Though “the Appalachian love child of the soufflé and the croissant”—as GQ described the dough rings in 1996—wasn’t able to satisfy capricious Manhattanites for long, the donut’s sojourn in America’s capital of hype left an impression. In New York, donuts, which had for so long been considered little more than working-class junk food, became the darlings of New York’s manicured media elite. Soon after Krispy Kreme’s arrival, fried dough started showing up on the menus of swanky restaurants.
Donuts in the Promised Land
In 1975, Ted Ngoy, his wife Suganthini, and their three toddlers arrived at Southern California’s Camp Pendleton. They were among the first Cambodian refugees that arrived in America following the murderous rise of Pol Pot in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Penniless, the thirty-three-year-old Ngoy got a full-time position as a janitor at a nearby church. To make ends meet, he took on two more jobs: as the evening clerk at a local building-supply store and pumping gas at a neighborhood service station. As fate would have it, next door was a donut shop where Ngoy was introduced to the exotic treat. “I didn’t know what it was, but I liked it,” Ngoy later told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times . “I took some home and my kids liked it, too.” He talked his way into a training program run by the Winchell’s donut chain for aspiring managers. With his wife at his side, he worked seventeen-hour days managing a Winchell’s in Newport Beach, eventually saving up enough to buy his own donut shop, Christy’s. A dozen years later, that first Christy’s had turned into fifty. Often employing other Cambodians who went on to open their own shops, Ngoy sowed the seeds of a phenomenon that lives on. According to some estimates, by the early years of the twenty-first century, Cambodians owned as many as 80 percent of California’s independent donut shops.
This sort of ethnic dominance of donut shops isn’t limited to Cambodians or to the Golden State. My neighborhood Dunkin’ Donuts is run by South Asians, as is every second Dunkin’ Donuts on the East Coast. But that’s nothing compared to Chicago, where between them, Pakistanis and Indians own 95 percent of the pink-and-orange donut franchises. It’s not that immigrants have gone into the donut business because they’re more enamored of the American sinker than the fry cakes of their homelands, rather it’s because the business has been relatively easy to get into. The ingredient costs are low, and you could count on family for free labor. Stinking of stale grease was just part of the dues that had to be paid for a shot at the American dream.
And what of Ted Ngoy? Sadly his success story did not have a happy ending. With the money from his donut business in his pocket he discovered Las Vegas and gradually gambled away every penny he made and then some, eventually borrowing and embezzling funds to feed his addiction. He lost his business, home, and family. By 2005, he was broke, homeless, and living off the kindness of his few remaining friends.
