Creator

Chantha Nguon

Cambodian memoirist and cook who reconstructs family Khmer recipes alongside an account of exile and return.

Chantha Nguon is a Cambodian cook and writer who wrote the memoir Slow Noodles with Kim Green and co-founded the Stung Treng Women's Development Center.[1][2] She spent two decades as a refugee before returning to Cambodia, and as of 2024 she lived in Phnom Penh.[2][3]

Life

Nguon is Cambodian Vietnamese and grew up in Battambang in the 1960s.[3][4] Anti-Vietnamese tensions in Cambodia drove her to Saigon as a child, in 1970 by some accounts and 1971 by others.[5][6][3] She lived through the last years of the Vietnam War in Saigon. The Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975 kept her from going home.[3] She stayed in Saigon for 14 years, through hunger and hardship, and then reached a refugee camp in Thailand after several attempts.[5]

She lived in refugee camps for about ten years. To get by in exile she cooked in a brothel, served drinks in a nightclub, sold street food, made tofu, worked as a suture nurse and wove silk.[5][1][3] In the camps she saw brutality against women in the sex trade and came close to starving.[5] When her hopes of refuge in the West did not come true, she was repatriated to Cambodia.[7][5]

Stung Treng Women's Development Center

In 1995 Nguon settled in Stung Treng, where she worked for Doctors Without Borders with HIV-positive sex workers. When the project ended in 2000, she looked for a way to keep helping the women.[3] She co-founded the Stung Treng Women's Development Center, a social enterprise that gives living wages, education and social services to women and their families in rural northeastern Cambodia.[2] The center serves women who have never been to school. It teaches literacy, weaving, hygiene, family planning and other life skills.[3] Its women weave silk scarves on hand looms, sold worldwide under the name Mekong Blue, which Nguon also co-founded and for which she is the public face.[7][8][1]

Nguon credits the center's work with less domestic violence, smaller families and more school attendance among the women's children.[3] She has said she chose to work with unschooled women because she had known the same vulnerability and knew how to get past it.[3] She has also said that moving from hunger to self-reliance takes a long time, and that rebuilding a society traumatized by genocide takes many generations.[5]

Slow Noodles

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes, written with Kim Green, was published by Algonquin Books in February 2024.[2][9] It follows her childhood in Battambang, her years in Saigon and the camps, and her return, with more than 20 family recipes woven through the story.[1] The recipes include sour chicken-lime soup, green papaya pickles, pâté de foie, Khmer curries, stir-fries and handmade bánh canh noodles.[2] The book tells how her mother's recipes helped the family through poverty and genocidal violence.[10] Some of its recipes are metaphors that comment on the Khmer Rouge years and what followed.[5] Green traveled with her through markets across Cambodia for the book.[6]

Slow noodles are a soup of thick rice noodles, a favorite dish of Nguon and her mother. She rolls each noodle by hand, about 30 seconds each, which makes it firmer.[3][6] The slow work of making them is her philosophy for rebuilding a life after loss, and she has taught it to the women at the center.[3][5] She has said that remembering the food of her childhood helped her survive hunger in the jungle and in Vietnam, and that she wanted to show Cambodia as more than its worst years.[8] Her own comfort food is sach kaw pong thea, braised pork belly and eggs.[3] Publishing the book connected her with the Khmer community in the United States.[3]

Cooking and speaking

Nguon cooks for friends and private events. She is a home cook and memoirist, not a professionally trained chef.[1] In June and July of 2018 she taught a dozen cooking classes in home kitchens in Nashville, sharing her mother's favorite dishes and stories of refugee life.[7] She speaks often in public and has appeared at universities and on radio and television news programs, including NPR's Morning Edition.[11] In 2024 she spoke about the book on Nashville Public Radio.[12]

Recognition

  • Longreads Best Personal Essay, for an excerpt from Slow Noodles published in Hippocampus (2021)[2]
  • Food & Wine, Favorite Food Books of 2024[2]
  • Smithsonian Magazine, Best Books about Food of 2024[2]
  • Memoir Magazine Memoir Prize, Food category (2025)[2]
  • Most anticipated books of winter 2024: San Francisco Chronicle, Reader's Digest, Parade, Publishers Weekly and Zibby Mag[2]

Works


See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Slow Noodles, official book site
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 Hachette Book Group, Slow Noodles by Chantha Nguon and Kim Green
  3. ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 JoySauce, For Chantha Nguon, 'Slow Noodles' are a way of life (June 12, 2024)
  4. ↑ Slow Noodles, About the book
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 The Banner, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes (May 10, 2024)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Condé Nast Traveler, Women Who Travel podcast: Love, loss, and noodles in Cambodia (March 21, 2024)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Slow Noodles, More Love for Slow Noodles (February 15, 2019)
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Nashville Scene, 'Slow Noodles' details resilience, family recipes and a life rebuilt
  9. ↑ Publishers Weekly, Review of Slow Noodles
  10. ↑ Publishers Weekly, Slow Noodles (2023)
  11. ↑ Slow Noodles, About Chantha Nguon
  12. ↑ WPLN Nashville Public Radio, Slow Noodles: how the best dishes take time and show Cambodian resilience (June 17, 2024)
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This page was last edited on 26 September 2026, at 23:31.