Sokhary Chau, a city councilor in Lowell, was unanimously picked by his council peers to assume the legislative body’s top post on Monday. He also became 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,” the 49-year-old, who works for the U.S. Social Security Administration, said after being officially sworn in. “I don’t know if that could happen anywhere else in the world. I’m still trying to absorb it.”
Today, the city of more than 115,000 residents is nearly 25% Asian and home to the nation’s second-largest Cambodian community. He said his mother, who died last year, managed to keep her seven children alive for four years, surviving “landmines, jungles, hunger, sickness and uncertainty” to deliver them safely to the U.S.
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 factories. Chau’s election follows the ascendance of new Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan.as Boston's first woman and first person of color elected to the post.
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