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♪ Cambodian music ♪
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[DONUT PEOPLE]
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[Samoeurn Phan]
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[Affectionately known as
Pou Sam (Uncle Sam)]
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[Sam has opened over 20 donut shops
for Cambodian families across Houston.]
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(Uncle Sam) Well, when I came here in 1994
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to eat one donut you didn't realize
how much work goes into one donut
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until you actually go into
doing the donuts.
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You know, it takes quite a bit
just to make one donut.
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I start off by finding a location.
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If I find a location,
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I get a family that needs a donut shop
to go to look at the location,
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and if they like it,
we negotiate the price,
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and if the price is right,
I build it for them and turn them the key.
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You know, most of them
already know how to make donuts.
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They work for a family member,
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you know, they've already worked
for like two, three or five years...
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to save up the money
to start up the business.
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[Chandara Meas
Owner of Snowflake Donuts, Galveston]
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[Cambodian Immigrant]
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(Chandara Meas) When I came to the States,
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I don't have no relatives in here,
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so I don't speak that much English,
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so I gotta start to learn English
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and start to work to support myself...
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and I don't have chance
to go back to college,
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so I ended up
at a donut shop right now.
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Most Cambodians who take us,
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they own a donut shop,
they run a donut business...
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[Congratulations on your new shop Bong!
Wish you all the best!]
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Yeah, you know, it's hard to do it,
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not many people want to do that job
as I'm doing right now.
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[Countless Cambodians were tortured]
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[and more than a million were killed]
under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime.]
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[More than a million Cambodians fled
and became refugees.]
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From 1975 to 1979,
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there's the Khmer Rouge ran by Pol Pot.
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At that time I was 10 years old,
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I still remember when they tortured...
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a lot of people dying
by starving and sickness...
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most of them were killing people.
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That was a hard time
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and that was the worst thing
that happened in the world.
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Most Cambodians escaped from the war
in 1981after the Khmer Rouge regime,
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and when they started to come here,
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people don't speak that much English,
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so that's why they started
working at donut shops
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because most of them what they do
are family business --
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This is my wife's nephew.
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He just came
to the United States last year.
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He came in a special case
they call "Lottery Visa".
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He's a lucky one
that won a lottery green card.
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The business we just opened--
it is kind of slow, it's brand new.
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Hopefully, we can own it
for a long time until we get...
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you know, some profit...
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to take care of my family, my kid...
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go to school, go to college...
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I have a beautiful kid.
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It's like, if you work for a company,
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you have a different schedule
than the donut people.
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The donut people, we wake up
at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning,
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and we'll be done by 12:00 or 1:00 o'clock
and take a couple-of-hours-nap
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and, you know, get together and then,
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go to sleep, and wake up,
and go to make some more donuts!
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(man singing Karaoke in Cambodian)
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[Tao Ngo Vietnamese Restaurant
North Houston]
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[Cambodian Karaoke Party]
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(end of singing)
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Yeah, we like to get together
because, you know,
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we work seven days a week.
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You know, some wake up at one,
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some of us wake up at two,
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some of us at three...
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and we work seven days a week,
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you know, this is the only fun
that we have.
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♪ Cambodian music ♪
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I would say 95% of the donut shops
in Texas, not just in Houston,
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in Texas is Cambodian-people-owned.
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One one-big -family, that's all.
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♪ Cambodian music ♪
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[Second Generation Donut Shop Owner]
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[Roth's parents, sisters, aunts,
and uncles all own donut shops.
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My parents bought the store in 1994.
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They would always bring us on weekends
because we have school on weekdays.
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I really dread waking up on the weekend
just to come make donut, you know.
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They told me one day
I'm going to own my business,
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and I kind of say
I didn't want to do this.
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This is not my first choice
of what I really wanted to do.
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For me, I thought going to school
was what I really wanted to do,
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I wanted to experience that life.
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One day I woke up and I realized
I didn't wanna work for somebody else.
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I called my mom and I told her
I wanted to come back home...
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and try this again,
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and she was very excited,
very happy for me
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that I can kind of woke up
and I wanted to do this.
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I get up at four o'clock,
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and my sisters,
they get up at about 2:00-2:30,
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they're closer to the plant
so they wake up earlier,
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to go to the plant and--
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I'm fortunate to have
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a little bit of both,
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so I can stay in bed a little longer
and they can--
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So when I first got to Houston
I didn't know--
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I thought my family was
the only one that's doing donuts.
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I come to find out
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a lot of Cambodian people
have done this way before we have...
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You know, it's like a community
of helping out each other, you know,
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like, people were telling each other
what can make you successful
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and I don't think anybody
was envious of each other,
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they just wanted to see
our culture succeed,
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and the donut business
is where it started
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for a lot of these Cambodian cultures.
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It's definitely a dream
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that a lot of people wanted
when they are in Cambodia,
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to have their own place.
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Back in Cambodia,
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it's a fast, fast-pace life.
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Every day is a struggle to find,
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you know, money and food for the family.
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It made me realized
what I have out here in America.
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As hard as I think I work down here,
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I think that they work harder over there
to make a smaller living.
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My first place when I came,
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I learned in the one Donald's Donut
on el Dorado in Webster.
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And then I breached it out to
a Yankee Doodle Donuts.
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And then, that's when I met David
on the El Dorado store.
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I was teaching him since he was young.
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I taught him probably
about five years, I believe.
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(David Buehrer) My name is David Buehrer
and this is Morningstar.
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[Houston coffee entrepreneur.]
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[Spent high school with Sam & Roth
working in the Ouch family donut shop.]
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(Uncle Sam) Most of the time
I don't ask for help but, you know--
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It surprises me it came up from David
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just to ask me to get into
a business partnership with him.
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(David B.) This is the first thing
I'd learned with--
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when I was in high school
was how to roll kolaches
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and Sam's family
they would let me roll a kolache
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and they would immediately
unroll the kolache,
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and then they would roll it again
to make sure it was perfect.
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And for like the first three
or four months of me working there
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they never served any of my kolaches.
(chuckles)
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One day they just saw one of them
and decided it was okay,
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and from then on,
they let me roll kolaches for them.
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But it took like months
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before they even serve
one of the kolaches that I rolled.
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It shows the attention to details,
a level of quality,
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and maybe, I just needed to learn more.
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But it took months to learn
how to roll the kolaches right.
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(David B.) One of the things
we wanted to do with Morningtar
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is bring in the technique that we learned
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from the Cambodian donut shops
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and apply it to the foodie nature
that specialty copy exists in.
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We have a lot of bartenders, and chefs,
and sommelier friends,
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and a lot of our donuts
are inspired by them.
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Yeah, at one point in high school
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I was driving an hour
at two in the morning
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to go and learn how to make donuts
in Magnolia, Texas, with Sam.
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And then, an hour back,
and then go to school by 7:30...
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but, you know,
you do what you gotta do to learn.
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(Uncle Sam) In the nineties, you know,
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that's when the donuts started here
in Houston by the Cambodian community,
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and to now is a long time to me, like...
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we feel like, it needs change,
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it needs some time to change, you know.
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(Uncle Sam) And then,
all of a sudden one day,
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he said-- he calls me pou
--which is Cambodian like, uncle--
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and he said, "Would you like to do
a donut shop and a coffee together?"
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I said, "Sure",
you know, I never expected it.
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In the future,
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the new generations
they know that I own this store
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and they want to do something like this.
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I don't want to do
the same thing every day.
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Especially, when doing it
for almost 20 years.
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You're doing the same thing every day,
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and to me, I wouldn't want to go back
and do the same shop
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like a mom-and-pop shop.
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This is the shop that I want to do
as the next one...
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and the next one,
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and the next one...
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People have no idea
what go into a single donut here.
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English subtitles by
Jenny Lam-Chowdhury