“And they couldn’t speak English,” Huynh recalled. But, she said, they became friends with a woman on the factory floor who she now considers to be their grandmother. “my abuelita, Nelly Pavone was the production manager and stood up for my parents and helped them out. My mother called her “Mama.” She was our Mexican grandmother and she called us Chinese, or grandchildren. ”
Pavone noticed Huynh’s artistic talent from an early age and encouraged her parents to send her to art school, Huynh said. Currently, she is an associate professor of art at Los Angeles Valley College, and she is also an artist in residence at Los Angeles Valley College. Los Angeles County Immigration Department. She is especially proud that her own work has been exhibited in numerous public facilities in her city, from the Los Angeles Zoo to the USC Medical Center of Los Angeles County.
Phung Huynh’s parents eventually started their own business with support from the community. Artists want to celebrate their resilience, courage, and entrepreneurial spirit. Still, she has no interest in perpetuating a glossy, mythologized version of the American Dream.
“There’s a lot of conflict and pain,” she says of the Ku-American immigrants who started small businesses. “I feel like there’s a lot of guilt for a lot of survivors, especially survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide. There’s a lot of guilt for being able to leave their families behind and come to America. There are many families who could not come to their hometowns.”
Meanwhile, the children who grew up in these donut shops were ridiculed and harassed by their peers because they couldn’t afford after-school care, Huynh said. Recently, a donut shop family she knows was threatened by white supremacists at their store.
“We are less than a generation away from experiencing the kind of intergenerational trauma that our brothers and sisters in Ukraine and Afghanistan are experiencing now,” she says. But donuts are important. Even if it’s just a short-term pleasure. That’s what trauma teaches us. Similarly, joy and joy are fundamental. ”