Eating Asian America

A Food Studies Reader

Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan, Anita Mannur

• Editore: NYU Press
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781479812035
• Argomento: Ciencias sociales
• Categoria: Costumbres y tradiciones

“Fully of provocation and insight.” – Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, author of War, Genocide, and Justice

PART I
Labors of Taste

1
Cambodian Donut Shops and the Negotiation of Identity in Los Angeles

ERIN M. CURTIS

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 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 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.

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 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 n...