Cambodian Donut Shops and the Negotiation of Identity in Los Angeles
Erin M. Curtis
Cambodian Donut Shops
When the communist Khmer Rouge regime came to power in Cambodia in 1975, Ted Ngoy, a major in the Cambodian army working at the Cambodian embassy in Bangkok, fled with his wife and three children “aboard one of the first refugee airplanes to leave Asia for the [United States] West Coast.”1 “All the way over we just talked about having enough pigs and chickens to take to the market,” Ngoy later told the Los Angeles Times. “That was my dream.”2 The family joined the more than fifty thousand Vietnamese and Cambodian refu- gees. They relocated to, were processed in, and moved out of Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California, before the end of 1975.3 Ngoy found employment as a janitor, sweeping floors at a Lutheran church in Tustin, California. To make ends meet, he also took two other jobs.
It was during his night job as a gas station attendant that Ngoy first encoun- tered the pastry that would alter his fate. According to the Los Angeles Times, a fellow worker left Ted in charge one evening while he “ducked over to a nearby donut shop to bring back some sugary snacks. ‘I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it,’ he recalled of the treat. ‘I took some home and my kids liked it, too.’”4 The next day, Ngoy went to the donut shop with $2,000 in cash he had raised from selling his possessions in Thailand and offered to buy the store. “‘They turned me down,’” he later reported.5 Undaunted, he attempted another purchase, this time at a branch of the popular West Coast chain Winchell’s Donut House. Employees at the store promptly enrolled him in a manage- ment-training program. After a year spent managing a Winchell’s in Orange County, Ngoy was able to save enough money to purchase Christy’s Donuts in La Habra, California. By the mid-1980s, he owned more than fifty Christy’s locations, a donut empire stretching from San Fernando to San Bernardino and from Monrovia to Newport Beach—in other words, across the entire five- county Los Angeles area.
Erin M. Curtis
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Ted Ngoy and his family suddenly found themselves at the forefront of a vibrant local food culture. They now were the owners and operators of a suc- cessful donut chain in a city with hundreds of donut shops6 and a populace “mad for” the fried confections.7 More important, Ngoy is credited with both inspiring and creating a major ethnic business niche in Los Angeles.8 In addi- tion to operating his own chain, Ngoy sold donut shops to more recent arrivals from Cambodia. Following his example, these new owners developed systems of extending credit to fellow refugees who continued to come to California throughout the 1970s and 1980s, allowing them to open their own stores. Through this process, the Cambodian community quickly gave Los Angeles the distinction of having more donut shops than any other city in the world.9 Their transformation of Southern California’s food culture did not go unno- ticed. As Seth Mydans reported in the New York Times in 1997,
Cambodian refugees have, with little fanfare, virtually taken over the doughnut business in California, making it their primary route into the local economy. . . . Cambodian immigrants have opened one small shop after another, cutting deeply into the business of large chains like Winchell’s Donut Houses, which once dominated the California market. Today, industry analysts say Cambodi- ans own about 80 percent of the doughnut shops in the state.10