This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

In the summer of 2002, Tatiana Kim took her first trip abroad.

She was going to Onson South Korea, which is a city that's about a half an hour drive outside of Seoul.

I was visiting Unson to spend the summer break with my grandparents.

They had recently moved into a very special apartment complex.

That's Tatiana, by the way.

Even though on the surface it seemed like any other building,

there were this little details that stuck out to me.

The holes and elevators were a little wider

and had handrails all the way across

for people to hold on to.

And for some reason, there was also a Red Cross office right on the premises.

But the most distinctive feature about this complex was the people who lived there.

There were about a thousand residents who were all elderly and even though everybody was

of Korean descent they all spoke Russian.

Sometimes I'd meet other teenagers who were visiting their grandparents, but just like me,

none of them spoke any Korean, only Russian. In the kitchens, our grandmothers would cook us both

Panchan and Borsch.

And that's because every person in this complex came here from the same place,

an island off the coast of Russia, called Saaklin.

In Russian, the complex is called Saakalin Village. But in Korean, this settlement has a different name.

Gohang-Maiel, meaning hometown village.

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