Starting in the late 1970s, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian population of Long Beach swelled and the city became home to the largest Cambodian population outside of Cambodia. The origins of the Cambodian community in Long Beach, however, date back to the late 1950s, when an exchange program brought students from Cambodia to CSULB to study, some of whom remained. In 1975, the first wave of 4,600 Cambodian immigrants arrived. These people who either were able to escape Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge takeover, or who were outside of the country at the time, were generally highly educated. In 1977 they established the first Cambodian community agency (United Cambodian Community). After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and for the next five to six years, an increasing number of refugees arrived, usually making their way from refugee camps in Thailand. Some were originally settled in other parts of the U.S. and moved to Long Beach to join relatives. By and large, this second wave of immigrant refugees tended to come from rural areas of Cambodia and had less education than the first group. Discussions about documenting the experiences of the Cambodian refugees were initiated with leaders of the local Cambodian organizations in 1986. However, it was several years before this project began, when an American student with close contacts to Cambodians at several of the area colleges began a series of directed studies projects. These interviews are with mainly younger, male members of the community. Later, an anthropology student conducted interviews withseveral older women. The life histories recorded by these students are of varying length and depth and most of these narrators originally were from relatively privileged, more urban families in contrast to the majority of second wave immigrant refugees. All of them discuss their experiences during and following the Khmer Rouge regime, and some detail their immigration and adjustments experiences in the U.S. In contrast to these refugees who came from relatively privileged backgrounds and who were either ethnic Khmer or mixed Khmer-Chinese, a valuable interview with an ethnic Lao Cambodian (Yaw) is also included here. Rather than the original recording in Lao, however, the narrator's daughter, who conducted the interview, is translating the interview as she listens to the original Lao. As a result, we do not hear the voice of the Yaw narrator. Unfortunately, many other interviews that were conducted with diverse members of the Cambodian community are not available here. Most of those conducted as part of or following the initiation of an informal seminar with mainly Cambodian students in 1989 were not recorded. As one student pointed out, interviewing is the means by which the Khmer Rouge both intimidated people and marked them for execution. Still other interviews that were conducted by Cambodian students, often in Khmer, were of such poor audio quality that they could not be easily understood. As a result, with the exception of one shorter interview conducted in English by a Cambodian student, these are not included here. They remain available, however, at the CSULB Library, Special Collections/Archive.