a long oneThe Donut King

How one man's shop in La Habra became a trade for a community, and what happened to the man. Ted Ngoy fled the Khmer Rouge in 1975, trained at a chain, bought a shop in 1977, and by the mid-1980s had leased shops to more than a hundred sponsored families. He also gambled it away.

Ngoy was born in 1941 in Sisophon, near the Thai border, to a Chinese immigrant family; his mother, from Shantou, did not speak Khmer, which made getting by hard. Sent to Phnom Penh to study in 1967, he married Suganthini Khoeun, worked as a travel agent and a tour guide, and joined the military in 1970. Through his brother-in-law Sak Sutsakhan — chief of police and briefly president of Cambodia — he was made a major and military attaché in Thailand.

In 1975 he fled with his wife and three children and came through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program to Camp Pendleton.

He took a janitor's job at Peace Lutheran Church in Tustin and a second job at a gas station. He noticed how busy a local donut shop was and asked to learn. An affirmative-action hiring programme at Winchell's trained him, and he managed a store in Newport Beach, employing his wife and nephew.

In 1977 he bought Christy's Donuts in La Habra. It had not done well before. It did under the Ngoys, and they named every shop they bought after it. By 1979 there were more than 25.

The part that mattered was not the shops but the leasing. Ngoy trained relatives and refugees and leased shops to them. "I sponsored more than 100 families", he said, and claimed each as kin on official documents. He lived out of a motor home to open new locations up and down California. By 1987 there were 32 Christy's; at the peak he reckoned 65.

A family arrived, learned a trade in weeks, took a shop, and a few years later handed one to the next family. That is how a refugee community came to hold a large share of an American trade.

In 1977 the Ngoys went to Las Vegas and he saw Elvis. He also found the blackjack tables. He went back monthly for the shows and stayed for the cards, forged his wife's signature on cheques, borrowed from relatives who leased shops from him, and signed shops over when he could not repay. Refugees who had once come to him for help began to avoid him. Gamblers Anonymous did not take: "I cry, everybody cry. After cry, go back gambling."

The shops. In 1985 he and his wife became citizens as Ted and Christy; the pink box is attributed to him and to Ning Yen, who were setting other families up in the trade. KQED reported in 2021 that roughly 90 percent of California's 5,000-plus independent donut shops were Cambodian-owned.

Alice Gu's documentary The Donut King (2020) put the story in front of a national audience. Most people who recognise the pink box do not know either name.