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Donuts and Identity: American Culture Besides preserving and promoting aspects of Cambodian life and Cambodian values, donut shops also offer a chance for refugees to negotiate aspects of life in the United States. They can become familiar with an American busi- ness model (and, to a limited extent, American foodways) while employing a Cambodian work […]

Donuts and Identity: Survival Donut shops evoke a value particularly dear to early Cambodian refugees: sur- vival. As Sucheng Chan points out in Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the Cambodian Donut Shops 23 United States, first-generation Cambodian immigrants self-identify as sur- vivors, and they value their survival and that of their families above almost everything else.72

Donuts and Identity: Cambodian Culture Cambodian donut shops give their owners and workers a unique means through which to negotiate their identities as both Cambodians and refugees living in the United States. They do so by providing spaces in which entrepreneurs and their employees can partake of Cambodian culture, promote Cambodian values (particularly the concept

The Successful Donut: Location Cambodian donut shops retain customers because they become well inte- grated into the neighborhoods that they serve. With their small size, location on most major thoroughfares, and frequent placement in shopping centers, it is not difficult for a donut shop to become part of a local resident’s routine. Most customers of

The Successful Donut: Practicality Applying the kind of frugality found in a tong tine to the daily business of run- ning a donut shop also helped Cambodians succeed. Lonh asserted that shop owners constantly find ways to economize in their daily routines. For example, he told of his aunts’ uncanny talent for stretching dough to

The Successful Donut: Hard Work Having recognized the economic advantages of owning a donut shop, Cam- bodian refugees set about buying franchises, opening independent stores, and expanding the donut business in California so prodigiously that by the mid- 1990s, industry insiders expressed fears of supersaturation: “In my computer, I have 2,400 Cambodian doughnut shops in

The Advantageous Donut: Economic Viability Donut shops had another advantage: a relatively low and attainable cost of ownership and operation. Although an associate of Ted Ngoy’s named Scott Thov reported that opening a small store in the 1990s required an initial investment of about $80,000,22 recent arrivals used various means to accumu- late the necessary

The Advantageous Donut: Popularity The ownership and operation of donut shops offer two major advantages over other occupations: their preexisting popularity and their economic viability. Before Ted Ngoy ever tasted his first donut, a widespread, highly visible, and readily available donut business infrastructure and donut culture already had succeeded in Los Angeles. The city’s heavy

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004, Kim Severson increased that estimate to 90 percent.11 This chapter tells the story of how and why the donut, a popular staple of so-called traditional American cuisine since the nineteenth century, became linked to Cambodian refugees in twentieth-century Los Angeles. Using inter- views with donut shop owners,

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