Swimming to Cambodia

When California librarian Susan Taylor needed new books in Khmer, the language of the local and rapidly growing Cambodian community in surrounding Long Beach, she scoured Brodart for foreign language titles. The library supplier had just four.

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.

“It was getting harder and harder to purchase Khmer material,” Taylor says. 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 adds.

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 levelheaded librarian with $20,000 to spend on Khmer-language books would do. She went to Phnom Penh.

Taylor and her Khmer-speaking library aide Lyda Thanh (top right) set out on their two-week journey on January 2. While there, they nearly cleaned out the bookstores in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap.

Eight boxes and 1,105 new Khmer books later—half of them for children—Taylor and Thanh are back in Long Beach, and during the weekend of February 1, the local Cambodian community previewed the new titles. The books will now be cataloged and ready for checkout just in time for Cambodian New Year during the first week of April.

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.