The Donut King tells a rags-to-riches immigrant story worth of Horatio Alger, but with a twist, as its protagonist – a hero to hundreds if not thousands of his fellow Cambodians – turns out to be a deeply flawed man. It’s available to stream free via hoopla if you have a library card and your system is a member.
Ted Ngoy is the donut king of the title, a refugee from the Khmer Rouge who comes to the U.S. in 1975 with his wife and children, staying in the makeshift refugee camp at Camp Pendleton when they first arrived. He finds work at a gas station when he notices the smell of fresh donuts, which leads him to get a job at the iconic California chain Winchell’s. From there, it’s all straight uphill for Ngoy, who works his way to manager, buys an independent donut shop called Christy’s, and builds a chain of 32 shops by training fellow Cambodian immigrants and leasing the new stores to them. Ngoy amassed a fortune of about $20 million, by his own reckoning, and gave generously, sponsoring a thousand families (again, in his own telling) of Cambodian refugees. At the peak of his success, he owned a $2 million mansion, which we see in the film.
Director Alice Gu shows just how broad that success was, as Ngoy helped populate southern California with Cambodian-run donut shops, and he gave several members of his extended family their starts in the United States. Several cousins shown in the film run their own shops, although one of the subplots is the way the youngest generation is turning away from the business, especially as they’ve gotten the post-secondary educations made possible by their parents’ donut enterprises.
The real story here is that Ngoy developed a gambling problem shortly after emigrating to the United States, and it eventually cost him everything. The generous, assiduous immigrant from the movie’s first two-thirds throws everything away through his gambling and, eventually, even worse transgressions. He’s a rich subject for a documentary because of these contradictions, and even family members who owe their prosperity to the first chances he gave them have a hard time reconciling their feelings about him. (His children appear to no longer speak to him, however, a subject that didn’t get the exploration it deserved.)
Gu begins the film with a good ten minutes or so of explanatory content on the Cambodian civil war, which would probably be necessary for most American audiences, using first-person accounts from Ngoy and his family as well as American TV news clips from the time. The Khmer Rouge overthrew the U.S.-backed government, killing nearly 2 million people via torture, imprisonment, and execution, and via the famine caused by the new regime’s forced agrarian schemes. We see scenes of the emptied capital of Phnom Penh, and Ngoy walks through the Tuol Sleng prison, which is now a museum of the civil war. It’s a strong opening, and predisposes you to root for Ngoy and the many other Cambodians we see on camera, discussing their histories.
Yet The Donut King doesn’t give enough time to the back end of the story – to Ngoy’s gambling and other more serious transgressions, to the changes wrought by big chains on mom-and-pop operators like those we see here, and to how the next generation might not be so willing to take over from their parents. If anything, Gu spends too much time on the young woman who’s helping popularize her family’s shop through aggressive use of social media, which is very fun, but a complete digression from any of the main stories she’s telling here. Ngoy’s own arc would be enough to support the film if Gu gave more time to his decline, and to how little he really seems to take responsibility for the damage he wrought. The digressions just aren’t necessary, and they’re the main thing keeping The Donut King from being a great film.