Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes
By Chantha Nguon with Kim Green
Recipe: How to Change Cloth into Diamond
“Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until on subsistence remains.”
Much has been written about the Holocaust in Europe during World War II, but not many books have been written about the holocaust that happened in Cambodia under the regime of the dictator, Pol Pot. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge informed the Cambodian people that they had no history. Cambodians were a new generation, starting from “Year Zero.” That’s the phrase Pol Pot invented to describe the annihilation of Cambodian culture and the birth of a new, revolutionary society, as his soldiers emptied the cities of people to replace civilization with an “Agrarian Paradise.” Historical records reveal that close to two million people, almost a quarter of Cambodia’s population, were annihilated during Pol Pot’s reign of terror.
In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone – her home, her family, her country – all but remembered tastes and aromas of her mother’s kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960’s Battamband, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers, and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. For two decades in exile, she survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture nurse, and weaving silk.
Nguon’s irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this lyrical memoir that includes more than twenty family recipes such as sour chicken-lime soup, green papaya pickles, and pate’ de foie, as well as Khmer curries, stir-fries, and handmade banh canh noodles. Through it all, re-creating the dishes from her childhood becomes an act of resistance, or reclaiming her place in the world, of upholding the values the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy, and of honoring the memory of her beloved mother whose “Slow noodles” approach to healing and cooking prioritized time and care over expediency.
Slow Noodles is an inspiring testament to the power of food to keep alive a refugee’s connection to her past and spark hope for a beautiful life.
Chantha Nguon was born in Cambodia and spent two decades as a refugee until she finally returned to her homeland. She is the co-founder, with her husband, of the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center, a social enterprise that offers a living wage, education and social services to women and their families in rural northeastern Cambodia. An excerpt from Slow Noodles in Hippocampus was named a Longreads Best Personal Essay in 2021. Today, Nguon lives in Phnom Penh, where she cooks often for friends, family, and for private events.
Kim Green is an award-winning writer and public radio producer and contributor based in Nashville. Her work has appeared in Fast Company, the New York Times, and on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Marketplace and The New Yorker Radio Hour. A licensed pilot, she was formerly a flight instructor.