Slow Noodle: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

As a refugee from war-torn Cambodia, Chantha Nguon lost everything and everyone—home, family and country—except the memories of her family’s food traditions. In the wake of the 1975 Khmer Rouge invasion, Nguon’s life spiraled from the comfort of her family home to the poverty and heartbreak of a refugee camp. Along the way, she survived by cooking food in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, selling street food and working as a suture nurse.

In 2001, having returned to her native northeastern Cambodia, Nguon founded the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center, a social enterprise teaching rural women to weave and sell their products to earn a living wage. The nonprofit was supported by a philanthropic Nashville family, who invited Nguon to Nashville in 2011 to share her story and introduce SWDC’s flagship brand, Mekong Blue, a gorgeous line of shimmering silk scarves and accessories.

That’s when Nguon met Nashville-based journalist Kim Green, who was writing a feature on Mekong Blue. Green recognized a much larger storytelling project, one that would capture a nation’s trauma in the culinary memories of a resilient survivor.

In 2012, Green traveled to Cambodia, where she befriended Nguon’s family and the proposal for Slow Noodles took shape. Over the years that Green and Nguon worked to find a publisher for the book, their friendship strengthened. Nguon’s daughter, Clara, helped Green capture the unwritten recipes of Nguon’s memories. And when Clara came to the U.S. for college, Green’s house in the 12 South neighborhood became a home away from home. The resulting collaboration is a unique overlap of skillful journalism and heartbreaking memory, weaving recipes into an inspiring narrative where the trauma of war meets the comfort of cuisine.

Find Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green, 2024, published by Algonquin Books, at local bookstores.