Sitting quietly, Michael and Yon Kwon fill up on a breakfast of daenjang jigae, kimchi and rice at the Korean Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, La., their place of refuge for the last week and a half. Their own tiny two-bedroom apartment in Metairie, a working class New Orleans suburb, was filled with two feet of water, and its insides are only a mash of belongings after Hurricane Katrina. Since they evacuated their home 16 days ago on Aug. 28, they have spent most of their nights here.

Wearing collared shirts and baseball caps, husband and wife look as if they’re off for a day at the links. But those were better days, when Michael was able to splurge on a round of golf. Now they carefully count the cash it will take to fill up their car with gas. It is 8:30 a.m., and they are headed for New Orleans to look at the dry cleaning business they owned and operated. It will be their third attempt. They went together just last week and Michael tried two days ago. Both times the floods prevented them from even seeing the outside of their building.

Chances are Angela Dry Cleaners is still trapped in a watery grave. And anyway, the Kwons don’t have flood insurance or any money to address the damage.

But it doesn’t lessen their need to see, to visually comprehend, what has become of their livelihood. Knowing the worst would be better than not knowing anything at all.

***

“Everybody asking how you feel,” says Yon, 48, in her broken English while sitting in the passenger seat. “The thing is we can’t tell, you know. If thinking about it, how in one day you lose your whole place, you lose everything — how you feel? You know what, you can’t tell.”

The Kwons had opened Angela Dry Cleaners in March 2004. It was the hard-earned prize after more than a decade of working and saving. Perceived as yet another Asian-owned dry cleaners to many, Angela Dry Cleaners was actually proof to the Kwons that they had finally established themselves in America.

Yon and Michael met in Los Angeles in 1990. Both had recently immigrated from Seoul, spoke little English and were divorcees. They married the following year. Michael started a painting business, but they decided to move shortly after enduring the L.A. Riots, a painful experience Yon has trouble articulating, but insists was dwarfed by Katrina.

Yon and Michael Kwon search for their dry cleaning business in a still flooded New Orleans.

“We still had the house, we can sleep, we can eat,” she says of Sa-i-gu. “Here we lost everything. House, business, everything.”

After Los Angeles, the Kwons lived in Louisville, Ky., where both worked seven days a week at stores. The plan was to save enough money to begin a business together. They liked Louisville, despite its lack of Koreans, and enjoyed the four seasons. But in 1999, they left the city’s stagnant job market behind and headed for New Orleans, where they had heard a small business could thrive.