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 refugees. 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 encountered 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 management-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.
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 successful 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 addition 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 unnoticed. 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 Cambodians own about 80 percent of the doughnut shops in the state.10
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 interviews with donut shop owners, donut shop workers, and members of the Cambodian community, in addition to archival evidence, I examine the historical and structural foundations of this business niche. After explaining why Cambodians found this business model particularly advantageous, I describe the strategies they used to make it successful within a relatively short period of time. Finally, I explore the role of donut shops in the negotiation of identity for Cambodian refugees in the United States.
In addition, I raise questions about the relationship between Asian immigration, the urban built environment, and food cultures. Using Cambodian donut shops as the sites where local, national, and transnational histories intersect, I explore the development of relationships among a new group of Angelenos, Los Angeles, and Asia, highlighting the role of donut production and consumption. I show that donut shops (and perhaps even donuts themselves) serve as sites of cultural negotiation. Cambodians reimagined the traditional ethnic business niche in a form that reflects the physical and cultural landscapes of Los Angeles. In doing so, they demonstrated the ability of immigrant entrepreneurs to successfully negotiate, adapt, and modify business practices and consumption patterns. Accordingly, I suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs can also reshape our understanding of the role of food and food enterprises in the construction and contestation of ethnic, cultural, and urban identities.
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 reliance on automobiles and the eventual development of an extensive freeway grid, which, according to British design historian Rayner Banham, offered a “comprehensible unity” and “a language of movement, not monument,”12 to otherwise “polymorphous landscapes,”13 gave rise during the early and mid-twentieth century to a new retail architecture that included supermarkets, strip malls, and drive-ins.14 The earliest fast-food establishments, including donut shops, thrived in this commercial environment. In 1936, a mere five years after the first retail donut and coffee chain opened on the East Coast, a trade publication, Doughnut Magazine, ranked California sixth in the nation for donut consumption, declaring, “Of all the states in the territory which extends from the Rockies to the Pacific, California has the highest annual total consumption of donuts—10,039,569 dozens,” adding with some fervor that “the lusty, growing doughnut business has abundant room in which to grow and expand.”15
This observation proved prescient: the men and women who flocked to Los Angeles both before and after World War II to take jobs in the growing aerospace16 and tire industries17 helped make donuts a favorite local treat and donut shops a standard feature of the retail landscape. By 1950, industry analysts considered the California donut market as separate from that of the rest of the United States, even going so far as to identify a regional taste profile: “They really live it up on the West Coast, where the preference is for ‘crunch’ doughnuts. These tasty tidbits are rolled in nuts, cocoanut, or cake crumbs. True to California tradition, they’re spectacular—real big.”18 In 1979, as increasing numbers of Cambodian refugees entered Los Angeles, an industrywide survey ranked San Diego and Los Angeles as having the first and second highest densities of donut shops in the nation.19 Shortly thereafter, the success of Cambodians in opening new donut shops caused Los Angeles to surpass San Diego. Simultaneous growth in what Edward Soja refers to as “high technology industries” combined with an “even greater expansion in low-paying service and manufacturing jobs”20 during this period meant a steady supply of customers for Cambodian donut shops and a constant demand for donuts. In 1995, Seth Mydans noted that “defying California’s health-food trend … the number of doughnut shops in the state grew by 55 percent from 1985 to 1993, even as consumption fell by nearly 10 percent.” He added, “In Los Angeles, for example, there is one doughnut shop for every 7,500 people compared with 1 per 30,000 more common elsewhere in the country.”21 Cambodians found a successful business model and then made it work harder and better.
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 accumulate the necessary capital relatively quickly. According to Hak Lonh, a Cambodian film director with two aunts and numerous cousins in the donut business, many refugees worked low-wage jobs (e.g., Ngoy’s stint as a janitor) until they could combine their savings with loans obtained through informal credit arrangements.23
In many cases, friends and family provided additional funds, often in the form of direct loans. Helen Chin, a retired donut shop worker who spent fifteen years in the business, used money she earned as a seamstress to help her husband’s niece and nephew open the store in which she later worked.24 Family and friends also contributed less tangible forms of support. For example, shop owner Nally Yun told a Sacramento Bee reporter that she and her husband Roger lived with their parents “so we could save some money and fly on our own wings.”25 Apprenticeship arrangements, in which a more experienced baker or store owner would train a newcomer to the business, also were common. Susan Chhu, who runs Sunrise Donuts in Rosemead, California, reported that friends who owned donut shops trained her husband to bake and helped them set up their business shortly after their arrival in the United States.26 Allen Dul of Mr. Steve’s Donuts in Rosemead embarked on a sort of reverse apprenticeship: hiring a friend with experience in the donut business in order to learn how to operate the shop he had recently purchased.27
The Yuns raised a portion of the necessary money to buy their shop, Howard’s Donuts, through a tong tine, another common source of capital. The Bee describes a tong tine as an “informal lending club that allows immigrants to pool their money.”28 In the Houston Press, Claudia Kolker elaborates:
This is how it works: typically, anywhere from six to thirty friends will contribute a pre-determined sum at weekly or monthly meetings. Then, through lotteries or a group decision, each member gets a chance to collect the whole pot. After drawing the money, he or she keeps paying the installments until each group member has had an opportunity to take home the accumulated money. Only when a cycle finishes may a new member sign on or participants drop out. More often, though, the same participants begin again. In some groups, they take their place in line by lottery; in others, they may compete with secret bids of ten or fifteen dollars that go back to the pot.29
The tong tine has many different names30 and is common among Asian, African, and South American immigrants. Los Angeles community business developer Namoch Sokhom described Cambodians’ specific adaptations of the practice using a theoretical example:
Let’s say Mr. Sok needs $10,000 for a down payment to buy a donut shop. He has been known in the community to be upright and trustworthy. In January 2012, he calls a meeting of ten close friends who know how to “play” and can put $1,000 each per month. Thus, for January 2, 2012, Mr. Sok is the mei tong tine (the mother or the head of tong tine …) and he gets the full $10,000. In February 2, 2012, if the kon tong tine #1 (the child of …) needs the money and she bids the highest against the other 9 kons tong tine, let’s say 5% … then she wins. She will get a total of … $9,500. In effect, she pays the interest up front. She is considered “dead,” i.e. she will not be able to bid anymore for the rest of the pool period. On March 2, 2012, kon tong tine #2 also need the money and bid at 4% and the highest, so then he will get $9,800 … #2 is now “dead” also. And so forth. On October 2, 2012, kon tong tine #10 will not need to bid and after a long wait and 10 months pay ($1,000, $950, $980 …) now #10 get a sum of $10,000.31
If Mr. Sok needs more than $10,000 he could organize at the tong tine with a head of $5,000. If 10 members, he would then get $50,000. In the U.S., $1,000 is most common and easier to find a member to join, and 15 members or less. If he needs more than $15,000 he can organize two pools.32
The titles of the participants in a tong tine—“mother,” “head,” “child,” and so forth—as well as the groups’ relatively small sizes indicate that these business arrangements could bring Cambodian refugees together in a kind of kinship. Thus, in terms of trust, obligation, and social bonding, this type of lending may not differ widely from the forms of family monetary support described earlier.
Of the many strategies employed by Cambodian refugees for raising capital to buy donut shops, the tong tines were perhaps the fastest, most economical, and most effective. The Cambodian variation of the arrangement allowed refugees to swiftly receive and pay back money. The loans were both tax free and interest free, supporting Kolker’s assertion that informal lending clubs exist “to save money, not to make it.”33 Perhaps most important, they made cash “quickly available to those who couldn’t otherwise get credit.”34 As Sokhom notes, tong tines were common for “Cambodian who cannot get a bank loan or did not know how.”35 In Lonh’s words, being able to “kind of avoid the bank”36 through personal savings, the help of friends and family, or the support of a tong tine, allowed Cambodians swifter access to independent business ownership with lower initial expenditures and fewer long-term costs.
Furthermore, the equipment, supplies, and labor required to run a donut shop are inexpensive. The necessary machinery for automated donut production, continuously streamlined since its invention in 1920,37 is cheap and eliminates the need for costly labor or extensive training. The required staples—flour, sugar, and oil—also are plentiful and even cheaper. Prepared donut, glaze, and filling mixes—introduced in the late 1920s for use with automated donut-making equipment and frequently reformulated throughout the twentieth century—ensure a uniform product, allowing workers with no prior knowledge of pastries to master the baking of donuts in a short amount of time and also lowering labor costs.38 Like the restaurant owners that Miri Song describes in Helping Out: Children’s Labor in Ethnic Businesses, donut shop proprietors relied on the labor of their children, other relatives, or friends in order to further reduce expenses.39 Indeed, a family of just three to five people could manage a shop independently.40 If additional labor was necessary, extended family and friends usually provided it. Chhu and her husband ran their shop with “just family”41 for many years, relying on the aid of their three children until each of them left home. With the business firmly established and family unavailable, they began to “hire part time,”42 employing Latino or fellow Chinese Cambodian workers. Dul’s daughters often take care of Mr. Steve’s Donuts on Sundays, allowing their father an occasional day off.43 Lonh describes his cousins helping out in his aunts’ shop, and Chin’s daughter Christina Nhek remembers folding boxes alongside her mother as a child.44 Refugee assistance programs rarely fund child care, and being able to include children in the work of a donut shop allows parents to earn an income when they may not be able to do so otherwise.45
Having recognized the economic advantages of owning a donut shop, Cambodian 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 California,” said Ning Yen, 39, who started with a small shop and now owns an $8 million business distributing doughnut-making equipment. “I think it’s already too many now,” said Mr. Yen, a disciple of Mr. Ngoy, “and people are fighting each other for business. They just kept opening doughnut shops, and there is not enough demand for them all.”46
Established California donut chains such as Winchell’s also expressed displeasure with their increased competition:
Nancy Parker, president of Winchell’s, said her company was now down to 120 outlets in California. Before the Cambodian influx, Winchell’s had more than 1,000 outlets in the western United States, mostly in California. “Where we had one Winchell’s shop, they now have three or four Cambodian shops,” Ms. Parker said. “They were very happy with a much lesser volume.”47
In 2002, Winchell’s even began renovating stores and increasing its advertising budget in order to compete more effectively with Cambodian donut shops.48 Shop owners relied on three businesses strategies for their success. The first, and perhaps most important, was the willingness of donut shop owners and laborers to work hard. The second was an emphasis on frugality and practicality, and the third was the shops’ integration into local neighborhoods.
Whether they viewed it positively or negatively, Cambodian donut shop owners and workers, almost without exception, cited hard work as key to the success of their businesses. Chhu reported that for about fifteen years, she and her husband regularly worked twelve-hour days, six or seven days a week, at Sunrise Donuts. They worked even harder in their previous shop, which was their first.49 Unfazed by the long hours, Chhu noted that her customers dispelled any potential monotony: “We see different people every day.”50 She also openly speculated that she could handle hard work because of her experience during the rule of the Khmer Rouge.
In contrast, Dul was dissatisfied with the hard work he encountered after leaving the jewelry business to buy a donut shop. He and his wife, Belinda Chhem, each have put in seventeen hours a day, “eight days a week,” in their new venture, he joked. “Too many hours a day, right? Four months, so far I lose thirteen pounds,”51 he added. Both concluded that in terms of workload, owning a donut shop compared unfavorably with the other jobs they previously held, including Dul’s stint as a jeweler and Chhem’s work in health care. Chhem even moonlighted in a donut shop for some time and found the twelve-hour shifts easy compared with the never-ending concerns of ownership.52
Applying the kind of frugality found in a tong tine to the daily business of running 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 its limit, saying, “For one little batch, they can get a week’s worth of doughnuts.”53 In the documentary Cambodian Doughnut Dreams, shop owner Leng Hing’s advertising budget allows for only a single rubber stamp, which she uses to manually apply her store’s name and address to every box of donuts. She expresses hope that this strategy will net new and repeat customers.54 Similar tactics, such as relying on popular California donut varieties in order to ensure consistent revenue, helped bolster the success of other donut shop proprietors.
Another form of frugality manifested as a kind of resistance to change: Cambodian donut shop owners rarely changed their menus or remodeled their shops. Although this tactic had initial advantages, after more than thirty years in the business the ongoing refusal of donut shop owners to innovate may have hurt more than it has helped. As Sokhom complained:
They run the business in the sense that they don’t upgrade, they don’t really … the younger Cambodian may say, “OK, I’m going to rebuild, repaint, remodel,” but some doughnut shop I say the last fifteen years I’ve been in, it’s the same. Never get a drop of paint. Maybe a neon sign, but that’s about it.55
In addition to occasionally putting up a neon sign, some donut shop owners were willing to diversify their coffee menus in order to compete with Starbucks and other specialty coffee purveyors.56 Though he appreciated this nod toward change, Sokhom noted that this might not always be the most practical choice:
They may add some coffee, some coffee machine, espresso. Those are expenses, some six, seven thousand dollar. You know, how many cup do you have to sell to recoup, right? You are selling not like Starbucks, but you buy a Starbucks machine, so not so smart. I mean, a regular … because people go there expecting a dollar a cup, not three dollars, so now you buy a machine that Starbucks sell for three, four dollar and you buy the same machine but you cannot sell three dollars, so how long does it take to recoup? And the people going there maybe not really conscious about … people that go to donut shop is the people who have about two dollar for breakfast … and not so picky.57
Here Sokhom is touching on the most important reason that donut entrepreneurs favored practicality over innovation: it not only saves money; it helps build and maintain a large base of regular customers. According to shop owners, rather than through novelty, they retain these regulars by offering good customer service and consistently fresh, high-quality donuts.58
Cambodian donut shops retain customers because they become well integrated 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 Cambodian donut shops patronize stores near their homes and places of employment. “They live around here,” as Dul put it.59 Since shop owners and workers spend long hours in their businesses and often live nearby as well, they know their regulars well and can predict their habits and expectations. Chin reported that she knew what kind of donut each of her regulars preferred and would do her best to have it ready for them.60 Over time, Chhu observed a correlation between her customers’ ethnicities and the time at which they would arrive at the shop: “You know, most Hispanic people, they come early and then Asian people, like after eight.”61 Among Dul’s regular customers were elderly men who “sleep and wake up early,”62 often arriving at Mr. Steve’s Donuts at 3:30 A.M. Even though it meant extending his already grueling hours, Dul often let them in. In general, the relationships between Cambodian donut shops and their neighborhoods appear to be friendly and largely free of the tensions frequently observed between Korean grocery stores and their customer bases in Los Angeles.63
Cambodian donut shops also succeeded because of their provision of local spaces within an extremely large and racially diverse global city. Chhu now has a working knowledge of six different languages in order to communicate with customers from varying ethnic backgrounds.64 In addition, customers can be found playing games and whiling away long hours in the stores’ limited seating. Donut shops also—sometimes grudgingly—provide a place for jobless and homeless people to spend time without spending a lot of money, a valuable service in a city with a large homeless population frequently restricted from occupying public space.65 As Sokhom pointed out, “[Donut shops] serve a big community that is really low income.”66
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 of survival), and navigate American culture. Spread throughout Los Angeles, each store serves as a small oasis of Cambodian culture, a virtual franchise of such enclaves as Little Phnom Penh in Long Beach (which grew from seven families in 1975 to eight thousand residents by 1981 and is still the largest Cambodian community in the United States)67 and Valerio Gardens in Van Nuys.68 Recent immigrants can work alongside family, friends, or, at the very least, others with the shared language, ethnicity, and experiences of escaping Cambodia and enduring what Aihwa Ong refers to as “the exigencies of coping and getting through life”69 in the United States. Many shops contain small Buddhist shrines70 (Duc’s shop prominently placed a Buddha next to the cash register, for example), while others display posters of Khmer slogans or art above cases of crullers and maple bars. Lonh described his aunts’ donut shops as both gathering places for his extended family and places where he can find someone to translate the lyrics of classic Khmer rock songs.71
Donut shops evoke a value particularly dear to early Cambodian refugees: survival. As Sucheng Chan points out in Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States, first-generation Cambodian immigrants self-identify as survivors, and they value their survival and that of their families above almost everything else.72 The actual means of survival matters less than the survival itself. In fact, donut entrepreneurs often have disdain for their product. In Cambodian Doughnut Dreams, store owner Bunna Men expresses contempt for the entire business, saying, “I don’t like anything about donuts, but I have to do, for a living.”73 Men appears to be using the word “living” in two ways: while he indicates that he has to make donuts in order to earn money, he also is referring to living in the most literal sense. Donut shops offer a means of owning tangible property and reaping the benefits of one’s own labor, two things that had been taken away by the Khmer Rouge. They also give families that have undergone horrific experiences of separation and loss an opportunity to bond more closely. Chhu noted that one of the best things about running a donut shop was that it helped keep her family close together.74 Again, donut shops have allowed families to survive independently with minimal outside help and almost no institutional interference. Minimal interaction with a new and unknown government is another marker of survival for a population recently brutalized by its authorities. Lonh summed it up best: “Donut shops are the keystones of survival for the Cambodian community.”75
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 business model (and, to a limited extent, American foodways) while employing a Cambodian work ethic that emphasizes hard labor and long hours. Workers can practice English, albeit with a somewhat limited vocabulary. (As the New York Times reported, “The first English words that Ly Yiv learned … were the names of donuts: twist, glazed and jelly, chocolate, buttermilk and old-fashioned.”)76 They can network, share stories, and offer advice to one another. Donut shop owners and workers can interact with other Los Angeles residents from a variety of class and ethnic backgrounds and thereby situate themselves within the city’s complicated social landscape. Chin told stories about residents of a wealthy neighborhood adjacent to her shop who became not only regular customers but also benefactors who gave generous tips to help her family.77 At the same time, she endured her customers’ open racism and contempt for her refugee status.78 As a whole, the practices of Cambodian refugees in donut businesses are reminiscent of Ong’s description of Cambodian refugees negotiating American citizenship in institutional settings: “In official and public domains—refugee camps, the welfare state, the court system, community hospitals, local churches, and civic organizations—refugees become the subjects of norms, rules, and systems, but they also modify practices and agendas while nimbly deflecting control and interjecting critique.”79 The Cambodian donut shops of Los Angeles serve as similar sites of contact with American customs, but storeowners and workers also use these spaces to assert a Cambodian identity, suggesting that Ong’s argument extends to commercial as well as institutional spheres.
In little more than thirty years, Cambodian donut shops have become important sites of cultural negotiation in Los Angeles. Recognizing their economic potential and viability, Cambodian entrepreneurs have parlayed a popular treat into a thriving commercial concern through the successful application of core business strategies and adaptation to their particular locale. In doing so, they have created spaces that simultaneously embody their memories of the past and aspirations for the future and allow for the negotiation of overlapping identities. It is important to note, however, that with very few exceptions, the first generation of Cambodians to come to the United States does not see itself as having a privileged relationship to a uniquely Cambodian American identity through donuts. Instead, they continue to identify themselves primarily as survivors and to see donuts as a means to two ends: a living for themselves and a wider range of opportunities for their children.
The global financial crisis of the early twenty-first century has threatened the ability of Cambodian donut shop entrepreneurs to rely on their businesses for survival, particularly as the first generation of refugees ages and looks toward retirement. In addition, the cost of supplies and rent has risen dramatically,80 decreasing the amount of profit that a donut shop can yield at any given time. “Right now, economy not so good,” Chhu stated.81 Sokhom explained, “So instead of ten days, now you have to do eighteen day or twenty day to pay just the rent.”82 Furthermore, because of the stagnant real estate market, donut shop owners who once expected to retire by selling their properties can no longer rely on this plan. According to Sokhom:
Now suddenly they lose almost everything. Because if I want to buy a donut shop from you, I’ll look at the cash flow. So suddenly the rent was $1,500 and now it’s $3,000. So your donut shop is almost half as much. Your donut shop can, say, sell for $200,000, now $70,000, nobody want to buy it. And so, if I’ve been building up my expectation and my hope that my donut shop is going to give me enough money to enjoy vacation, whatever I have dream about, $100,000 in my hand … it’s not possible now.83
Rather than retiring, many owners have had to continue working even though their “bones are creaking.”84 To make matters worse, they now face a greater likelihood of health problems but rarely have health insurance. Sokhom noted:
I mean, for me, it’s very sad, very … the sad part is, you thought they are well set, they are ready to retire. These are the people who work so hard, rarely take vacations, mostly open shop ten to sixteen hours a day, don’t have health insurance most of the time—none, actually, none.85
Even Ted Ngoy has fallen on hard times. In 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that the man who stated that he “created the doughnut world” was “broke, homeless, and dependent on the goodwill of his few remaining friends”86 due to a series of personal, political, and financial missteps.
Yet despite these recent difficulties, Cambodian donut shops have not entirely lost their luster. Allen Dul purchased a shop during the financial crisis in part because the donut is a fairly “recession-proof”87 commodity. Entrepreneurs still take pride in their businesses, and the Cambodian community in Los Angeles still regards them with respect: “I think the most satisfying is you are well recognize when you go to a wedding, you go to the temple … people recognize you, because it’s a step up. Whether or not your shop make it or not make it, but in the meantime you enjoy it.88 Though their future is extremely uncertain, Cambodian donut shop owners persist in the face of hardship much as they always have, and their stores still provide a place in which to navigate these new challenges. “Now people know that business is hard,” said Sokhom, “but it was that old feeling, still keep them going.”89
1. David Haldane, “A Real Horatio Alger Story: Refugee Built Empire on Doughnuts,” Los Angeles Times, December 18, 1988; available at http://articles.latimes.com/1988-12-19/business/fi-434_1_doughnut-shop.
2. Ibid.
3. Los Angeles Times, “Last of Refugees Leave Camp Pendleton,” November 1, 1975.
4. Haldane, “A Real Horatio Alger Story.”
5. Ibid.
6. An industry survey reported that in 1979, the city of Los Angeles had 720 donut shops. Including the surrounding counties that make up the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area would increase this number substantially. See Ralph Chapek, Inc., 1979 Donut Industry Survey (Santa Barbara, CA: Ralph Chapek, Inc., 1979).
7. Mary MacVean, “Krazy Kravings,” Salon, March 10, 2000; available at http://archive.salon.com/travel/food/feature/2000/03/10/kreme/index.html.
8. See Haldane, “A Real Horatio Alger Story”; David Haldane, “Voices from the First Generation: The Ngoy Family,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 1989; available at http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-05/magazine/tm-1171_1_united-cambodian-community; Seth Mydans, “Long Beach Journal; From Cambodia to Doughnut Shops,” New York Times, May 26, 1995; available at http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/26/us/long-beach-journal-from-cambodia-to-doughnut-shops.html; and Paul Mullins, Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), 89–90.
9. MacVean, “Krazy Kravings.” According to MacVean, 1,650 of the United States’ 9,743 doughnut shops were located in Los Angeles as of November 1997. These numbers vary from source to source, however.
10. Mydans, “Long Beach Journal.”
11. Kim Severenson, “The Hole Truth: Can America Build a Better Doughnut? Does It Need To?” San Francisco Chronicle, March 17, 2004; available at http://articles.sfgate.com/2004-03-17/food/17418894_1_doughnuts-krispy-kreme-fried-dough.
12. See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 73.
13. Ibid.
14. See Richard Longstreth, The Drive-In, the Supermarket, and the Transformation of Commercial Space in Los Angeles, 1914–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Richard Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); and Richard Longstreth, The American Department Store Transformed, 1920–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
15. Doughnut Machine Corporation, “Doughnut Possibilities in the West,” Doughnut Magazine, March/April 1936, 6–7.
16. According to Joseph E. Libby, “In the decades following the Second World War, Southern California became the most powerful geo-political region in the United States. Much of its political and economic strength was due to its preeminence in the fields of aerospace and defense related technology. By the early 1960s, more than forty percent of the billions of Federal dollars spent on research and development went to California’s aerospace industry.” Joseph E. Libby, “To Build Wings for the Angels: Los Angeles and Its Aircraft Industry, 1890–1936,” Business and Economic History 22 (1992): 22.
17. “God and Man seem to have conspired to make Los Angeles the future hub of the tire world,” the Los Angeles Times declared in 1919 when the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company announced the opening of a twenty-million-dollar tire factory in Los Angeles. See Los Angeles Times, “Twenty-Million-Dollar Tire Factory Coming to Los Angeles Soon: Goodyear Builds Plant,” June 29, 1919. Ten years later, according to the Times, the factory was producing almost two million tires a year. See Los Angeles Times, “Fourteen Million Tires Made: Local Plant Celebrates Tomorrow,” June 23, 1929. In 1947, the factory was still growing and announced further expansion to its facilities. See Lynn J. Rogers, “Automotive Highlights and Facts,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1947.
18. Monsanto Company, “The Ubiquitous Doughnut,” Monsanto Magazine, February/March 1958, 31.
19. Ralph Chapek, Inc., 1979 Donut Industry Survey.
20. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 192. Soja includes “engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and technical specialists” among the members of the high-technology industries. Soja also notes,
Between 1970 and 1980, when the entire USA had a net addition of less than a million manufacturing jobs and New York lost nearly 330,000, the Los Angeles region added 225,800. In the same decade, the total population grew by 1,300,000 but the number of non-agricultural wage and salary workers increased by 1,315,000, making the region by far the world’s largest job machine, a position it has continued to hold in the 1980s.
21. Mydans, “Long Beach Journal.”
22. Ibid.
23. Hak Lonh, interview by Erin M. Curtis, Los Angeles, March 2011.
24. Helen Chin, interview by Erin M. Curtis, Long Beach, CA, December 2011.
25. Stephen Maganini, “Surviving the Killing Fields: Cambodians Find Success in California,” Sacramento Bee, May 5, 1995.
26. Susan Chhu, interview by Erin M. Curtis, Rosemead, CA, December 2011.
27. Allen Dul, interview by Erin M. Curtis, Rosemead, CA, December 2011.
28. Maganini, “Surviving the Killing Fields.”
29. Claudia Kolker, “Dipping in the Money Pool,” Houston Press, March 30, 1995.
30. The Vietnamese term for such an arrangement is hui, and the Ethiopian term is ekub. See Kolker for a broad treatment of the subject.
31. Namoch Sokhom, e-mail to Erin M. Curtis, January 2, 2012.
32. Ibid.
33. Kolker, “Dipping in the Money Pool.”
34. Ibid.
35. Sokhom, e-mail.
36. Lonh, interview.
37. For more on the invention of automated doughnut-making equipment, see Mullins, Glazed America; and Sally Levitt Steinberg, The Donut Book: The Whole Story in Words, Pictures & Outrageous Tales (North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2004).
38. For more on the history of prepared doughnut mixes, see Mullins, Glazed America; and Steve Penfold, The Donut: A Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).
39. See Miri Song, Helping Out: Children’s Labor in Ethnic Businesses (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).
40. Mydans, “Long Beach Journal.”
41. Chhu, interview.
42. Ibid.
43. Dul, interview.
44. Christina Nhek, interview by Erin M. Curtis, Long Beach, CA, December 2011.
45. A 1985 refugee policy report cited a correspondence between large family size and lower workforce participation, observing,
This relationship between household size and employment can be explained in two ways. First, it is more difficult for families with large households, especially when most of the household members are children, to support themselves on the type of employment that is generally available to refugees—minimum wage jobs. Second, in large households with young children, it is more difficult for all adults to seek employment since at least one will usually have child-rearing responsibilities. As discussed below, child care programs are not generally funded through the refugee program.
See Susan S. Forbes, Adaptation and Integration of Recent Refugees to the United States (Washington, DC: Refugee Policy Group, 1985), 11.
46. Mydans, “Long Beach Journal.”
47. Ibid.
48. Mark Ballon, “A Hole in Their Dreams,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2002.
49. Chhu, interview.
50. Ibid.
51. Dul, interview.
52. Belinda Chhem, interview by Erin M. Curtis, Rosemead, CA, December 2011.
53. Lonh, interview.
54. Chuck Davis, Cambodian Doughnut Dreams, documentary film, Throughline Productions, 1989.
55. Namoch Sokhom, interview by Erin M. Curtis, Los Angeles, November 2011.
56. For more on the competition between Cambodian donut shops and major chains such as Starbucks after the turn of the twentieth century, see Ballon, “A Hole in Their Dreams.”
57. Sokhom, interview.
58. According to Dul, the best advice he received about running his own donut shop was to focus on top-notch customer service and fresh products. As a result, his shop has a large number of regular customers.
59. Dul, interview.
60. Chin, interview.
61. Chhu, interview. Chhu added that African Americans tended to arrive early and that the local Chinese population frequented her shop in the afternoon.
62. Dul, interview.
63. For more on the relationship between Korean groceries and the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, see Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). These tensions were observed most strikingly in the destruction of Korean shops during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Abelmann and Lie warn against speculating generally about their source, however:
Nowhere is the distance between ideal and reality greater than in the dominant media framing of the “black-Korean conflict.” The popular account of the interethnic conflict reifies essentialized views of the two ethnic groups and fails to make sense of the concrete structures of opportunity they face. Facile ethnic and cultural generalizations are drawn, and class divisions within each group are passed over in silence. Although we do not deny that tensions exist between African Americans and Korean Americans, we criticize the dominant “black-Korean conflict” frame by considering its place in the American ideological crucible (x).
64. Chhu, interview.
65. See Davis, City of Quartz.
66. Sokhom, interview.
67. Rebecca Trounson, “8,000 Refugees Make Long Beach Cambodian Capital of U.S.,” Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1981.
68. John Nielsen, “Cultural Wall Confines Cambodians,” Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1985.
69. Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xvii.
70. Lonh, interview.
71. Ibid.
72. See Sucheng Chan, Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
73. Davis, Cambodian Doughnut Dreams. Not all storeowners and workers share Men’s opinion. Chhu recalled her first taste of a donut positively: “I said ‘It’s good. It tastes good and we can eat every day.’” She still eats donuts for breakfast daily.
74. Chhu, interview.
75. Lonh, interview.
76. Mydans, “Long Beach Journal.”
77. Chin, interview.
78. Chin, interview.
79. Ong, Buddha Is Hiding, xvii.
80. Sokhom, interview. According to Sokhom, the cost of rent for a donut shop has risen from $600 to $1,500 in 2007 to currently about $3,000, an increase of two to five times the original amount in an extremely short period of time.
81. Chuu, interview.
82. Sokhom, interview.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Sam Quinones, “From Sweet Success to Bitter Tears,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2005.
87. Sokhom, interview.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.