Of donuts and despots

Last week, the Register published a story that took me back to the place where I learned to love journalism.

In the Dec. 21 issue, staff writer Cristina DeLeon-Menjivar wrote about a vigil for homeless people who had died in Napa over the years. For four years, I did a similar, and similarly sad, story in San Francisco, for a now-defunct monthly called the Tenderloin Times. The TT was published on skid row in San Francisco in four languages: English, Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese.

The languages reflected the diversity of the notorious downtown neighborhood, home to a remarkable variety of down-and-outers, hustlers and immigrant families from Southeast Asia who packed into one-room apartments in the roughest corner of the city as their first stop in the United States.

The Times had initiated San Francisco's homeless death reporting a couple of years earlier, and then I had what turned out to be the good fortune as a journalist to participate. I combed through the San Francisco's coroner's records, looking for the reports on John Does and Jane Does and people who had no listed address at the time of their death, or whose addresses were the city's homeless shelters and seedy hotels that accepted city-sponsored vouchers for people who needed a place to sleep.

The lessons I learned on this project were many: About the way people live, about the real fabric of a city, about the personal, political and societal problems that create homelessness and too often leave people to die destitute and alone. I won't soon forget them.

But I learned a lot more at that newspaper, including the lesson I attribute to a group we called the Cambodian donut kings.

The Tenderloin Times office was just across Market Street from a hole-in-the-wall donut shop on Sixth St. between Market and Mission, perhaps the toughest block in the city. In talking to colleagues including Sopath Pak, who wrote and translated for the Times' Cambodian pages, I learned that the family running this donut shop -- and many other families like it --had remarkable stories of escape from the Khmer Rouge.

They had made it to our shores, acquired small donut shops and put the whole family to work pouring coffee, frying donuts and making small change as the first step in achieving the American dream. We wrote a story on the subject, and I spoke to a Cambodian immigrant who, at the time, ran several donut shops in the Sacramento area. Quite the entrepreneur, right?

In Cambodia, he said, he had been a high-ranking government worker before Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge toppled the government and began a reign of unimaginable terror. The donut king barely had escaped to a Red Cross camp in Thailand, and after long delays in difficult circumstances had made it to America.

What a journey: From a steady government job to a panicked run for his life to spending his mornings in donut shops in sleepy, sunny California suburbs.

One simply cannot imagine the sojourns of the people we meet. We journalists are fortunate to have such a window on the world.