Interesting. Most of the traveling I do for business in in CA or close to teh west coast so that would explain a lot. Still - a fair number of asian doughnut places in Michigan too
Ted Ngoy's story is almost unbelievable. From a fairytale romance to becoming a politically connected multi-millionaire to now being a homeless vagrant.
Check out how he met his wife:
He was born Bun Tek Ngoy. His mother raised him in a rural village near Cambodia's border with Thailand. He was Chinese Cambodian, part of a despised underclass.
In 1967, his mother sent him to study in Phnom Penh, the capital. At school, Ngoy fell in love from afar with a beautiful girl. Her name was Suganthini Khoeun. Her father was a high-ranking government official. Her brother-in-law, Sutsakhan Sak, was chief of police and would become, briefly, the country's president.
Suganthini's parents hoped she would marry well. Until then, she was kept sheltered. At 16, she had no friends, could not talk to boys and was forbidden to leave home alone.
Ngoy lived in an attic apartment a few blocks from the Khoeun family's mansion. The son of a peddler had no chance with such a girl, no right even to think of loving her. But one night, he had an idea.
He sat on the roof of his apartment and played his flute, the music sweeping over the neighborhood. Suganthini and her mother heard the music. Those are the sounds of a man in love, her mother said.
Ngoy wrote to her. I am the flute player, he said in a note passed through the family's maid. A week later, Suganthini wrote back, and the two began a secret correspondence. Ngoy asked to visit.
"I don't think you dare come to my room," she responded. Soldiers and dogs guarded the mansion. One night in a pouring rain, Ngoy scaled a coconut tree beside the wall surrounding her home. He cut his chest sliding under barbed wire. From the wall, he leaped onto the roof and crawled through an open window. Drenched and bleeding, he tiptoed into a hallway. He had to guess which room was hers.
He opened a door, and there she was.
Suganthini was terrified, but she let the stranger stay. For the next 45 days, he lived in her room. He slept under the bed and hid when the maids came to clean.
Late at night, Ngoy would put Suganthini on his back and climb down the roof, then down the coconut tree. They would speed through Phnom Penh on his motorcycle, the couple recalled. Before sunrise, they would climb back into her room.
One night under a full moon, they knelt and prayed. They pricked their fingers and squeezed drops of blood into a cup of water. They both drank and vowed to be faithful.
Eventually, her parents discovered Ngoy and threw him out. They arranged a meeting for the couple at a relative's house, where Ngoy was expected to formally end their romance. Her parents and cousins hid behind curtains so they could hear him break off the relationship.
Ngoy told Suganthini that he didn't love her. He was a fraud, he said.
Then he pulled a knife. That is a lie, he cried, and plunged the blade into his belly. Suganthini's father ran out from hiding and called an ambulance.
Suganthini's parents kept her locked in her room for days. Distraught, she took an overdose of sleeping pills and fell into a coma.
When the couple recovered, her parents finally allowed them to marry.
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