Hong Chhuor is the oldest brother of the Chhour family and co-owner of King’s Donuts located on Rainier Avenue in Seattle, WA. Along with his mother, Kim Sok, and brother, Travis Chhour, the family carries forth the legacy of King Donuts as a community-hub for the past 30+ years. King Donuts’ community-centered history rallied families and businesses together facing the loss of space through redevelopment as a combined doughnuts, teriyaki, and laundry spot in Rainier Beach in 2003. The Chhour family maintained the combined business for a few years until raising costs paired with the pandemic took place and the family decided to focus solely on doughnuts beginning in August of 2021. Still, the shop continues to welcome Rainier Beach regulars, including families with groups of kids, African-American elders, and Filipino retirees who stop in for daily doughnuts and (prior to the pandemic,) for games and cards, making the dining room their living room.

The Chhour family come from a long line of doughnut shops. Hong’s parents are Chinese refugees from Cambodia who fled in the 1980s during the Khmer Rouge. Many Cambodian refugees in California and along the west coast were welcomed into a community of support in the doughnut shop business that was inspired by a refugee named Tony Ngoy, now known as the “Doughnut King.”

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My name is Hong Chhuor and I am the oldest son of five Chhour boys total and I am part of the family that owns and operates King Donuts in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle.

How long has your family been in this area?

My family has been in the Rainier Beach area for a relatively short amount of time. We bought a house down here four years ago. We feel so fortunate that we were able to really sneak in when the real estate market was conducive to folks who were looking to just get their foot in the door in terms of buying their first home. And at the time we moved down here we weren't necessarily thinking about King Donuts as a business opportunity but it became an opportunity for us and we leapt right in.

I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about the role that food has played in your family's life. Specifically, when were you introduced to food, when did you kind of have that spark of maybe cooking, sharing food or sweets?

My family, we are Chinese-Cambodian and I would say that food is an important part of many different people's cultures and traditions and if you're speaking just about the Chinese-Cambodian aspect of it, I guess my mother engages in behavior that really is... How do I describe it. she is the perfect Chinese mom. Some folks use the concept of a love language and for her it's food. So she is constantly asking me if I have food to eat and if I am hungry and have I eaten yet? If you're familiar with Chinese culture, you'll know that that's kind of a common way to check in with someone is just to ask, have you eaten yet?

Food has been an essential part of my life, not just from the biological and physiological standpoint but from just the relationship standpoint as well.

My mother made it a point to cook for the whole family and we would have family dinners every night when I was growing up. And this was amazing to me because she would do this after an entire day's worth of work. And then the other thing she managed to do, because we grew up in a multicultural family between my father who absolutely required having rice at every meal to my younger brothers who had only known life as Americans where they just want fried chicken or chicken nuggets or french fries or something, and my father wouldn't touch that. So my mother would have to make two, sometimes three meals just to make sure that she fed everyone.

At what age did your interest in food begin?

It's hard to really pinpoint because food, as I've shared, has been such an integral part of my identity. When we would talk about celebrations, let's just take Lunar New Year as an example. I would just come to expect that there would be certain foods on the table. I would smell roast duck or chicken, smell of noodles. The smell of even something as subtle as lotus seeds which a lot of people may not know what the smell of candied dehydrated lotus seed smells like, but I do. Watermelon seeds, for example. Those have a smell as well. And I came really to think about food as it was connected to how we make meaning in our lives.

And so as I got older and started to try to branch out beyond what the things I was familiar with in terms of... My go-to cooking technique is stir frying because that's what my mother taught me. But as I grew older, I really came to see... I shouldn't even say much older. I would say one of the things that is really unique to me and my family is just the fact that we are an immigrant family. And so we're talking today, a little less than a week away from Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving presents a really interesting look into the dynamics and history of my family because as I was growing up an immigrant child, we didn't have the expectation that Christmas and Thanksgiving and New Years and the Fourth of July and Labor Day would all look the same. Each of those holidays in the U.S. tradition celebrates the food in a different way. You think turkey at Thanksgiving. You think maybe goose at Christmas. You think barbecues for Labor Day and the Fourth of July, Independence Day. And for me, I would say my mom has never learned how to cook turkey.

And so as I was growing up I said, "I want turkey at Thanksgiving." I want any number of different things that were associated with American traditional holidays. And my mother said, "If you want it, then you go do it." So here I am. I don't know how old I was when I first cooked Thanksgiving for the whole entire family but I do recall when I was in high school that not really having been trained and taught again by the people passing on the traditions of the people who came along before you, I was very bad at timing.

So I would start cooking and I recall at least one time where I didn't finish cooking until around close to midnight on Thanksgiving evening and my family were very gracious, they still stayed up and took a few bites even though they had already eaten dinner because they were starving by the time I was done. Or they were starving even before I was done and they ate some food but they still ate some of what I cooked just to be supportive, I guess. And so I would say that over the years, as I had access to more information and tools and other people, I was able to learn more like, "Oh, these are the things that someone would have taught me as I was growing up with that tradition."

And I would say now, since we started operating King Donuts, we live in a multi generational household again where my mother lives there, my brother lives there, I live there, the kids live there. And so we have quite the eclectic range of things that show up in our meals, and simply because we spend a lot of time at King Donuts and we don't always have a lot of time to cook together.

And then, I don't know how to talk about this but we live in a world where we just have maybe more awareness about food sensitivities and allergies and such, and so growing up I always had the simple narrative that my brothers were finicky and picky eaters but now we understand that there are certain foods that my brother can't eat because he has adverse reactions to them. Or I can't eat because I have adverse reactions to them. And so we're just at a place where we do the best we can with the time constraints that we have and the dietary restrictions that we have. And sometimes we have fun with it as well and just say tonight is a pizza night.

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You said a little bit about the journey to King Donuts. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more in detail of how this all came about?

One of the defining characteristics, I think, of immigrant families and their children is that they find themselves thrust into a society and an environment where they have to really adapt to succeed, to really be integrating into their new communities.

And they have to because whatever job they did, whatever life they had before they arrived in this country is most likely not available to them. Even if you had training as a medical doctor in your home country, even if you had training as an architect in your home country, the U.S. system doesn't recognize these credentials in the same kind of way.

And that is just what we're seeing in more recent times. When my family arrived in the U.S. in the 1980s and we were part of a steady... I shouldn't even say steady. We were part of a massive influx of immigrants and refugees from Southeast Asia because of the conflicts in the 1970s and '80s. And we landed in Los Angeles when I was about three and found ourselves really dependent upon the public systems. We went to food banks. We had what was called food stamps at the time, or EBT, SNAP benefits now. And my mother didn't drive and my father was the only person who worked.

So we were in many ways in the 1980s just a representative like any other family where oftentimes you only had one income earner. And they had no skills because my father grew up as I hear told, my father grew up tending to animals and herding them. And my mother was part of a merchant family living in the capital. And so between them their educations were interrupted. They were both swept up into the Khmer Rouge reeducation camps without having completed even elementary education. And so when they arrived in this country they didn't have the skills needed to really make it work.

And so we have this really interesting series of stories across immigrant groups in this country, especially in the Asian community, where you might find yourself wondering, why is it that so many dry cleaners are owned by Koreans, and why is it that so many nail salons are operated and owned by Vietnamese people? There's a story behind why so many Cambodian-Chinese families own donut shops in Southern California and in Los Angeles. If you're familiar with the documentary, The Donut King...

I would recommend checking out this documentary called The Donut King because the story of Ted Ngoy is essentially the story of my family. Who else would sign up for a job where you are isolated for hours and hours on end because you start at two o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the morning frying up batter and rolling out dough. And really the day ends when people are getting up, for you. And you don't get to see your family because they're part of the regular crew of people who start going to school as soon as you're getting home. And so my father, I'm not quite sure how he got connected with donuts, making donuts as a means of livelihood, but that's what he did.

He made donuts. And I remember as a child waking up to a box of donuts that he would bring home and that smell. That smell of donuts is just something that instantly transports me back to my childhood. So we kind of bumped along, I recall, for about... When was the first donut shop?

My family's first donut shop was in a strip mall in Los Angeles. And it was called Perfect Donuts and I think I must have been about 9 or 10 at the time. And so it was a joint operation between my father and mother and my aunt and uncle. And so we did that for maybe four or five years before we moved up to Washington.

Los Angeles, even at the time, was a rough place to grow up and I would say that one of the instigating events that occurred for us to leave sooner than later was that my mom was held at knife point. And I remember her coming home one day with stitches across her neck and I said, "What's going on and what happened?" And it was only later that I found out that she had been robbed when she was at the shop by herself. And so we settled in Bellevue, actually up here in Washington. And for a while we struggled to find our way next.

My mother started a house cleaning business, and my father started a landscaping business and the two of them just made it work for the time that I was in middle school and high school. When I was in college, they decided to take a risk to open up their second shop. But it wasn't here in Washington. They moved to a small town in Texas called Marshall, population about 30,000, to pursue their own business again in the form of a second donut shop. I shouldn't say second because it wasn't like we held onto the first one that we left in Los Angeles. We sold the remaining shares to my uncle and then we packed up and moved. But we opened up a new shop...

When you make plans as an entrepreneur, you really have to be open to opportunity and to what the world presents to you in terms of here's the opportunity that we have right now. And so they found a building in a neighboring town... I struggle to call it a town because they probably had 1,300 people that lived in this place, in Jefferson, I could be misremembering that but it was a very small community. And they found a shop that used to be something probably like an old Dairy Queen. It had one of those red metal roofs and it was like a square. It had a drive-through and that building became Star Donuts, the second donut shop. And that's where my brothers grew up.

They grew up in this town of Marshall and they worked at the donut shop in Jefferson, and they were probably one of 10 to 20 Asian families in the area so that meant that my brothers grew up working at the shop, behind the counter, making donuts, and that was the story of our second donut shop.

And so, we have a long and special history with donuts as a means for us to find our way in this world and to provide for the things that we want in life simply because my parents didn't have the education, they didn't have the foothold that many Americans start with. They didn't even have a public education and so without language skills, without even having someone ever taught them something as simple as writing a check or ordering things online. To this day I think my mom still doesn't even know how to turn on the computer. Anyway, this is all an aside.

So, four years ago when Raz, my husband and I, bought our home, we were fortunate enough to celebrate the upcoming marriage of my youngest brother and for that my mother flew into town. She was living in Jacksonville, North Carolina with my brother at the time, helping to take care of his young son. So she flew into town as well as my cousin, who is a co-owner of King Donuts. She and her mother, my aunt, flew into town to attend my brother's wedding in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. But they stayed with me up here, just up the hill from the shop. And while they were here they decided they would just make a trip of it.

I think they stayed for maybe a total of two months. During that time they just had an opportunity to see the city together and my mom, even when she lived here, spent most of our time working so there are many things in the city that she hasn't seen and done. One thing I forgot to mention that's really important here is that my cousin is a French national and so is her mother. Earlier I talked about the story of the Chinese diaspora and spreading out to different parts of the world. Well, my part of the family ended up in the U.S. And my cousin's part of the family ended up in France. And then I have some other relatives who ended up in places like Japan.

So here is my cousin playing tourist in this city called Seattle, far, far away from home. She at the time had this strong desire to really want to come live here in the U.S., and she's a trained pastry chef. So she was trying to figure out how to combine her dreams of being a pastry chef but in the U.S. and so my mother being the opportunist that she was, said, "Well, why don't we figure it out together?" And so the two of them, along with my aunt, toured just different places in the city and they toured different donut shops because that's what my mother knew. And they stumbled upon this place in the Rainier Beach area just down the street from our home called King Donuts.

And the story goes, because I wasn't part of that, the story goes that they came in here and they spoke with the owner at the time and they were bantering back and forth and she said something along the lines of… the owner asked them, "Hey, you looking to buy?" And they said, "Well, maybe." And so one thing led to another and the original trip to join my brother's wedding then turned into a business venture. And so after what felt like a really short amount of time, we became the operators of King Donuts here in the Rainier Beach neighborhood.

And King Donuts has been on this block for over 30 years.

Yes. When we were deliberating amongst ourselves about whether King Donuts was the right choice for us to invest and plant our feet down and take on, I said to them that King Donuts is not just a turnkey business that we can walk into and buy and operate. It's not a Subway. We're not buying a franchise. King Donuts has a legacy and a history and a special place in the hearts of this community for, as you say, nearly three decades. And I said to them,

"If we take on King Donuts, I just want you to know that we're taking on a very important responsibility because of the place that it is and the special place in the hearts of the people who live here." And I said to my family, "We're going to be taking on that responsibility. I want you to know that."

I would say that as a resident of Seattle for a very long time and having seen the rapid pace of change in many parts of the city, I would say that I felt that more keenly than my cousin from France who has no connection to the region. And I see that more keenly than my mother who just doesn't understand the kind of emotions that people have in connection to their sense of place here in the Pacific Northwest in particular. I think it's a very unique kind of connection to the land and to the communities. And her experience of having been displaced and pursuing opportunities where they lie, for her it was just a different way of thinking about things than I have.

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You mentioned a bit about how you've taken on King Donuts, that legacy that you are perpetuating in this neighborhood, in the true customers, and your own legacy within your family with the younger generation that you have coming up too. I'd wonder if you could speak a little bit about, to close out here, around that idea of legacy and the legacy that your family is perpetuating?

It's really interesting that you asked me about this word legacy. We live in a world that is fast-paced and hyper-connected and seems to be moving at a pace that is just a blur. And in our conversation we've talked about some themes like opportunity. And we talked about themes about adaptability and just making things work.

I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about the role that food has played in your family's life. Specifically, when were you introduced to food, when did you kind of have that spark of maybe cooking, sharing food or sweets?

My family, we are Chinese-Cambodian and I would say that food is an important part of many different people's cultures and traditions and if you're speaking just about the Chinese-Cambodian aspect of it, I guess my mother engages in behavior that really is... How do I describe it. she is the perfect Chinese mom. Some folks use the concept of a love language and for her it's food. So she is constantly asking me if I have food to eat and if I am hungry and have I eaten yet? If you're familiar with Chinese culture, you'll know that that's kind of a common way to check in with someone is just to ask, have you eaten yet?

Food has been an essential part of my life, not just from the biological and physiological standpoint but from just the relationship standpoint as well.

My mother made it a point to cook for the whole family and we would have family dinners every night when I was growing up. And this was amazing to me because she would do this after an entire day's worth of work. And then the other thing she managed to do, because we grew up in a multicultural family between my father who absolutely required having rice at every meal to my younger brothers who had only known life as Americans where they just want fried chicken or chicken nuggets or french fries or something, and my father wouldn't touch that. So my mother would have to make two, sometimes three meals just to make sure that she fed everyone.

We started our conversation this morning and we had a young girl came in with her family. She was probably about two and her eyes were just wide at this case. Every week, almost every day but that would be a stretch, we have customers who come in and say to us that we are so glad that you're here. I remember coming to King Donuts when I was my daughter's age. And it used to be what I did with my mother or my father or my grandfather or whoever. And as a longtime resident of Seattle I lament the loss of places that have meaning, places that have history, places that are connected to the communities in which they operate in ways that extend beyond what is the coolest new thing that I can put on Instagram?

And King Donuts, when we were able to allow seating within our walls, was a gathering place. On a weekend day it would be bustling with a group of Filipino seniors sitting in a corner over there catching up with each other. And then they would be sitting just feet away from a group of older African-American men who would just be checking in. We would see families that came in for their weekend donut outings before they went to something like Kubota Gardens, for example. We would see residents who are on their way to their jobs, say downtown, before they caught the bus.

And so we would just see a very rich and just very diverse range of people and faces come through the doors. And as I think about my time in Seattle, and as I think about all the different things that make this city unique and that kind of highlight and help tell the stories of the communities here.

It's hard to find something that is like King Donuts where you walk into a place and you see the same lady behind the counter who doesn't seem to sleep or eat, and then she becomes the neighborhood's grandma. That's not something that you can find everywhere across this city in particular. And so when we talk about this idea of legacy, it's both a blessing and a responsibility.

We know that on the one hand if we keep our doors open and we keep on persevering and we keep on making donuts, people will come and buy them. And then at the same time we say just tremendous support for us as a family and as a business in the pandemic. We had on more than one occasion different community groups or not even groups, I would just say different individuals who are part of our orbit who would rally their neighborhoods, who would rally their friends and their family to buy a lot of donuts from us just so that they can be sure that we're going to make it, that we were going to make it through the pandemic.

And so that's something that's special and unique and just so amazing about King Donuts and businesses like ours in that they are a place of true connection, they are a place of meaning, and the ability for them to really bring people together is truly special and unique and hard to find these days.

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Thank you so much for sharing so much of the story, the history, the legacy of not only the food and the ingredients that go into it but a community hub, a community keystone that is King Donuts. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you'd like to share that perhaps we didn't touch on?

I think the only thing I would want to talk about is that we spent a lot of time talking about King Donuts as a place that pulls people in but the other side of that is that the people who come here and the communities that support the business are truly what keeps it going. So I think I just want to make sure I extend my gratitude to the people who value places like King Donuts and continue to visit it, and really to see the folks who are working behind the counter, my family, as people. And really to those folks who come and make King Donuts possible, thank you.

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Listen to the full interview below:

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