Chantha Nguon
Chantha Nguon and Kim Green are the authors of the new book Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes. Nguon is the co-founder of the Stung Treng Women's Development Center, which helps Cambodian women. She lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Kim Green is a writer and public radio producer based in Nashville.
Q: What inspired the two of you to write Slow Noodles?
A: The idea grew out of a feature Kim wrote in 2011 for a local women’s magazine. The piece focused on Chantha’s nonprofit, the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center, and her partnership with a Nashville-based philanthropist named Ann Walling, who has been a loyal supporter and donor since the center’s early days.
After the article came out, Ann Walling asked Kim to consider a bigger writing project. Kim agreed, and in 2012 she made the first of three trips to Cambodia to interview Chantha.
Kim Green
On that initial trip, Chantha and Kim shared lots of meals together and settled on the theme and structure of the memoir: Instead of focusing only on loss and tragedy, we hoped to also zoom in on resourcefulness and hope, and to pay tribute to Chantha’s mother and sister by highlighting their artistry in the kitchen.
Including those remembered meals and recovered recipes would also give Chantha a way to pass on that culinary heritage — not only to her children, but to the next generation of Cambodians and diasporic Khmers.
Q: The poet Maggie Smith said of the book, “In this harrowing, wise, and fiercely feminist memoir, cooking is a language--of love, remembrance, and rebellion--and stories are nourishment.” What do you think of that description?
A: First of all, it’s an incredible honor. We are huge admirers of Maggie Smith’s work, so these words mean so much coming from her.
Also, we agree: there are many harrowing events in Chantha’s life story, and that makes her wisdom stand in even starker relief.
The Auschwitz survivor and Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote movingly about this kind of extremely hard-won wisdom, the power of individual choices in the worst of circumstances, and the moral courage required to resist giving in to despair.
In her memoir, you can see how Chantha faces a series of increasingly agonizing decisions; but even as her options narrow, she chooses humanity and positive action again and again.
At each crossroads, she relies on the values she learned from her mother and sister. Often, that means cooking as an expression of love and care, or as a survival skill, or simply as a way to honor her forebears.
Over time, we see another quality emerging: that staunch feminism Maggie Smith mentions in the quote. Born out of those lessons in “silken rebellion” that Chantha absorbs from her mother, that rebellious seed slowly blooms into a new understanding of what female strength can look like.
It’s a feminism forged by fire, and it informs everything in her postwar life, including her mission of helping rural Cambodian women pull themselves out of poverty and hunger.
So yes, Slow Noodles is Chantha’s recipe for learning to live again after devastating losses; and cooking is, for her, a way to remember her childhood kitchen, resist despair, and love the people she feeds — and ultimately, herself.
Most of all, we are so grateful to Maggie Smith for reading Chantha’s memoir and offering her beautiful words about the book.
Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: In our discussions, Chantha often reflected on her work with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and shared her perspectives on the wider aid and development community that helped Cambodia rebuild in the postwar years.
Some projects, she felt, were essential and well-run (like MSF); others seemed hasty and poorly conceived. Whenever she described the latter category, Chantha called it “instant noodles” aid — slapdash quick fixes that blew through money but wouldn’t lead to meaningful, lasting improvements in people’s lives.
To her, “slow noodles” aid means understanding what a community truly needs and engaging fully with it long-term to help fulfill those needs.
Meanwhile, as we cooked meals together, Chantha talked about her mother’s fervent belief that preparing complicated dishes from scratch — even to the point of grinding rice flour herself to make rice noodles — was the only proper way to cook.
“My mother would not approve,” Chantha told Kim one day as they were rolling out dough and cutting rice noodles with scissors for her mother’s famous bobor bánh canh. To do it properly, Chantha explained, you could NOT use scissors; you had to roll out each noodle by hand, no matter how long it took.
We started to call this cooking philosophy the “slow noodles” way — this idea that the best meals require lots of time, care, and love.
Over time, we began to see that her mother’s “slow noodles” philosophy in the kitchen had become Chantha’s philosophy of life — the idea that doing anything truly meaningful and lasting requires a huge investment in time and care.
It’s a philosophy that applies to cooking, aid work, rebuilding a country devastated by war, and spending more than a decade writing a book together.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: It required incredible courage for Chantha to face her past and share these stories with Kim. She was also very anxious about sending her private histories into the world.
In Cambodia, people don’t usually talk about that part of the past — she says speaking publicly about your pain is akin to lifting your shirt to show your scars.
But over time, Chantha and Kim saw that the memories flowed out more easily and naturally when they were cooking or eating together, so we focused more on chatting over meals and less on formal interviews.
Eventually, Chantha began to feel that each time she spoke a terrible memory out loud, it felt slightly less painful than the time before.
In the moment, it always hurt her to remember. But over time, she found that telling the stories helped her begin to heal. Otherwise, Chantha says, the memories would stay buried inside like a land mine that might one day explode.
As she said in a virtual bookstore interview earlier this year, “I would strongly recommend people who lived in trauma, like myself, should say it out. And we need someone to listen. That’s more important than saying it out … But once you start it, you can continue, until you can release your pain, and partly let it go. Because it’s not going to go away.”
As for Kim: Spending more than a decade getting to know Chantha and her daughter Clara like family, learning to cook Cambodian food with them, and being trusted to help write Chantha’s life story has been the greatest honor of her life.
We hope readers will take away the idea that losing everything isn’t the end of their story. Chantha’s history is full of pain and tragedy, but it’s also full of resilience, hope, purpose, and love. This book is for anyone who has endured trauma and loss, struggled with despair, and wondered how to begin again.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: We’re catching up on all the things in our normal work lives that we neglected during the exciting and hectic book launch season!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Only that Kim, Chantha, and Clara (who wrote the epilogue and narrated the audiobook) are grateful for your interest in Slow Noodles!
If you’d like to continue to engage with us, follow @slownoodles on Instagram or visit slownoodles.com, where we’ll post occasional recipes, cooking videos, and articles about Cambodian food, history, and culture. Thank you so much for featuring us on your site!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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