We are eating typical Korean-buffet fare — galbi, sushi rolls and the standard panchan side dishes — at a restaurant in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., on Friday, Dec. 1, 2006. Though my meal is somewhat typical, my dining companions are not. I am having lunch — all-you-can-eat, no less — with four former citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a.k.a. North Korea. Our fellow diners — their hosts at the nearby Korean church — can’t help but ask their guests, two women and two men, if they have tried the dishes before. “Is this your first time eating sushi?” One of the women lived close to the East Sea, so she has had raw fish. The other woman tries an avocado for the first time and makes a face. It’s too fatty for her palate.

As the conversation continues, it ranges from the mundane — like comparisons between South Korea and the United States (“Do American women get as much plastic surgery as South Korean women?”) — to differences in language (a lot of South Korean vocabulary differs from North Korean). 

When one of our hosts reaches for a toothpick on the table, the North Koreans don’t know what it is. When they learn the Korean word for “the thing to pick meat out of your teeth,” they consider it distinctly South Korean. At first I think it’s just regional slang, but then I realize why they didn’t know the word for toothpick. They don’t need it — the word or the toothpick — because in North Korea you don’t eat meat, much less worry about having food in your teeth. 

I want to ask them what they used to eat in North Korea, but I don’t want to be presumptuous or make them feel provincial. So instead I ask them how North Korean seasoning differs from South Korean. They laugh at me. There goes my cover, so I might as well be direct: “What did you eat in North Korea?” All four of them give me the same answer: grass.

The four defectors are touring the United States with Phillip Buck, a missionary and aid worker on the Underground Railroad bringing North Koreans to South Korea. Over lunch, and later in the basement of Hana Presbyterian Church, the former North Koreans talk about their experiences in North Korea and China. Because they fear for their relatives still in North Korea, they use assumed names. They wear sunglasses in the rain and cover their faces so that identifying details will not be published. 

They are, after a lifetime of training, paranoid, even though they are thousands of miles away from Kim Jong-il’s regime.

These are their stories:

 

 

 

OK SOON KIM

AGE: 59

LEFT NORTH KOREA IN: 1997

WITH: Her husband and one of her daughters

ARRIVED IN SOUTH KOREA IN: 2002

In 1997, Kim’s youngest son was in the North Korean Army and one daughter had married, but there still wasn’t enough food to feed the family. For years they had eaten a diet of grass and leaves mixed with the occasional corn powder or noodles. They sold everything they owned to the Chinese that passed through their town for food: their TV, blankets and clothes. Some of her relatives started selling opium. But in the winter, there was nothing to harvest.