1st Cambodian American mayor
BOSTON — He came to the U.S. as a young refugee, having survived the Khmer Rouge’s brutal rule. Now, Sokhary Chau is the nation’s first Cambodian American mayor.
The 49-year-old city councilor in Lowell, Mass., 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. 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.
Chau recounted how his father, a captain in the Cambodian army, was executed by the communist Khmer Rouge in 1975 during the civil war.
His mother, who died late last year, managed to keep her seven children alive for four years, surviving “land mines, jungles, hunger, sickness and uncertainty” to deliver them safely to the U.S., he said.
Chau said he was around 9 years old when his family arrived in Pittsburgh with the help of the Catholic Church. They lived for a time in a convent and embraced Christianity.
They made their way to Lowell’s growing Cambodian community in the mid-1980s, where some of his older siblings immediately set to work in local manufacturing operations.
Chau, however, continued his studies and earned a scholarship to Phillips Academy, an elite boarding school in nearby Andover. He went on to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where he studied economics and political science, also on a scholarship.
Before running for office, Chau said, he worked mostly in financial services, including running a mortgage lending company in Lowell with his wife. He now works for the Social Security Administration.
Chau’s election follows the ascendance of new Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan. She was sworn in last November as Boston’s first woman and first person of color elected to the post.