Cambodian Community Makes Banner Statement

Right now, they are simply hot pink street banners that declare this fixer-upper mile of Long Beach to be Little Phnom Penh.

Fluttering along Anaheim Street, they define the heart of the Cambodian community, the largest in the world outside the Kingdom of Cambodia. No freeway signs, no official designation like Little Tokyo or Little Saigon. Just a streak of pink along a blur of stucco on a homely corridor lined with immigrant promise.

But after a generation of living and working in relative obscurity, Cambodian refugee leaders and Long Beach City Hall hope the banners will invite a blossoming of pride, property improvements and investment after years of financial blunder and missed opportunity.

Amid a population of up to 50,000 Cambodians, such long-awaited progress has been stunted, immigrant leaders concede, by disorganization, language barriers and a fierce distrust of government. Which is why merchant, politician and social servant alike find great potential in such a seemingly small wave of magenta.

“It’s really the beginning of the community putting itself on the map,” said Sereivuth Prak, deputy director of United Cambodian Community Inc., a service center and institution among refugees, which led the banner effort.

“Most of our people came from rural areas and were uneducated farmers or peasants, not business owners,” said Prak, himself a refugee. “And here they are in a city. This kind of change, it’s taken a while.”

For years after their exodus from genocide and war, the refugee community struggled here with more basic challenges than creating a name for itself. Cambodian boat people were primarily agrarian and likely to be unschooled in anything but farm life.

“They didn’t come here for economic purposes; they came here because they couldn’t stay in Cambodia,” said Jack Humphrey, a demographics expert for the city of Long Beach, who worked as a professor throughout Asia for 18 years. “They have had a difficult time adjusting to America. But I think they are a hidden jewel in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

“It would be very nice,” he added, “if Anaheim Street became an attractive tourist center. I think people would find the Cambodian community very fascinating.”

For now, that vision is strictly potential, and few Cambodians use the term Little Phnom Penh.

“I say Anaheim Street,” said Kaylene Men, 31, who owns a Cambodian gift shop and works at the Cambodian Assn. of America, the older of two social services centers for refugees. “But I think the banners and the name are meant as much or more for non-Cambodians. And I think they’re beautiful. I love the pink.”

Other business owners say they hope the banners spark a drive toward the day when the boulevard, like Little Saigon’s Bolsa Avenue in Westminster, is officially designated Little Phnom Penh.

Prak said he has been approached by a groundswell of businesspeople saying they want to work toward an official designation of Little Phnom Penh that might better establish the district as a destination to which tourists who visit the Queen Mary, Aquarium of the Pacific and downtown Pine Avenue promenade might be routed. He and others say a police substation on Anaheim Street has made business owners feel more secure but there is a long haul ahead.

“Let’s face it: Right now, Anaheim Street is an ugly thoroughfare,” said John Shapiro, the development manager and grant writer for United Cambodian Community and husband of its Cambodian-born arts program director. “Our job is to draw attention to the community as an entity, to respond more than initiate. If the community wants to work toward [an official name], great, we’ll work toward that.”

Besides being plunked into an urban landscape, the older refugees in Long Beach have struggled to overcome unimaginable trauma. One million to 2 million Cambodians were slain, and the intellectual and political leadership all but wiped out after radical Communist Khmer Rouge forces mounted a guerrilla war and seized the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975, toppling the government. Many of those who were not starved or slaughtered in the killing fields made famous in the movie of the same name were imprisoned in slave camps; a minority fled and survived.

Although census figures indicate a second decade of undercounting Cambodians, Humphrey said the population is thought to number well above the 20,000 official tally and below the more frequently cited 50,000 figure.

Cambodian Businesses Clustered in Area

Cambodian businesses are concentrated along Anaheim Street, bounded by Long Beach Boulevard on the west and Redondo Avenue on the east side. It is a multicultural corridor shared by African Americans and immigrants from Latin America, the Philippines and elsewhere. It is a hodgepodge of markets, bakeries and shops selling videos, new hairdos and reupholstered sofas.

Cally S. Keo, who runs the United Cambodian Community’s after-school tutoring program, had her young charges work on the banner’s design, and the winning submission was illustrated by a 6-year-old girl. The banners feature the outline of a traditional Cambodian dancer, and state: “Our kids are our future.”

United Cambodian Community got funds from the city’s neighborhood improvement program and a group that promotes local business called Long Beach Strategic Marketing Inc.

In late June, the banners went up on street lights under a 65-day permit. They might be replaced by rotating designs in the future.

Curious Cambodians have called the city and United Cambodian Community about the banners. What do they signify? Who put them up? Good color, we like the color. Who paid for them? Can we get one to hang in our business?

“At first when I saw it, I didn’t like the color. Too girly,” Prak said with a giggle. “But then everybody in the business community liked it so I said, great color!”

Andrew Danni, executive director of United Cambodian Community and a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory executive, called the flags “a great example of a very simplistic thing that can be done, at no great expense and without politics or anything controversial.” The organization hopes to do more of that kind of thing, he said.

“Giving the community an identity or name is not difficult,” he added. “It’s what happens with that identity that matters.”

Until recently, City Hall had lost faith in United Cambodian Community, said Assistant City Manager Gerald Miller.

This, he said, was the institution where a refugee’s lack of English, lack of education, lack of money and lack of prospects could be overcome. But prior leaders of the organization had failed to repay a decade-old loan and later a second loan from the city, he said.

Cal State Long Beach professors with ties to the Cambodian community worked behind the scenes to find a new director for the organization who could restore its financial stability.

Danni, a white Long Beach resident who had more recently worked with the university’s foundation to help companies and organizations build better business plans, applied for the position. The organization’s board, which got no Cambodian applicants, hired him last year. Danni hopes in the near future to be replaced by a Cambodian.

Miller said Long Beach is impressed enough with the new and improved direction of United Cambodian Community that it is considering forgiving the debt.

Prak and other Cambodian leaders admit that theirs is not the most organized of communities.

“The saying goes that you gain their confidence one Cambodian at a time. And some you don’t,” said Paul Bott, a Cal State Long Beach professor who has studied with and taught Cambodian students since the ‘70s. “And the reason you don’t is that there are still great, unimaginable political divisions that stem from who did what to whom in the war in Cambodia.”

But helping the Cambodian refugee succeed is an investment in the wider city, said City Councilwoman Bonnie Lowenthal.

“The flags are certainly a step in the right direction . . . but there has to be a comprehensive effort. . . . An improved Cambodian community will not only improve the lives of the Cambodians there but will bring a lot more interested people and tourists to the Long Beach area.”

Steve O’Keefe, the city’s acting economic development bureau manager, said the city will assemble a Cambodian business directory to help better define the area for outsiders. And a position for a Cambodian-speaking business outreach worker may finally be filled after a vacancy of more than five years.

Still, skeptics exist, said Narin Kem, editor of Serey Pheap, a Cambodian weekly newspaper with a circulation of 20,000 whose name means freedom.

“I personally appreciate and thank the UCC for trying really hard with the city of Long Beach on the flags. But I think in the community you would hear that it means nothing to the Cambodian to put up the flags if the city won’t let the Cambodian New Year celebration happen in the city,” said Kem, whose newspaper has been publishing since 1984.

Unable to afford the $40,000 for police overtime at its planned April Cambodian New Year celebration at El Dorado Park, organizers had to move the celebration out of the city, to Lancaster. The move caused a wave of anger and resentment that persists, although city officials say they are working with the Cambodian Assn. of America to assure the celebration can remain in the city next year.

“Personally, I am happy about the flags,” Kem added. “In the last 20 years, it seems for the first time the city knows we’re here.”