By employing the ‘trouble-case’ method borrowed from legal anthropology, this paper uses a particular incident of conflict to illuminate the process by which Khmer in America gain access to primary resources and their processes of group formation. The accusations of complainants are reviewed as articulations of logical cultural patterns which are based in the culture of the mother country, but which are undergoing rapid change. The paper first presents the conflict; then describes the system which provides social services to refugees; thirdly, it discusses the Southeast Asian and particularly Khmer cultural context; and finally it analyzes the conflict as the dialectical interaction of two cultural systems, resulting in new and revised methods of social interaction and group formation.