My Home is a Corner Donut Shop
One of my earliest memories is standing on a storage bin, trying to hide from splashes of oil as my dad dropped rings of dough into a deep fryer. He would drizzle their golden brown shells with a perfect layer of glaze. As a toddler, I followed my dad throughout the day around the shop, to pastry trade shows, and through aisles of restaurant warehouses, where he shopped and filled the U-shaped utility carts with stacks of flour and sugar as I hung off the edges.
I never questioned why my Chinese-Cambodian family sold donuts, an iconic American staple, until one day my family went to a donut shop convention and I recognized Cambodian music blasting. It wasn’t until college that I started to understand the importance of donuts in the Cambodian refugee experience: donut shops had relatively low startup costs and did not require many prerequisite professional skills. My parent’s journey in the United States began in the winter of 1979, in a small town in upstate New York, where their sponsors helped them assimilate to American culture. Because both my parents had worked as butchers in their native city of Battambang, they soon moved to Kansas, where they utilized their skills at a meat processing factory. After years of saving and with the help of other family members, they made their way to Los Angeles, taking the advice of some Cambodian friends to try their luck in the donut shop industry. Through this path, my parents were able to provide for my siblings and me, and build up a successful business.
I have many fond childhood memories associated with donuts, although very few of them are of actually eating them (I preferred our ham and cheese croissants). I vividly remember watching my sister dip the freshly fried dough into trays of colorful icings as my mom closed the storefront. And I remember the first time I brought my family’s donuts to school, on my 5th birthday. It was the first time that I heard that it was “cool” that my parents owned a donut shop, and it brought me so much joy that the kids in my class enjoyed something that my family made. I continued to brings donuts to school up until college: for birthdays, club meetings, and end-of-the-semester parties, sometimes experimenting with cereal and pretzel toppings, and drizzles of chocolate.
Up until I left for college, I worked in our donut shop. I spent my pre-teen years folding thousands of pink and white boxes and as I got older, I spent my weekends, summers, and holidays helping customers from behind the display case. Early on, my parents instilled in my siblings and me the personal obligation to uphold our shop. Some children mastered the art of riding a bike — I became an expert at “closing the shop.” And since college and education were never emphasized in my household, I always felt an inherent guilt when participating in sports and extracurricular clubs, because there was always something to fix, clean, or restock. Over time, however, I began to appreciate this upbringing and would carry these memories and skills with pride.
In school, I learned that some geographers defined the concept of “home” as spaces or imaginaries which are steeped and infused with our feelings and emotions — something like a warm cup of tea. In this way, home to me is a space of comfort, imbued with the same feelings of familiarity and nostalgia that donuts evoke. I am at ease when I hear a mixer spinning because that sound plays in the background of so many of my childhood memories. Some donuts even transport me back in time: a pink cake donut with rainbow sprinkles brings me back to my kindergarten birthday, while a strawberry jelly reminds me of the winter break of my freshman year of college, which I spent behind the counter, microwaving jelly donuts to eat with a coworker. These memories always bring me back to simpler times and make me long for this comfort and familiarity.
I see donuts differently now, as I look back at what they meant to my family and their story in the United States. They resemble a means to live, with a heightened importance because of my parents’ background as refugees in the United States. After being displaced from their home country following the Khmer Rouge genocide and pushing through language barriers, my parents would not let my siblings and me take for granted the life that they had created for us. I learned to accept and appreciate what I perceived as disappointments in my childhood: my mom could never attend my award ceremonies because they were during her shift, we never had dinner together because my dad would get home past 9 p.m., and we hardly took vacations because my parents only gave themselves Christmas Day and New Year’s off. Although donuts have allowed them to become financially stable, my parents continued to close the shop late and only take two days off a year because of their resilient mindset due to their past adversity. They wanted to make a home for their children, and worked tirelessly to achieve it.
Though my memories and the responsibility regarding donuts had its challenges, they have ultimately bonded my family together in ways that I could not have imagined, and I believe that other families with similar stories to mine would say the same. My siblings, cousins, and several more children of Cambodian refugees that I have met over the years also share this experience of donuts and sacrifice in our teenage years. I feel connected to my parents through the love that they have shown by working over 10 hours a day to provide for us. The mornings that I have spent working when I have visited home no longer feel like a burden, but instead a time to catch up with my family and show my parents my appreciation. Although unconventional, donuts signify both the home that my parents built as a means to live, and the one that my whole family continues to preserve together.
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