Cambodian couple finds new home for 41st Donut House

09/22/2009
By JONDI GUMZ
Santa Cruz Sentinel (California, USA)

41ST AVE DONUT HOUSE
WHAT: Doughnuts, 75 cents each, $8 per dozen; Farmers Brothers coffee, small, $1, medium, $1.25, large, $1.50.
OWNER: Keang Siv Lim and Hour Chiv
LOCATION: 1601Q 41st Ave., Capitola, King's Plaza shopping center
HOURS: 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days a week.
INFORMATION: 464-9599

CAPITOLA -- It cost a lot of dough -- close to $100,000 -- to move the 41st Ave. Donut House across the street.

Keang Siv Lim and Hour Chiv, who have been in the doughnut business locally for 23 years, discovered the exhaust hood and fan would not fit through the door of their new smaller location in the King's Plaza shopping center.

That didn't stop them.

They paid a contractor to cut a hole in the roof and use a crane to set the equipment in place. When they opened for business Monday morning, they were all smiles.

"First day," said Lim, handing over a doughnut and coffee to Marshall Jones, who lives nearby.

Jones, 68, admitted, "I'm a doughnut lover."

Lim, 61, and her husband Chiv, 62, are Cambodian natives of Chinese descent. They lived near the Thai border and made a living selling merchandise at a local marketplace until their country was taken over in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge.

They lost everything.

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 and fought off the Khmer Rouge, the couple escaped and spent two years in a refugee camp in Thailand. After another six months in a refugee camp in the Philippines, Lim and her husband, their five children, including one born in the refugee camp, and Lim's mother were allowed to resettle in the United States.

They arrived in November 1982.

The couple found work at a garment factory in Los Angeles, then in 1986 got an opportunity in Santa Cruz.

Cambodian who had purchased Ferrell's Donuts on Mission Street offered them jobs.

Lim took care of customers at the counter; her husband made the doughnuts, a job for early risers.

They learned the business, and in 1989, bought the shop. Two years later, they bought another doughnut shop on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz and changed the name to Ferrell's.

Their friend Yong Sip said most of the doughnut shops locally are owned by Cambodians.

That is true across California, according to Henry Chen, who married Lim and Chiv's second oldest daughter, Lena.

"When we first arrived, we were very hungry for the opportunity to succeed and bring about a better life for ourselves and our families," Chen said. "Most of us knew very little English."

For that reason, the seven-day-a-week doughnut business was a very good fit.

In the mid-1980s, it was not uncommon to find a Cambodian baker working in a doughnut shop at night, training four or five of his friends, Chen recalled. Most of these friends went on to become bakers themselves, and they in turn taught others.

Chen, for example, has a doughnut shop in Alameda.

He also has an expresso shop in Pacifica, managed by the youngest of Lim and Chiv's children, who was born in America.

That's another family tradition: Having the children help out at the doughnut shop.

After the children were on their own, Lim and Chiv downsized, selling the two Santa Cruz shops and buying 41st Ave Donut.

When Goodwill bought the shopping center where they were located for the Shoreline cosmetology school, they were not ready to retire.

They found space at the Kings Plaza shopping center owned by the Ow family.

Patriarch George Ow Jr., whose father immigrated to America at 16, is impressed by their resilience.

"They are grandparents and still working longer and harder than most 20- to 30-year-olds," he said. "Definitely the American work ethic."