Bite The Hand That Feeds You presents new drawings, paintings, and sculptural installations centered on pink donut boxes—an iconic yet often overlooked artifact of Cambodian refugee labor in California and across the United States. Donut shops, frequently framed as success stories of refugee entrepreneurship, obscure the physical toll, racialized labor conditions, and intergenerational sacrifices that make such survival possible. Huynh reclaims the donut box as a charged container—one that holds sweetness alongside exhaustion, nostalgia alongside exploitation, and cultural memory alongside erasure. Rendered fragile, monumental, or emptied, these forms question who is feeding whom, who is consumed, and who is rendered disposable within capitalist and nationalist frameworks.

Food operates in Huynh’s work as a complex register of memory, intimacy, and obligation. Within refugee households, food is often the primary language of care, carrying histories of loss, adaptation, and survival across generations. Yet food is also labor—frequently feminized, racialized, and undervalued—performed under conditions shaped by displacement and economic precarity. In the context of anti-immigrant violence, this labor becomes even more precarious, as the threat of detention or deportation shadows everyday acts of survival. By invoking Cambodian-owned donut shops, Huynh situates food as both sustenance and site of struggle—where care persists despite systemic harm.

Huynh reconstitutes the well-known idiom “bite the hand that feeds you” as a powerful stance of both provocation and refusal. Reflecting on the context of the phrase’s original disciplinary tone, used to silence dissent, and maintain an expectation that refugees and immigrants accept rescue without complaint and perform gratitude in exchange for survival. This new body of work critiques U.S. foreign policy and refugee resettlement programs, exposing how state aid is often conditional and extractive. The metaphor collapses under the reality of anti-immigrant policies and the violence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which targets the very communities whose labor sustains the economy. The true “hand” is not the state, but immigrants, refugees, and undocumented workers whose labor undergirds entire industries. To bite, then, is not an act of ingratitude, but a refusal to accept exploitation disguised as opportunity.

Thus, Bite The Hand That Feeds You ultimately rejects the moral economy of gratitude imposed on refugees and immigrants. It insists instead on critique as a form of survival and care. To bite is to remember, to resist, and to expose systems that exploit while claiming benevolence. Huynh reframes feeding not as an act bestowed from above, but as labor performed from below—by those whose work sustains the nation even as they are targeted by it. In this reversal, the work asks us to confront an urgent truth: the hand that feeds has always been immigrant labor, and the violence against it is both systemic and self-destructive.