CA Librarian and Aide Head to Cambodia for Kids’ Books
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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 1/31/2008 2:00:00 PM
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She phoned libraries in Los Angeles and San Francisco. They had either no Khmer books or just a few. She checked out a promising tip about an "Asian" bookstore in La Jolla but discovered that it stocked only English titles for adoptive parents of Cambodian and Chinese infants.
So Taylor, supervisor of the Long Beach Public Library's Mark Twain branch—located in the heart of the newly designated "Cambodian Town"—did what any level-headed librarian with $20,000 to spend on Khmer-language books would do. She went to Phnom Penh.
There, Taylor and Khmer-speaking library aid Lyda Thanh spent just $6,000 of that amount on books—with half going toward shipping—because, Taylor says, books were surprisingly cheap. The Friends of the Library group donated funds for the duo's $5,000 travel fees.
Eight boxes and 1,105 new Khmer books later—half of them for children—Taylor and Thanh now are back in Long Beach and looking forward to the weekend of February 1, when the local Cambodian community will preview the new titles. The books will then be catalogued and ready for check-out the first week of April—just in time for Cambodian New Year.
"We started the project two to three years ago," the librarian says. "It was getting harder and harder to purchase Khmer material.” Khmer books were available only in Cambodian grocery stores whose owners would travel back to their homeland and return with suitcases of books to sell, she says.
Taylor estimates that 50,000 to 60,000 Cambodians dwell among the half million residents of Long Beach, located 25 miles south of Los Angeles. "The adults still read Khmer, and there is a big resurgence among families to have the teenagers learn to read it," she explains.
After raising their travel money, Taylor and Thanh set out on their two-week journey on January 2. While there, they nearly cleaned out the bookstores in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, including Monument Bookstore, which Taylor and Thanh dubbed the "Barnes and Noble of Cambodia."
