‘The Donut King’ documentary release makes an O.C. homecoming

The donut business isn’t easy. There’s a hustle to it, and director Alice Gu captures it in her debut documentary “The Donut King.”

The film follows an immigrant tale of the American dream through Bun Tek “Ted” Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee whose charmed life is full of war, romance, entrepreneurship, racism and a caution about greed. Also, significantly for Ngoy, other Cambodian refugees and their children — donuts.

Ngoy built a vast donut shop empire across California and it started in 1970s Orange County. He tasted his first donut at a Tustin gas station, trained as a baker in a La Mirada Winchell’s and ran his own Winchell’s store in the Balboa Peninsula.

Then he opened his first independent shop in La Habra, eventually covering the rest of O.C. and California landscape with a familiar coat — yellow strip mall signs with red lettering reading Christy’s Donuts.

Ngoy and his family enjoyed the fruits of their labor and at one point moved into a 7,000-square-foot mansion in Mission Viejo. He also sponsored more than 100 Cambodian refugee families and established a path of financial opportunity for them in America.

The documentary goes back and forth between Ngoy and the present-day lives of second- and third-generation donut shop kids or what Gu refers to as Donut Generation 2.0.

In this condensed and edited conversation, Gu talks about the American dream, Cambodian American Republicans, 1970s Orange County and the best donut she ate during filming.

What drew you to Ted’s story at the start?
Finding out about his story, it’s fascinating — a guy who comes here penniless and becomes a Donut King. That phrase “Donut King” is already so eye-catching right off the bat. Upon deeper glance, it was so personal for me. I’m Chinese American. I am the child of immigrants who came and moved here for the American dream. It really helped put some perspective on the journey to get here from somewhere else and the struggles that people go through when they arrive in a new, strange and foreign land. The premise of family in the film is how hard your parents work and the sacrifices they make so that you can have a life better than they did.

Did working on this film change or contribute to your perspective of the American dream or immigrant stories?
It seems like these days the American dream is harder and harder to attain. There’s so much competition. The world moves so quickly now, but I do believe that it is still real and it is still possible. I wanted to tell this story in a way that was inspirational and optimistic.

As far as the immigrant experience and my parents — what it really did for me is open my eyes and I just cut them some slack about growing up here in conflict with wanting to be an American kid and their Chinese ways of raising me. Doing this film was really an exploration for me of understanding where you come from.

When you first reached out to Ted, it was a cold call. What was it like?
I spoke with him and he was in Cambodia. He was very surprised that anybody would find him and want to tell his stories. I told him that he has a story to tell. This is an incredible story of how he helped people. It was really wonderful. In our very first phone call, he asked if I was American and I told him that I was Chinese American. He said he’s Chinese Cambodian and we spoke Mandarin for a couple of minutes. That really broke the ice for us. We had an instant connection and it felt like we were meant to be doing this story together.

His story has been told through different angles in a couple of articles. What new information did you learn in the making of the film?
There was a lot that was new to me. In doing the research and finding that it was President [Gerald] Ford who issued the executive order to receive the refugees, a Republican president — that was a huge surprise to me given that during the time that we were making this film we were hearing Donald Trump’s rhetoric. Also Jerry Brown, who we’ve seen in California as our beacon of hope and morality, in 1975 was actually the opposite. He said that we didn’t have room for these refugees here. We were taxed to the hilt, unemployment was high and he was very reluctant to give refugees a home here when Californians were out of work. That was super mind blowing for me to hear the political flip-flop and really insightful about another time when politics were more civil and there could be discussion.

The other discovery for me was what I called Donut Generation 2.0, the kids who go to take over the parents’ mom and pop shops. These are kids who are American educated. They’re savvy, young, hip. They have social media and know how to work it to innovate their parents’ old donut shops with a worldwide following.

What was surprising for me was watching Ted, a Republican, pictured with Pete Wilson at one point in the film since Wilson supported laws that hurt immigrants.
It’s wild. To understand the politics, the Republican party at the time was a very anticommunist party. Ted and a lot of the Asians who came aligned themselves with the Republican party. Ted had met Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., [Richard] Nixon. He hosted Dan Quayle and Pete Wilson at his house. He’s friends with Dana Rohrabacher. These are all people who present day you don’t associate with welcoming refugees with open arms. Interestingly, largely because of Democratic policy we got a grant for our camera and it came from this girl, who was the daughter of Vietnamese refugees who landed in Arkansas. I called her when I found out and asked if she knew about Ford and Brown. And she said she knew a lot of people in her parents’ generation who are lifelong Republicans and that’s why they hate the Democratic party.

I’m also, again, the daughter of Chinese American immigrants and my dad was a big Republican party supporter. And I thought, “How could that be?” He’s passed away now so I can’t talk to him about it, but it was a learning experience for me about my parents’ relationship with politics.

There’s this portion in the film that goes into Ted and his ex-wife Christy’s experiences in Orange County during the 70s. Tell me more about how they connected to the local community.
Ted came in the 70s and it was quite homogeneously white in Orange County at the time and a lot of people had never seen an Asian person, much less heard of a place called Cambodia. Ted was dismayed. When he was working in the donut shop, he went to his sponsor and said he was having a hard time. People made fun of his accent. It was hurtful. His sponsor told him people will have their prejudices but they mean well. He suggested that Ted hang out in the back and to put Christy in the front. People love her and she’s beautiful. It was a strategy that ended up working for them. Christy was in the front and made a lot of inroads with the community and built a lot of bridges.

Something else about Orange County that I found so beautiful and touching while we were making this film, there was a man who owned a donut shop in Seal Beach and his wife was stricken with cancer. He wanted to be with her, but he had no one else to manage the shop. The whole community banded together and they all agreed to sell him out of donuts every morning by 9 a.m. He would have no more donuts to sell so he could be with his wife for the rest of the day. It actually made national, if not international, news about the kindness of these people in Orange County. I thought it was so profound that this was the very same community that just a couple of decades earlier were making fun of somebody who worked at the counter and had an accent. I think that’s the American way — the power of connections and people.

There’s also the moment where Ted revisits his former home in Mission Viejo. How did those scenes end up happening?
I asked him to travel to California again. For a year and a half, I struggled with how I was going to get access to that Mission Viejo mansion. I thought I would just get an exterior scene for context. A day before he left, his eldest son said if you have $3.2 million you can buy it. It was on the market. I instantly found the Realtor, the listing agent and arranged to go and have Ted walk through his old house.

Some of his relationships didn’t end well. Was there any tension or awkwardness when he visited California again?
He came to visit California, I think, with a little bit of trepidation. There were some hurt relationships. I can’t take credit for it, but I do feel like in the making of this film and having some of these people face feelings that they hadn’t confronted in many years, it was very healing. To think about what Ted did years ago — letting bygones be bygones.

Interviews can sometimes feel like a therapy session. Some of the interviews in the film seemed that way.
It was actually really wonderful to speak with particularly his older kids Chet and Savy, who until that interview, they didn’t have much to do with him. They barely talked to him. The second time Ted came back to California, Chet took all this time off of work, took him to his timeshare in Oceanside and drove his dad around all over Southern California. This is my own speculation, but it seemed like he had come to some peace with his dad and childhood.

What is Ted up to in Cambodia nowadays?
Ted is doing well. He is wealthy again. He is working in real estate. He’s really funny. He says to me, “Alice, making money — it’s so easy. I say, “Ted I don’t think it’s that easy at all.” And he’ll respond, “I’ve been rich three times. You just have to see the opportunity and go for it.” Those are the wise words of Ted Ngoy.

Is there anything that you left on the cutting room floor that you still think about?
There are a lot of things that I still think about on the cutting room floor. One of them being my interview with Michael Krondl, the food historian. He wrote a book called “The Donut: History, Recipes, and Lore from Boston to Berlin” and he gave really fascinating insights into donut culture, history and our relationship to donuts in America. I could have made a special piece just on the history of donuts.

Which donut shop do you find yourself going back to for the sake of eating a donut?
I had my out of body experience at DK’s Donuts and Bakery in Santa Monica. That is because I had a buttermilk bar about 30 seconds out of the fryer with fresh glaze on it. And it was actually a donut that I refused at first from Mayly Tao, the Donut Princess. I ended up not sharing that donut. I ate the whole thing.

‘The Donut King’

In English, Mandarin and Cambodian with English subtitles; Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes

Playing: Regency South Coast Village, Santa Ana, and in limited release where theaters are open; available via virtual cinemas, including Laemmle Theatres

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