambodian culture in the diaspora as well as Cambodia itself.

This research project is concerned with Cambodian American students' undersentation in higher education. While numerous studies have been done on Asians heir success in the American Educational School System, few have focused their repreand tattention on Cambodian American students. The under-representation of Cambodian Americans in higher education appears to be a function of the model minority myth, family's socioeconomic status, parental expectations, and cultural influences. The struggles of Cambodian Americans to adapt into mainstream culture have altogether been ignored, and it is time that we take a closer examination of Cambodians and begin to understand their status here in the United States. In this study, I specifically addressed the ways Cambodian student's socioeconomic status, parental expectations, and cultural influences played a vital role in Cambodian students' decision whether or not to pursue a college education. I also examined their schooling process here in America, and a role school played in their current decision. I focused on the Long Beach area because Long Beach is home to the largest growing Cambodian American community in the United States (Rambaut, 1995). A significant proportion of refugees reside in Southern California; approximately 40% of them are concentrated in urban metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties (Rambaut, 1995). I took a qualitative approach in conducting my research. Several individual indepth interviews were conducted. These interviews supplied me with vivid detailed 6 narratives of the student's perception of what their parents' expectations and cultural influences were. A closer examination of Cambodian students' socioeconomic status allowed me to see whether or not socioeconomic privilege correlates to the pursuit of higher education at a four year university as opposed to a community college. Lastly, a glance at my interviewees' schooling process provided me with an insider's perspective in their schooling process and shed some light as to why there is an under-representation of Cambodian Americans in higher education. I drew upon theorist such as Randal Collins (1974), Michael Omi (1994), Howard Winant (1994), Patricia Hill Collins (1990), and Yen Le Espiritu (2003) to help understand the social circumstances that led up to the under-representation of Cambodian Americans in higher education. Discussions on conflict theory, racial formation, matrix of dominance, and notions of home were all included in this work to help broaden reader's understanding how and why Cambodian Americans are an oppressed group. Findings from this research gave valuable insight to some of the multiple barriers that Cambodian American students experience in their pursuit for higher education at a four year university. Through this research, I hope scholars and outreach coordinators can better understand the needs of Cambodian American students and address them accordingly to ensure the success of Cambodian Americans once they are enrolled in four year universities.

In this clear, comprehensive, and unflinching study, Sucheng Chan invites us to follow the saga of Cambodian refugees striving to distance themselves from a series of cataclysmic events in their homeland. Survivors tracks not only the Cambodians' fight for life lives but also their battle for self-definition in new American surroundings. Unparalleled in scope, Survivors begins with the Cambodians' experiences under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, following them through escape to refugee camps in Thailand and finally to the United States, where they try to build new lives in the wake of massive trauma. Their struggle becomes primarily economic as they continue to negotiate new cultures and deal with rapidly changing gender and intergenerational relations within their own families. Poverty, crime, and racial discrimination all have an impact on their experiences in America, and each is examined in depth. Although written as a history, this is a thoroughly multidisciplinary study, and Chan makes use of research from anthropology, sociology, psychology, medicine, social work, linguistics and education. She also captures the perspective of individual Cambodians. Drawing on interviews with more than fifty community leaders, a hundred government officials, and staff members in volunteer agencies, Survivors synthesizes the literature on Cambodian refugees, many of whom come from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. A major scholarly achievement, Survivors is unique in the Asian American canon for its memorable presentation of cutting-edge research and its interpretation of both sides of the immigration process.

Not Just Victims contains twelve oral histories based on conversations with Cambodian community leaders in eight American cities -- Long Beach, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland, Tacoma, and the Massachusetts towns of Fall River and Lowell. Unlike the dozens of autobiographies published by Cambodians that focus largely on their victimization, these narratives describe how Cambodian refugees have adapted to life in the United States. Sucheng Chan's extensive introduction provides a historical framework; she discusses the civil war (1970-75), the bloody Khmer Rouge revolution (1975-79), the border war during the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia (1979-89), and the additional travails faced by those who escaped to holding camps in Thailand. The book also includes an essay on oral history and a substantial bibliography.

"This groundbreaking book peers deeply into the lives and lifestyle of an overlooked new-member of American society providing the reader with understandings compiled in no other document." Asia Week."Compelling. This new work by author Scott Shaw details the trials and the tribulations of newly arrived Cambodian immigrants and their quest to find assimilation in U.S. Society." Publishers Weekly.Cambodia was in a state of political and cultural upheaval from the late 1950s through the early 1990s. This was epitomized by the political reign of terror brought on by Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, as he seized power in 1975. His attempt to create a completely agrarian society left the country in chaos and an estimated three million Cambodians dead. With the inception of his brutal rule, Cambodians began to seek sanctuary in less hostile environments. With this, many left their native land and entered the United States as refugees. This movement to America has had one city as a focal point, Long Beach, California. By the late 1980s there were an estimated thirty-five thousand Cambodians living within this cities boundaries. This is a groundbreaking book on the subject, chronicling their plight.This book is unique in that it was the first text to study the lives and the lifestyles of the Cambodian Refugees living in Long Beach, California. In order to present insight into their struggles, their change of lifestyle, and their assimilation patterns, the author interviewed one-hundred Long Beach, California based Cambodians refugees in 1986. In 1989, the author interviewed an additional one-thousand refugees. From these interviews, the author was able to comprise statistics and detail a presentation of the Cambodia refugee experience, based upon their own definitions and understandings of living life in the United States.