A survivor of the Khmer Rouge, Sovanna Chan raised her family in East Oakland, where she and her husband own a donut shop. In recent years, she’s also found stardom on social media.

Sovanna Chan piles slices of lemongrass, turmeric, and galangal in a heavy stone mortar, crushing them methodically with a pestle. A bright, earthy aroma fills her East Oakland kitchen.

“This is kroeung,” explains Chan. She adds shallots and plump cloves of garlic to the mix, continuing to smash them. “This lemongrass paste, you can also use for lemongrass chicken and soup, too.”

She is speaking to the two reporters in her house, but also to the nearly 200,000 people who follow her on TikTok, and the tens of thousands more on Instagram and YouTube. Young, old, local, international—they all tune in to watch Chan prepare Cambodian recipes through the mouthwatering videos she narrates in both English and her native language, Khmer.

Social media stardom has been a surprising later-in-life development for the 56-year-old former refugee who’s spent the past few decades raising children and working seven days a week in a donut shop on High Street. The new role has brought Chan immense joy, and a sense that she’s fulfilling a duty as a Khmer ambassador.

“I’m trying to spread my culture, my recipes, my language,” said Chan, “especially to the younger generation born in another country like my kids.” 

Chan was born in Battambang, in northwestern Cambodia. But when she was 7, the brutal Khmer Rouge regime took over and separated her family. Chan’s mother was taken to one village along with most of her children, while Chan was the only kid who was taken to another with her father. 

And he didn’t know how to cook.

“I’m the only one who step in,” Chan said. “Back then we didn’t have gas stoves. I learn how to start the fire, the smoke was in my eye, I was crying. I just saw what people do, I watched, and I learned from them.” 

After the Vietnamese army and Cambodian dissidents captured Phnom Penh in 1979, removing the Khmer Rouge from power, the family reunited at a refugee camp in Thailand. At another in the Philippines, Chan learned to read and write English. She’d need those skills at the Salt Lake City high school where she’d land in 1984, when her family was sponsored by the Mormon Church.

Pastry peddler to content creator

Throughout those tumultuous years, Chan continued to learn the cuisine of her home country from her mother and other women in her community. She continued to cook when she got married right out of high school, and when the newlywed couple moved to California, bouncing around Fresno, Long Beach, and Oakland, looking for work, living with relatives, and having four children of their own. 

In Oakland, they got jobs at a donut shop. This path was a common one for Cambodians in California at the time. So-called “Donut King” Ted Ngoy had spent the late 1970s through mid-1980s buying dozens of donut shops, often leasing them to Cambodian refugees. It’s estimated that, to this day, 80-90% of independent donut shops in the state are owned by Cambodians. 

About 20 years ago, the Chans got an opportunity to buy Dick’s Donuts on High Street, which is named after a previous owner.

The nondescript shop is a Laurel neighborhood staple. People stream in steadily to buy buttermilk bars, apple fritters, and paper cups of coffee. Chan is there every day, often as early as 4:30 a.m. Then she returns to the nearby home she shares with her husband, daughter, granddaughter, 15-year-old dog and 20-year-old fish, to film in the daylight.

In her succinct and pleasant videos, Chan carefully walks viewers through each ingredient in a recipe, holding the mouthwatering results up to the camera. Shooting on her iPhone in her modest kitchen, Chan has shared the magic behind dishes like grilled banana cakes, tom yum soup, Cambodian beef jerky, and her favorite, prahok ktiss, a pork dipping sauce. 

Videos on crowd-pleasers like chili oil, pickled garlic, and Thai iced tea have gone viral, the latter getting 5.8 million views and counting. Chan has increasingly shared sponsored content as well, hawking products from the TikTok shop, though she said she doesn’t make much money from it.

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/v2/7359328984879861022?lang=en-US&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.berkeleyside.org%2F2024%2F05%2F31%2Fsovanna-chan-tiktok-oakland-cambodian-food%3Ffbclid%3DIwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2SsZXjA9ymg_DLWgV0aCQHQ37zIobxY_WcLuc95H-Wa-mlExtantWeymk_aem_AbGQomqPerp1oX5UaAFlqy3_yz3VJHuamADrLYkVJ8ZEhR4ELZTeSLR3Xv4IWjvHMPbRh4EMjyBqcN67LxiVggDj&embedFrom=oembed

In 2015, Chan created a Facebook group for people to share Cambodian home cooking and gardening. She noticed the younger members would eagerly ask for recipes when others posted photos of dishes. Most people refused to provide them.

“They think it’s like a family secret,” Chan said. “It kind of make me feel bad. What if I don’t share? Cambodian authentic cooking will be disappeared.” 

Her son Vannara was the first to encourage his mom to post cooking videos. He’d moved away and was getting tired of calling her constantly to ask how his family could replicate her dishes. Why not start a YouTube channel?

“I say, ‘Buy me a ring light,’” Chan said, laughing as she recalled their conversation a few years back. 

“He say, ‘It’s a deal!’”

Then, a couple years ago, Chan’s niece introduced her to TikTok. 

Vannara Chan had primarily wanted the videos for his own use, but he knew the public would appreciate them too. “Honestly, I knew she would be a natural,” he said in an email. “She is loved by everyone she comes across.” He’s thrilled whenever a friend texts him because they’ve organically found one of her videos. 

“My wife would even have people at her job show her videos of this Cambodian lady,” he said. “She would yell, ‘That’s my mother-in-law!’… I am very proud of my mom and how far she has come, from Cambodian genocide survivor to social media famous.”  

Feeling the “strength of community” in Oakland and online

Comments under Chan’s videos are filled with gratitude: “Reminds me of home,” “I see my mom in you,” “Thank you aunty.” 

But the reaction hasn’t always been positive. When she first started posting videos in English only, viewers made fun of Chan’s language skills.

“I kind of feel offended and want to stop,” she said. “But what about the people who need my recipes? I need to keep going on.” 

Some American-born children of immigrants asked her to start speaking Khmer too, so they could begin to understand it. So she did. This time, the insults came from Cambodians. 

“They said, if you make Khmer food, why don’t you just speak Khmer? They don’t understand my intention to share,” Chan said.

Preserving and sharing her culture is of utmost importance to Chan, whose home is filled with ornate paintings and sculptures from Cambodia. She keeps her mother’s betel nut chewing set—called slaa mluu in Khmer—tucked away to show her children and grandchildren what older Cambodians used to do instead of smoke. In the kitchen hangs a poster for Sabaidee Fest, a Southeast Asian cultural event in Chino where Chan will host a cooking demonstration in June. On the counter, rice soaks in water colored pink by flower petals, destined for a dessert plate.

Most of the people who come into Dick’s for donuts have no idea about Chan’s alter ego as a content creator. But her followers now know about the shop, from videos she posted about a robbery there in April. A customer returned to the open store, stealing the cash register with $1,400 in it and damaging the display case. It was just the latest hit for a small business already struggling to recover from the pandemic.

In response to the incident, community members rallied in support of the Chans, shocking the owners by donating $5,000 to their crowdfunding campaign. A crew of Oakland firefighters paid them a visit, too. 

The robbery shook Chan, who already does her grocery shopping in San Leandro out of discomfort with the crime rate in parts of Oakland. But she takes fierce pride in her adopted hometown.

“I get some comments that say, ‘Get out of Oakland,’” Chan said. “But I don’t see Oakland as a threat. There’s more good people here than bad. Not only that, Oakland is one of my favorite spots. It has multicultural, everything is in Oakland. I feel the strength of community here.” 

Back to today’s menu.

It’s fish amok, a Cambodian national dish. Chan, in a colorful apron she sewed, blends red chilis with coconut milk, then stirs the mix into the kroeung paste she made earlier. 

Rock cod is chopped, spooned into the marinade, and cooked. Pre-soaked coconut shells are toasted over an open flame and turned into serving bowls.

To serve the rest of the dish, Chan yanks a massive banana leaf from a tree in her yard, stripping it into little squares. She folds them into little green boats, held together with toothpicks. (“Banana tree is very useful for Cambodian people—we use the leaf, fruit, and trunk,” she says.)

A naive reporter asks: “With hundreds of videos under your belt, will you run out of recipes to share soon?”

She looks like she’s trying not to laugh.

“There’s so many more,” she promises.