The South Korean YouTuber Lee Jae-ho was eating at a North Korean barbecue restaurant in China this year when a waitress posed an unexpected question.

“Which country are you from? Are you Korean-Chinese, or are you a puppet?” she asked, in an encounter captured on video.

Lee was taken aback by the waitress’ casual use of the derogatory term, which often appears in DPRK propaganda to slander South Korea as a subservient lackey to “U.S. imperialists.”

But while the disparaging language is not new, experts say its use by ordinary North Korean workers appears to reflect the Kim regime’s