I once read a book about the Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko, who defected to Japan in his MiG-29. When he was brought to the US and driven around Northern Virginia, he thought that everything he was seeing was a made-up Potemkin Village for his benefit.
It boggled his mind that people could just walk into Safeway and choose from a dozen different kinds of canned beans and walk out again with a full shopping cart for so little money.
I can’t imagine taking a North Korean defector into an ordinary American supermarket with no period of Western acclimation.
I escorted a group of visiting Georgian teens to a local mall in the 90’s, not really great by big city standards. They were nonchalant....... the availability of so much stuff and the apparent wealth of the ordinary folks was difficult to comprehend.
They were embarrassed at their own (Georgian) inadequacy. They brought along a puppet show to put on performances to earn their way. No one came to the heavily publicized shows. It was a fiasco and big financial problem for the American sponsors.
One of the kids showed up in my office seeking asylum. Big headache. The State Department sent an officer and asylum was ultimately denied.
In the 70s and 80s I worked as an instructor of students in ‘centrally controlled economies’ for a petroleum-related company.
The students would come to this country for their training. As the instructor, I would be tasked with setting them up in apartments and filling their refrigerators.
I took some Rumanian students to the supermarket and got a basket. They ran to the meat counter and immediately filled the basket with everything that would fit in the basket. I said, “Your freezer is not big enough to fit all of that. Why are you doing that?” Their response was that they had to get all of the meat before it was all gone.
I explained to them that it would be ok because the meat section would be restocked overnight.
They looked at me in disbelief so that I had to take them back to the supermarket the next day to show them. They were absolutely amazed! The poor souls had lived a life of hell. Many of them defected to this country after getting back to Rumania.