The young students remember their native Cambodia in bright-colored drawings and somber prose. At the same time, they're leaving behind the ghosts that hid amid the jungle flowers, banana trees and war.

"When my family escaped from Cambodia, my father carried me and my brother in baskets. We were very young and scared. I remember the loud noise of the guns and missiles," wrote Saroun Bun, 13, who fled her homeland in 1983.She and other immigrants from Cambodia make up nearly 50 percent of the student body at Joseph G. Pyne public school in Lowell, where Dorothea Tsapatsaris teaches them English and a little bit about survival.

"I'm no psychiatrist, but you can't see the atrocities they've seen and not have it surface," said Tsapatsaris. "They need to get it out."

Compositions by her students are on display at the city's cultural center and others have appeared in "Duck Soup," a children's literary magazine.

"I knew these kids had seen slaughter . . . but they hide a lot," Tsapatsaris said Thursday. "I like to get to the core."

At their core, they harbor bittersweet memories. They wear constant smiles and are model English students, but their work reveals their sorrow.

"I miss my home very much, but I rather live in America because there is no peace right now in my country," Sothy Sar, 11, wrote in her essay "Happy and Sad Memories of Cambodia."

In the mid-1980s, an estimated 17,000 Cambodians came to Lowell, 20 miles northwest of Boston, attracted by job opportunities and tales from friends prospering in this old mill city turned high-tech center.

Sothy was 6 years old when her family fled Cambodia in 1985, taking the refugee's path to Thailand "until our name was called to come to America."

"Everything was quiet and peaceful before the war. In the morning the rooster crowed to get us up," the sixth-grader wrote.

"Then the Khmer Rouge came and I saw a lot of people killed. . . . My mom picked me up and we ran."

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"Many, many ghosts live in Cambodia. ... The ghosts are of all the dead people," wrote one young student.

"The ghosts in Cambodia sleep during the daytime, like owls and bats," remembers another. "They come out at night ... go after people at night to scare them, eat or kill the people."

Steven Centore, a National Park Service worker at the cultural center, remembers when he served in Vietnam that parents tried to protect their children by warning of ghosts.

The students' memories are not only of ghosts. Their drawings also recall New Year's celebrations, folk medicine and the familiar daily scenes that were their village lives. And they remember relatives and friends left behind.

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