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Entering this restaurant, I had to address the young lady four times before she realized I was speaking Vietnamese, so unexpected was my presence. Even before the coronavirus crisis, Hadong received no foreign tourists, she said, and only a few domestic ones.

Married to a Korean, she'd been in Korea for a decade, and had two kids, nine and three-years-old. She used to try to return to Vietnam every year, but hadn't been there in three, not that she missed it much.

She opened her restaurant two years ago, at a smaller location, and had just moved into this space two months ago.

Nearly all of her customers were regulars, she said, and she didn't know of anyone who had gotten sick from the coronavirus in this county of 58,000.

Remarkably cheerful, she laughed constantly as we talked, and she thought it was hilarious I would take buses to go places I knew almost nothing about. She herself had not seen much of South Korea.



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