Every Time I Smell Fresh Ginger, I Think of My Uncle Sam

This is Bad Kimchi, a monthly column by Noah Cho about how food and cooking can inform our identities.

Whenever I smell freshly sliced ginger, I think of my Uncle Sam.

Yes, I really did have an Uncle Sam. He was the oldest of my dad’s siblings, the first-born son of the generation of Chos who endured the end of Japanese occupation in Korea as well as the height of the Korean War. Sam once told me about carrying my father on his back as the North advanced through Seoul; about the long and arduous journey my family took, fleeing from city to city until they reached Jeju island, where they intended to wait out the war. It has never officially ended.

War is a trauma that divides, carves out holes that can never be entirely filled. Sam was sent to the US before any of his other siblings. Besides Sam and my dad, my aunt and two uncles eventually made their way to the US; my grandparents came even later. Emigrating step by step, person by person, separated across the vastness of their new country and the various opportunities and marriages that determined where they would settle, the family, once fragmented, never fully recovered as a whole.

My dad loved his sister and brothers, and they all loved him, even if they didn’t always get along as a group. Because my dad died early, his saintliness has never been in dispute amongst his siblings. In the years before he died, I can only remember a few occasions when my dad and all of his siblings were together.

I didn’t meet Sam until I was about twelve, when he made the first of a few trips out to see my dad in California. By that time, almost everyone in the Cho family lived in Southern California—except for Sam, who was a therapist and professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. I’ve still never met Sam’s sons, my cousins. They’ve never seemed interested in connecting with us. Sam was the black sheep of the family—the one who disengaged, making a new life for himself far from everyone else. My dad loved him, and they shared a bond that Sam did not have with his other siblings.

Sam was the first male family member I met who cooked. Before him, the only Korean man I’d seen attempt cooking was my father, who once blew up a plate in the microwave while trying to make popcorn. Uncle Sam didn’t just enjoy cooking; he was masterful at it. He could make anything, it seemed, and he had a passion for food that matched my parents’.

My mom was the cook in my family, and an excellent one; my Korean grandma and my white grandma were both fantastic cooks as well. But I’d never seen a man cook before Sam, and I was captivated watching him. Sam’s knife work was impeccable—and incredibly fast. My mom would get upset because he would sharpen her knives a bit too much for her liking, and after he left she’d often wind up accidentally cutting her fingers.

The ingredient my uncle used most was ginger. Ginger feels like home.

My uncle’s palate was deep and impressive, and he could differentiate flavors with the best of them. The boldest were the ones that most appealed to him. Though he did not eat food as spicy as my father enjoyed, he still packed every dish with layered bouquets of tastes and fragrances. And the ingredient he used the most, during that summer he stayed with us, was ginger.

Perhaps I didn’t always appreciate ginger’s charms; its pungent embrace, its way of lingering on your palate. Once you start paying attention to the dishes that have ginger versus those that don’t, though, you realize its real power. Ginger is essential to so many great Asian continent cuisines, but it also exists in the Western mind as a comforting agent—something you might bake into a batch of cookies when you’re stress-baking after a shitty week, or perhaps add to a soothing cup of tea along with some lemon and honey. Ginger feels like home.

It’s added to a lot of Korean foods, but Sam put it in other dishes, too. He once made a dish of cold sesame noodles, garnished with thin slices of cucumber and green onion, made ever so slightly fiery with the taste of ginger—a subtle but noticeable heat. The noodles were refreshing, perfect on a hot summer day, with the ginger providing a snap of warmth and tang and sweetness.

Sam was also the first home cook I’d ever seen make soondubu. To this day, it is one of my comfort foods: a hot bowl of spice and soft tofu and bits of seafood and pork or beef, served bubbling over. Sam added ginger to his soondubu, which is not common, making it earthy and cooling at the same time. I’ve never had another soondubu like his.

Sam died last fall, around the same time as another uncle of mine, and these twin losses left our slowly shrinking Cho family even smaller and sadder. That Sam was separated from the rest of my family for so long, that there was never a chance for everyone to come together again after my father died—these things still haunt me.

I have one picture of my dad and his brothers together—perhaps the only one they took as adults, and certainly the last one before my father died. In it, my father is still upright, before cancer would rob him of his hair and his mobility. My uncles Song and Kenny are there, too, all of them presenting an impressive platter of those cold ginger sesame noodles. It’s hard for me to look at this picture now. Only Kenny remains; everyone else is gone.

I frequently use ginger in my own cooking. I recently made a marinade for kalbi, to which I usually add ginger. But I wasn’t cooking at home, and I forgot to buy and bring ginger along with me. Though the marinade came out fine, to me it felt like something was missing.

I thought of all of my family members—my dad, my uncles, my grandparents—who have passed on, whose absence I still feel. And I thought especially of my Uncle Sam, a man who was such a mystery to me, someone I wish I’d known better—now connected to me only by the scent of fresh ginger, and the memory of a smile on his face as he cooked.

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