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Khang Lai sees his entire life on the shelves and in the file cabinets of this small room on the third floor of UC Irvine's main library.
The 23-year-old student picks up a book and thumbs through, nodding at the descriptions of Southeast Asian refugee camps, where he and his family lived after fleeing the Communist takeover in Vietnam two decades ago.
Below that beckon volumes of books, theses and papers on everything from "Vietnamese Novels in French" to "Lao Adolescents in Honolulu" to "The Traditional Vietnamese Family in Transition." Posters from Tet festivals in Orange County and nearby cities adorn the cinder-block walls. Taking stock of the room, the Southeast Asian Archive, Lai says, "it sort of depicts me." That is the intent of this unusual collection that began 10 years ago in a couple of file cabinet drawers in a basement office. It has now blossomed into a treasured resource that includes more than 2,000 items and offers the best hope nationwide both for students researching local Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian culture and for community members trying to preserve the history of Southeast Asian refugees, with Orange County home to the largest such community in the country. Although other universities have collections related to Southeast Asia, they focus on the Vietnam War and the history of those countries. But scholars and archivists say UC Irvine's collection is the most extensive devoted solely to the refugee experience. "Besides Irvine and our collection, no other library in the country has anything like it," said Wei-Chi Poon, director of UC Berkeley's Asian American Library, which often refers students to Irvine's more comprehensive collection of refugee and emigre materials. To call the collection eclectic seems an understatement. Need "Traditional Recipes of Laos"? It's here. A 1965 issue of the Vietnamese literary magazine Bach Khoa? In a box in the far corner. The latest issue of Suorsday, a Cambodian-language magazine from Long Beach? Check the display rack. Transcript of an interview with a refugee in a Malaysian camp? In the cabinet against the far wall. A copy of the defunct Hmong Times? Which year? On a recent day, Brown University graduate student Karin Aguilar-San Juan sifted through clippings and other materials as part of her doctoral research...