Dan Pashman: In the 1970’s, Cambodia was ruled by a dictator named Pol Pot. In what came to be known as the Cambodian genocide, his Khmer Rouge slaughtered millions of their own citizens, often in areas known as the "Killing Fields". Millions more fled, refugees poured into Thailand, and many eventually made it to the US. One of those people was a guy named Ted Ngoy. In 1975, he arrived in Orange County, California, outside L.A., with his wife and three kids, and he decided to open a donut shop.

Greg Nichols: He was working at a gas station and he was working the night shift, like the graveyard shift. And across the street, there was this lit up doughnut sign and in my mind, it's like this beacon of goodness of America. And he started to go there and get doughnuts and something in this guy's mind was like, "Doughnuts, like I can do something with this."

Dan Pashman: This is Greg Nichols, he's a journalist who’s written about Ted Ngoy and the donut industry in California. Ted enrolled in a management training program at a local donut chain called Winchell’s. He learned the business and saved up enough money to buy his own place.

Greg Nichols: Opened his first shop in La Habra, and it was called, Christy's. It was the old school doughnut in the box that the cop station has everyday. 

Dan Pashman: Around this time, the situation in Cambodia got worse. More refugees poured into southern California.

Greg Nichols: And all of a sudden, there were tons of people who were looking for work, looking for some kind of opportunity to create a life, and Ted Ngoy saw that as a big opportunity for him as well. So he started buying up doughnut shops. He started scouting locations and building new doughnut shops. He really had a feeling now for what would make a successful doughnut shop, with the traffic and everything. And he started leasing them to Cambodians who were looking for some kind of employment. A lot of these people didn't have any money. They fled and he would do it very cheaply or on the promise — oftentimes a the handshake that they would pay him back or pay some percentage of revenue and that's really how it blossomed. 

Dan Pashman: Ted and his wife even sponsored visas for many refugees. And the people Ted trained in the donut business then trained others. By 1985, 10 years after he arrived in California with nothing, Ted was making $100,000 a month from his donut shops.

Greg Nichols: He had hundreds of shops up and down the coast, all the way up to Washington state as far east as Texas. I mean, the dude had dominated the doughnut market at this point. He was known as "The Doughnut King". Everybody knew him that way and he had this huge mansion in Vallejo — I mean, he was living the American dream. 

Dan Pashman: But that dream didn’t last. Within a couple years, Ted had lost it all, and then he disappeared. 

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Dan Pashman: The Doughnut King may not be around but his legacy lives on. Today, there are about 5,000 independent donut shops in California, alone. 90 percent of them are owned by Cambodians.

CLIP (PERSON 1): When you think of Vietnamese, they own nail salons or phở restaurants. Then the Koreans own the dry cleaners. So you associate with Cambodians owning doughnut shops. 

CLIP (PERSON 2): Whether their parents owned a doughnut shop, or they used to work in one, or they still do ...

CLIP (PERSON 3): They would say, "Oh ya, doughnut shops are all Cambodians." When you hear that, it's like, yes. It's that pride. It's like, yes, Cambodians are coming up. 

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Dan Pashman: All that traces back to Ted Ngoy. But where is Ted Ngoy? Today on The Sporkful, the world he Donut King built and our attempt to find him.

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Dan Pashman: This is The Sporkful, it’s not for foodies, it’s for eaters, I’m Dan Pashman. Each week on our show we obsess about food to learn more about people. This week we’re doing something special: We’re replaying one of my favorite two-part series that we’ve ever done on The Sporkful. It’s also one of the most requested replays from you, our loyal listeners. It’s called "Searching for the Donut King" — and this story is so fascinating that a documentary film came out about it a couple years after our series. Now, there may even be a feature film in the works. We’re playing part 1 today, and then part 2 will come out on Friday, in place of our Reheat. All right, here we go.

Dan Pashman: A couple years ago I was driving around L. A. and that's when I noticed it, there are so many mom and pop donut shops, and I'm a sucker for a good old fashioned glazed donut. But when I think of food in L.A., I think of great Mexican food, great Asian food, and beyond that, like wheatgrass shots. I know, I'm sure there's more than that, but point is, I definitely don't think of donuts.

Dan Pashman: But I began looking into it and my initial search for some basic information turned into an attempt to solve a mystery. Now, when you drive around L.A. and see all these shops, the connection between them is not immediately obvious. Most of them have different names, different branding, and the doughnut are, like you heard, just really good versions of the greatest hits. 

Dan Pashman: Now, let me give you one stat to drive home just how many of these places they have in southern California — in most of America, there’s an average of about one donut shop for every 30,000 people. In L.A., there’s one donut shop for every 7,000 people.  In fact, Dunkin' Donuts found it so hard to break into the L.A. market that in the late '90s they gave up — closed all their stores there. Only in the last couple years have they decided to give it another try. And the main reason why it’s so hard? The Cambodians have that market on lock.

Frank Shyong: Doughnuts are everywhere here. It seems like there's one in every strip mall. And a big part of that is the sort of entrepreneurial spirit of Cambodians. 

Dan Pashman: This is Frank Shyong, from the L.A. Times. He covers the Cambodian community and the Long Beach area, where a lot of the community is centered.

Frank Shyong: They come from such chaos and in the aftermath of a civil war and a genocide and so they — the safest thing to do is usually to open their own business because that's something that they can control. So everyone wanted to have their own business. Many of these are sort of mom and pop operations that through sort of this endless chain of family linkages, you know, all originated with Ted Ngoy. 

Dan Pashman: If we wanted to try and find him, what would you recommend that we do?

Frank Shyong: Well, I think he has some relatives around and maybe some people who he helped open a doughnut shop with them. That's where I'd start. I'd check to see if he has any relatives. 

Dan Pashman: But, as Frank explained, getting those relatives to talk with me wouldn’t be easy. 

Frank Shyong: Cambodian immigrants, a large majority of them have a experience of trauma. For that reason, talking about the past is really difficult. During the time of the Khmer Rouge, basically having any personal information out there about yourself was dangerous. Being invisible was a survival strategy. And so they can see no good from participating in a story. It's difficult when you just kind of are walking around Long Beach and knocking on doors, as I have for stories in the past, and I haven't had a lot of success that way. 

Dan Pashman: So we'd need someone in the community to help open some doors for us. But things were already getting more harder, because as we kept digging, it looked more and more like Ted was probably back in Cambodia. We needed to find someone here who might help us reach Ted there. Frank Shyong put us in touch with Sandy New, who’s very active in the Cambodian community in Long Beach. It's where she grew up. She’s 27. Her dad escaped the Khmer Rouge and settled in the area in the mid '80s. He was a donut baker for years. But Sandy didn’t feel comfortable asking her father to discuss anything about Cambodia or even those early days in the U.S.

Sandy New: Even to their families, to their own children, they don't even share whole stories. I mean, my father had 13 brothers and sisters and they were all murdered — all thirteen of them. That's all I know. He did not tell me what happened during whatever that they went through. He just doesn't want us to have that feeling where it's like, "Oh my God, I feel bad for my parents." 

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Dan Pashman: So Ted’s family, and the older generation of donut makers, the people who knew Ted, were probably not going to talk me, a stranger with a microphone — and I get that. Sandy said she’d keep asking around for us, to try to find us a connection. In the mean time, I wanted to explore Ted Ngoy’s legacy. In particular, I was curious to understand the role these donut shops play today for the younger generation of Cambodian Americans.

Dan Pashman: All right, should we open these doughnuts up?

Chad Phuong: Yeah. Sure, man. 

Dan Pashman: I met Chad Phuong at King’s Donuts in Hawthorne, which is about halfway between L.A. and Long Beach. 

Chad Phuong: Aw, man, look at these glazed coconut ... 

Dan Pashman: This looks ridiculous. 

Chad Phuong: Oh yeah, look at this sugared doughnut, right here. 

Dan Pashman: I'm just gonna let you keep listening to Chad and me talking about doughnuts until you're starving. 

Chad Phuong: ... Some more chocolate and some of the fillings are Bavarian cream, you get strawberry, you get lemon, raspberry, blueberry, and on and on. 

Dan Pashman: And you specifically said we needed the butter milk, right?

Chad Phuong: Oh yeah, the butter milk is always the number one thing to go to because that's the first doughnut that you make when you step into the doughnut shop. Every baker, that's their first doughnut that they make when the open the shop. 

Dan Pashman: Chad didn't eat doughnuts as a child in Cambodia, but he learned a lot about them growing up in the U.S. Chad's father didn't make it out. He was a military police officer, who was executed by Khmer Rouge. Chad fled with his mother and his uncle on foot. 

Dan Pashman: How far did you walk?

Chad Phuong: Oh man, that's a good — about a couple hundred miles. 

Dan Pashman: And how old were you?

Chad Phuong: I was about maybe six but I walked half of the way. But, you know, I mean, I was really, really young and my uncle — he helped carry me. 

Dan Pashman: What are some of your specific memories from that walk? 

Chad Phuong: From that walk was actually with food. There was really nothing to eat and we scavenge for fruits, like we saw wild mangoes. We saw bananas. And I remember going to a little rice paddy and we didn't have a lot of stuff to eat. So what we did we picked out these grass. And these grass had like small little roots, ao they gave us nourishment from the little roots that they had. So they are my fond memories was mostly food but also with — we got stuck in the jungle. During the middle of the night, there was people shooting. Snipers — we didn't know if they were Viet Congs. We didn't know if they were Khmer Rogue or they were Thai, because we couldn't see. And that memory when there was RPG that almost hit me and luckily there was a cow that was in front of me, so I was a few feet away from it. And then you know when people talk about war and bombs and stuff, you get that high ping sound and it throws off your equilibrium. So that's what threw off my equilibriums, so I let go of my mom's hand and she didn't know where I was because there was shooting. There was grenades going off, machine guns, so that was a very very frightful moment for my family and for a lot other people that were sleeping in the jungle that night. 

Dan Pashman: Chad was reunited with his mother later that night, but he never forgot that moment.

Dan Pashman: Did you have siblings walking with you?

Chad Phuong: No. My sister and brother, they stayed behind with my other aunt, who were watching my siblings because they were so small. They would cry or people would hear us. They would rob us, or something, so she was really afraid of that. So she told them they would come back later for them. 

Dan Pashman: And did they? Your siblings made it here?

Chad Phuong: Yeah, they made it here. So I have two brothers, two sisters. They didn't here to the states until '84, that's when we reunited with my siblings, with my brother and my sister. 

Dan Pashman: What was that like?

Chad Phuong: It was cool because I haven't seen them for a while, like a good five years just to see my sister, my brother, just like I remembered them. And we gave each other hugs. Like we've been reunited but in a different country and getting away from — and we felt blessed because we didn't have to worry about food. We didn't have to worry about guns or taking sniper fire or you know changes. The uncertainty, you know?

Dan Pashman: As they settled into life in Long Beach, Chad’s mom opened a sweatshop. His uncle started baking donuts. Sometimes Chad would visit his uncle in the donut shop.

Chad Phuong: And I would go at night to get some ice cream. I would help him dip the different glazed that he finished, just to give him a hand. And when we did that we learned different types of doughnuts, how to handle it, how to make the dough. And that set a stage because when I finished high school, the only job that I could find, being that we're second generation, we didn't have a role model or anybody because our parents were too busy trying to survive, trying to make a living, so we didn't really have a lot of guidance. So my first job was being a doughnut baker. 

Dan Pashman: That first job in a donut shop allowed Chad to save money for school. He studied computers and taught himself to build computers. Then he switched careers, now he’s an operating room technician. Today, Chad’s 45 and he doesn’t make donuts anymore. But he does have a food business on the side. He sells Cambodian sauces and other staples online. He also helped launch a group called Chefs Off the Boat. It's a collective of Cambodian American chefs that do various kinds of food events. And all of that started with that first job at a donut shop.

Chad Phuong: It's a very, very important industry in the Cambodian American history. And it's still here today and it's still thriving and strong and is reaching to other communities outside California. So it brings me a lot of pride being a baker, too. And having aunts and uncles and and friends that still own doughnut shops, now a days. 

Dan Pashman: Is there any specific culinary reason why Cambodian Americans ended up making doughnuts? Like is there some special connection to Cambodian food or is it just that happened to be the thing that people caught on to?

Chad Phuong: It just happened to be the thing. I mean, we got a couple guys who own the doughnut shop taught their friends and family how to be bakers and they work hard. They saved that money and they bought the doughnut shops in sales. And they had  a really, really good relationship with the neighborhood that they were in. So when they created that relationship with their community, it was really hard for the big doughnut business to make it here in California, especially. 

Dan Pashman: What do you know about Ted Ngoy? 

Chad Phuong: Oh man, he's, like, a doughnut legend. He's the king of doughnuts. I remember that one of my uncle used to bake for one of his shops. And when you bake doughnuts, you get compensated by the quart. Quart meaning the amount of dough that you have to make so many doughnuts. So usually like a small mom and pop, Cambodian owned doughnut store would be be 15-20 quarts. That's a good amount of doughnuts to be sold in a day. But man, some of his shops they were cranking 30, 40, 50 quarts. But Ted, he's a legend. I mean, everybody knows him. He took care of his community. He took care of people. He lend them money for them to succeed. Man, he helped so many people, so many families to get their foot in the door int he business. He had a really, really good heart of helping his community. 

Dan Pashman: Chad didn’t have new info on Ted Ngoy's whereabouts today, but he had heard some rumors about what went down all those years ago. I checked back in with Sandy. Remember, she’s the one who’s very active in the Cambodian community in Long Beach? She was gonna do some poking around for us. And the rumors Chad had heard about Ted Ngoy — they lined up with what Sandy told me. 

Sandy New: This guy is like one of the richest Cambodians at that time. But that horrible habit that he picked up with gambling made him lose everything to the point where he had to come back to those who he has helped loan money and everything to start up their business, their doughnut shops and everything. He's now asking them for loans.

Dan Pashman: At the height of Ted's gambling addiction, every time he went to Vegas, he’d lose another donut shop.

Sandy New: I mean, everyone kind of shut their doors. I mean, just like us, if someone is having a gambling problem and they're asking us for money, it's a risk. You know? And most of those who he helped didn't want to take that risk. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: So Ted had a falling out with the community that he helped build. They didn’t want to loan him money because they knew he was gambling. And Sandy says that after everything Ted had done for people, he took that very personally. All of which helped explain why maybe some people in the community didn’t want to talk about Ted, or help us find him. 

Sandy New: I know he's back in Cambodia in a village, where no one can get in touch with him. 

Dan Pashman: Do you think you could get word to Ted Ngoy, through one of those family members?

Sandy New: I mean, for us to get in reach of him? Yeah, it's kind of impossible but for the family members to get in touch with him, I think it's possible if we were to send him a message. 

MUSIC

Dan Pashman: So Sandy agreed to reach out to Ted’s family in L.A. on our behalf. That was last November. It was March before we got any kind of response and it wasn't the response we expected. Stick around. 

MUSIC

 

+++BREAK+++

 

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Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, I visit cookbook author and YouTube star Molly Baz at her house in Los Angeles. Molly's known for her great taste, her effortless cool, so I asked her how she’s honed that.

CLIP (MOLLY BAZ): I think that's just part of my personality is like, I know what I like and I am pretty bull-ish about it.

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): And where do you think that belief in your own taste comes from? CLIP (MOLLY BAZ): It's just not that hard to, like, decide whether you like something. Like, it’s not an active thing. It’s just like … Is it good? [LAUGHS}

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): Right, right.

Dan Pashman: Molly also let me watch her test the sixth version of a cornbread recipe that she can’t quite figure out. She tells me that if it doesn’t work out when I’m there, she’s going to abandon the recipe entirely. High stakes for this cornbread! It's a great conversation. Check that episode out, it’s in your feed right now where you got this one. Okay, back to the show.

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Dan Pashman: So, all indications were that Ted Ngoy, a.k.a The Donut King, was back in Cambodia. He’d had a falling out with the community he helped build. Sandy New, a Cambodian American based in Long Beach, was helping us look for him. She agreed to try to get word to Ted, through the family he still had in the L.A. area. Meanwhile, I kept thinking about the future of all these Cambodian donut shops as the original generation of owners gets older. They came here with nothing, no education, donuts were the only option for them. But a lot of their kids have gone to college and can now make a lot more money working a lot fewer hours at other jobs. I asked Sandy, what’s gonna happen to these donuts shops? In response, she took me to a place called Sweet Retreat in the heart of Cambodian Long Beach.

Dan Pashman: From the outside, Sweet Retreat looks like a pretty standard place but as soon as you walk in, it’s pretty clear this is not your Cambodian grandma’s donut shop. They have donuts with fruity pebbles and cocoa puffs on them, maple bacon bars, red velvet, and a whole variety of vegan donuts with things like rose bud and matcha green tea. Then there’s the décor. The old school places look kinda like off brand Dunkin' Donuts — functional but not beautiful. At Sweet Retreat, the walls are bright yellow, with a huge hand painted mural.

Sreyot Chan: It has some pictures of some doughnuts or some jokes. Other than that, it has a story of us. Like when I say, "Yes" or "baba". "Baba" is Dary calling me — always "Baba, Baba". It's like short for like babe and then he became lazy calling me baba. 

Dan Pashman: And is that a Cambodian flag I see there as well? 

Sreyot Chan: Yes. And that yellow wall — why is it yellow? Because it's sreyot. Sreyot in Cambodian means sunflower girl — that's my name. Yeah. So it tells a lot. The shop tells a lot about me and Dary. 

Dan Pashman: This is Sreyrot Chan. She and her husband Dary were both born in refugee camps in Thailand. Sreyrot’s family spent 12 years in three different camps before they came to Long Beach. Dary was much younger when his family arrived here, so he doesn’t remember coming. But he's got a lot of memories spending time in his family’s donut shops, playing in the back, napping on sacks of flour. Dary and Sreyrot met in college. They graduated, got office jobs in the healthcare field. But they dreamed of owning a café together, with Dary as the baker and Sreyrot running the front of the house. In 2015, they bought an old donut place, redid the inside, and opened the area’s first gourmet donut shop.

Dan Pashman: So your parents and your extended family, they saw a doughnut shop as a way to get a foothold in America to sort of move up the socio-economic ladder to get new opportunities. What did they say when you told them you wanted to open your own doughnut shop?

Dary Chan: Are you nuts?

[LAUGHING]

Dary Chan: You've been a doughnut shop all your life and now you want to open up a doughnut shop? [LAUGHS] 

Sreyot Chan: Especially, when you have a career, why did you decide to go back to what we — well, that's according to my dad. He's like, "What were you thinking? You already have a career. You already have a degree." Both of us already have a degree. Why did you decide in going this? But if you want to, then we will support you. 

Dary Chan: I was thinking, we're still young. I always wanted a business and this opportunity opens up. It was a vacant building and I was thinking, "You know what? Give it a try." At least there's no regret. If everything all fails then you could always go back to healthcare. And that's why we took the place and then we put all our savings into it and see how it goes. But we figured it out together. We're thinking, "Okay, we have to do something different because there's doughnut shop around the corner," and I remember the first week that we opened we make like, wha, fifty bucks a day. [LAUGHS] And we look at each other like, "Are we gonna survive?"

Dan Pashman: Dary and Sreyrot say despite the warnings they got from their families, they were still surprised by how much work it is. 12-16 hour days, 7 days a week, and they have two small kids. Plus, making so many varieties with such high standards, it’s painstaking.

Sreyrot Chan: I grew to love doughnut, even more with the fact that I know how hard it is to make a doughnut. Back then, I just thought, "Oh, there's a doughnut on a table in a pink box," where my dad normally took it from his work place after he baked and everything. He brought it over. So it wasn't like amazing to me until now, when I had my own shop. Seeing my husband baking, he has a lot of pride in making doughnut. Everything, he always tells me, "It's timing babe. Come on, come on. It's timing!" Okay, I would sometimes help him here and there. Sometimes I don't know how to do certain things. I feel frustrated just unable to help him out. 

Dary Chan: Most old school baker, they eyeball it, kind of like, "I guess ... ", they pull out within 45 minutes or something like that. But for me, I have a lot of timers. The thing about doughnuts is that, you have a certain amount of time that doughnut rise, so you have to take it out in a certain amount of time. So if you leave anything longer, it'll rise too much and it'll soak oil and it'll get really heavy and greasy. And every time you take a bite, it's really horrible. So everything is just time and temperature and plus you have to kind of adjust what the outside is too. 

Dan Pashman: And what kinds of reactions have you gotten from the local community that grew up with those old school doughnut shops?

Dary Chan: They're like, "Wow, this is different." This is something that they're not used to. I mean, people here, they don't travel outside too much. So they never got the gourmet style. It's like, okay now we bring it here to Long Beach and they're like, "Oh this is something like I've never tasted before." And we've got customers come back every single day for them. 

Sreyrot Chan: I'm actually feel proud, too. The fact that like we see the Long Beach community doughnut, they're starting to bring more gourmet into their shop. 

Dary Chan: They're several in L.A. that came here and was like, "Hey, I'm copying your shop." [LAUGHS] I was like, "Oh great."

Dan Pashman: Dary says those other shops are even copying their yellow wall and mural. 

Dan Pashman: What can you tell me about Ted Ngoy?

Dary Chan: He's pretty much The Doughnut King. [LAUGHS] He's the one who introduced everyone — like the Cambodian community to doughnuts. 

Dan Pashman: What would you say to him, if he were here?

Sreyot Chan: [LAUGHS] Hi, sir. 

Dan Pashman: [LAUGHS] 

Sreyot Chan: If he's here, like: Hi, sir. Thank you for introducing the Cambodian community into the doughnut world here. Without you, we probably don't know what is doughnut. We wouldn't be having a doughnut business to start our life.

Dan Pashman: At this point I had to get going, but not before I picked out a couple dozen donuts to bring back to Stitcher L.A. Headquarters. I got peanut butter Oreo, a caramel bar, apple fritters, which are my favorite …

Dan Pashman: Could I please have the two apple fritters that are to your left. The ones that are a little darker?

Sreyot Chan: Okay. 

Dan Pashman: I like them a little bit darker. 

Sreyot Chan: A little bit crunchier.

Dan Pashman: A little crisp, crunchy ... Yes.

Sreyot Chan: Good. [LAUGHS] 

Dan Pashman: Yes, yes. Exactly. You know.

Dan Pashman: Then I got a variety of chocolate themed donuts. But still, there were so many options, I was feeling a lot of pressure.

Dan Pashman: What kind of a ratio — I want to make sure we're getting a good ratio of yeast to cake doughnuts to please everyone in the office. 

Dan Pashman: I added a vegan blueberry and matcha green tea. 

Dan Pashman: Oh, I think I've been neglectful of the buttermilk section. Could we please …

Dan Pashman: Finally, I got it all worked out. Before I left, I had one last question for Sreyrot.

Dan Pashman: If your kids comes to you in twenty years and say, "Mom, we want to open our own doughnut shop. We have some ideas of our own," what would you think of that? 

Sreyrot Chan: I'm like, "Oh, it's gonna be a hard work," just like my dad say. "Are you sure about it?", just like my dad say but I will support him throughout. 

MUSIC

Sreyrot Chan: If things doesn't work out, it's okay. It's a learning process. Failure make you stronger. 

Dan Pashman: Dary and Sreyrot Chan own Sweet Retreat Donuts in Long Beach, California. It is definitely worth a visit, the donuts are amazing. After talking with them, it was clear to me that Ted Ngoy’s legacy is safe. But what about Ted himself? Well, that trip to Sweet Retreat, like I said, it was taped back in November — nearly six months ago. For months, we waited for word from Sandy. We even offered to edit together clips of all the nice things the younger generation was saying about Ted so she could try to pass it on to him. But after a while we stopped hearing back from her. It felt like we were at a dead end. Finally, I said, "Okay, well, we gotta finish this episode," I guess the end of the story is that we couldn’t find Ted. 

Dan Pashman: Then we decided to try just one more thing. It was a long shot to be sure. Frankly, it’s a maneuver that only the most seasoned journalists even attempt. We looked on Facebook. And guess what? Ted’s on Facebook ... in Cambodia. And at the top of his feed was a message:

“Can’t wait to see everybody on April 8th, Long Beach Cambodia Town Khmer Culture Festival Day. See you again America.”

Dan Pashman: We literally found this a week before the festival. So, there was really only one thing to do …

MUSIC 

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): All right, thanks.

MUSIC

[DOGS BARKING] 

CLIP (DAN PASHMAN): You must be The Doughnut King. 

[LAUGHING]

Dan Pashman: This Friday, in the second and final part of our story …

CLIP (TED NGOY): Well my name is Ted. Ted, last name Ngoy — Ted Ngoy. 

CLIP (PERSON 4): Ted's got some demons …  

CLIP (PERSON 5): I stood by him for so many years. He'll be broke if he don't have anything, moved to Cambodia. So, okay. I go with him to stand by him, hoping all the time that he's changed … 

CLIP (PERSON 6): I think he may still even owe people money here and there. So there's some animosity there but I think he's done a lot more good than bad. That's for sure … 

Dan Pashman: That comes out this Friday. In the first half of this episode, we heard from Chad Phoung. Since we recorded this episode, he started a Cambodian Texas BBQ stand that travels around to different locations in the L.A. area. It's called Battambong BBQ and you can follow them on Instagram for the latest info about hours and locations, @Battambonbbq. We'll put a link in the show notes. 

Dan Pashman: Special thanks to Greg Nichols and Frank Shyong. Several years ago, Frank wrote an L.A. Times story about a younger generation of Cambodian American artists and business owners is changing Long Beach. And Greg profiled Ted Ngoy in the California Sunday Magazine. That story's called “Dunkin and the Doughnut King”. We'll put links to both stories in the show notes.