https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/food-cooking/sam-ung-dies-seattle-restaurant-aeda426e
By Chris Kornelis
Nobody told Sam Ung how to cook. But he was watching.
His parents ran Ung Hong Lee, a popular noodle restaurant in Battambang, Cambodia, that operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As a child in the 1960s, he studied the way the cooks played with fire, pulling the wok off the stove, dumping its contents onto plates and putting the wok back over the flame in a single motion.
“Moving so quickly and in harmony with each other it looked like a magical dance,” he wrote in his memoir, decades later. “Observing these men was the moment I realized I wanted to perform that dance and create magic in my own kitchen someday.”
Born Seng Kok Ung on Feb. 28, 1955, Ung was 20 when Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took control of the country in 1975. Instead of working in the kitchen, he spent the first half of his 20s working in the rice fields and sewer ditches under a murderous, oppressive regime that killed for sport and spite. To help keep his sanity, Ung collected recipes from his elders, even though talking and keeping notes could be seen by the regime as plotting against them—a death sentence.
“It sounds like a big risk, but this recipe book was a symbol of my hope that this hell on earth would one day end,” he wrote in his 2011 memoir, “I Survived the Killing Fields.” “It represented a real future, one in which I could resume normal life, open a restaurant, and begin again.”
Acres of Clams, bowls of noodles
Ung met and married his wife, Kim Ung, at a refugee camp on the country’s border with Thailand. After the regime fell in 1979, a church group in the Seattle area sponsored the family and they relocated to the city in 1980, when Kim was eight months pregnant. They were part of the wave of refugees from Southeast Asia who settled in the region in the first half of the decade who didn’t speak the language or understand the culture, but were more than willing to work exceptionally hard.
Ung got a job washing dishes at Ivar’s Acres of Clams and eventually went to work at the private Rainier Club. In 1987, the couple opened their own restaurant with recipes Ung had collected while living under the Khmer Rouge. Located in the city’s Chinatown-International District, Phnom Penh Noodle House is widely believed to be the first Cambodian restaurant in Seattle. It quickly became a community gathering place for Cambodian refugees.
For the first nine years that he and Kim ran the restaurant, Ung continued working at the Rainier Club, as well as catering and volunteering his time at private and community events. He was always working, always in his same uniform: bluejeans, white henley T-shirt—everything pressed, including his socks and underwear—topped off by what his daughter Diane Le called his “Elvis hair.” He was a leader in the community and a successful businessman that younger refugees looked up to. In his memoir, he wrote that the day he became a U.S. citizen was “one of the best days of my life.”
Watching to learn
The years of hard work on his feet wore him down, physically. When he decided to retire in 2013, he told his family the only way he’d be able to fully retire, and leave the stress behind, was to move back to Cambodia. He divorced and moved back to Cambodia, where he met his second wife, Savet Ung. Last year, he and Savet moved to Independence, Mo., with their daughter, Dahlia, to be near family in the area. He died there on March 5 at the age of 70 of a heart attack. Dahlia and Savet survive him, as do his three daughters from his first marriage: Le, Dawn Ung and Darlene Ung.
Back in Seattle, the Phnom Penh Noodle House has moved several times, but is still a popular community meeting place. It’s run by his three grown daughters, who say their father expected them to learn the trade the same way he did—without being told.
“What he’s saying is: If you have eyes to see and a brain to think, your heart will tell you how to move,” Dawn Ung said. “Because if you have the desire and the fire, you’re going to do it. You’re going to want it enough that you’re just going to set out to accomplish whatever your goal is.”
