By Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, August 2, 2021
In the mid-seventies, Ted Ngoy was working the late shift at a gas station in Orange County when he tasted his first doughnut. Ngoy, then in his thirties, was instantly hooked. He trained to become a manager at Winchell’s Donuts, a popular chain, before purchasing Christy’s Donuts, a struggling shop in La Habra. Ngoy turned Christy’s around, and in the next few years he acquired more stores in the area. He is said to have popularized the pink box for to-go orders, which became a key part of doughnut iconography. By 1980, he owned twenty Christy’s Donuts throughout Southern California, and he kept expanding. He eventually became known as the Donut King, and he claimed a vast empire.
He had come to Southern California as part of a wave of refugees from Cambodia, which was being ravaged by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge had emerged in the fifties and sixties as a Communist opposition force before assuming control of the nation, in 1975. In the next four years, the paranoid, authoritarian regime killed as much as a quarter of the nation’s population.
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