Apartheid. USA 1988

October 21, 1987:

Rancor and hostility toward Lowell's, in Massachusetts, newest group of immigrants has surfaced amid an angry debate over school desegregation. The rising tensions have a familiar ring in the Boston area, where school busing accompanied by ethnic clashes have been a fact of life for more than a decade. But they have bitter ironic overtones in Lowell, a city whose most prominent citizen and economic savior is the computer entrepreneur An Wang, an immigrant from Asia. The targets of recent outbreaks of ethnic tension are also Asians.

Refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam now make up 15 percent of Lowell's 100 000 residents. Lured by the region's flourishing high-technology industries, most of the immigrants arrived over the past four years, establishing

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businesses and a Buddhist temple. Hostility towards the Cambodians, by far the largest immigrant group have risen in Lowell in part because of their visibility and in part because of their customs many native Americans find strange or suspicious. Few speak English well. Many live communally in houses packed with several generations of extended family. The Cambodians pool their money, buy a house and share a car. Tensions further increased dramatically, when a Cambodian boy, Vandy Phorng (13) drowned after he was pushed by a white American boy into the Pawtucket Canal. Lowell has 13 000 schoolchildren. After it was discovered that some Cambodian pupils received classes at the billiard room of the Lowell YMCA in spite of vehement opposition a busing plan was accepted by the City Council and some 700 students will now be bused to schools outside their neighborhoods.^162.

162. The New York Times, a special report