Posted on 04/14/2009 9:33:27 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
N. Korean Defectors Bewildered By the South
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 12, 2009; A01
ANSEONG, South Korea -- To flee North Korea and arrive in the rich, wired, consuming culture of South Korea is to feel clueless, fearful and guilty.
Teenagers are particularly bewildered. As part of the newest wave in a decade-old flow of defectors from the North, they arrive stunted from malnutrition and struggling to read. At the movies for the first time, they panic when the lights go down, afraid someone might kidnap them. They find it incredible that money is stored in plastic credit cards. Pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers -- staples of South Korean teen cuisine -- give them indigestion. One gargled with liquid fabric softener, mistaking it for mouthwash.
In time, they wise up and their stomachs calm down. Their guilt, though, tends to fester.
"When I eat something that is really delicious, I can't help but feel guilty about my family back in North Korea," said Lee J.Y., who asked that her full name not be used because she was afraid that North Korean authorities would punish her family for her freedom. Now 20, Lee escaped five years ago from North Hamgyong province, where her little brother died of hunger and where she survived on cake made of pine-tree bark.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ping!
BTTT
I know, we need to send the Congressional Black Caucus over there to see what can be done with North Korea. Perhaps some easing of trade restrictions and allowing Kim to visit Disneyland.
Who in the world would thing Kim Jong Il is anything but a genocidal monster?
this is what happens when wars are not won by conclusive military victories .
‘negotiated’ settlements never result in a true or just peace.
Bo I and his ilk would!
As long as Kim Jong II is a leftist, anti-American, "genocidal monster", bo I and company will continue "negotiations" route, ergo propping up and entrenching his genocidal regime and suffering and starvation of millions of N. Korea's people.
arrggh.
Kim Jong Il is a “thing” but I meant to type “think”!
Communism at work. I don’t know how many live examples liberals need before their professed “love for science” makes them change their mind. They are the ones who are religious. They have faith in communism regardless of the facts. How many Soviet Unions have to fail, Cubans and North Koreans have to get jailed and starve before they look at the facts?
Maybe a few will wise up, but you’ll never convince a true believer of anything.
30 years ago some Russians were taken into an American Supermarket for the first time, they started to cry.
Sounds like our teenagers, circa 2050, if Obama has his way.
I heard the story of Cambodian refugees (safe in USA for maybe 10 years) go to see the Academy Award movie "Killing Fields" about the Khmer Rouge, and some of them began to bitterly weep and one also screamed in that darkened, crowded theater somewhere in the US.
Native-born Americans sitting around them had no idea what was up. What the "commotion" was all about. In fact there were reports of one telling the Cambodians to "shut up over there."
Little did they know that the movie, with scenes of the Communist takeover and Pol Pot, brought back horrific memories to those refugees.
One can carry such horrible things years later, it is true.
How will we help the mental health of entire North Korean People once their gulag is entirely free and they learn the truth about the world around them??
Keep them in place, create change and exposure to the real world gradually. Familiar surroundings, however deprived, are reassuring and need to be respected. Likewise too much and too rich food can be a severe shock, as the GIs found out when they liberated the survivors from the German camps and charitably gave them lots of food they couldn't digest.
A Korean woman I became acquainted with told us there is a “South Korean” government and system organized, waiting, and already in place to sweep into N Korea and put things in place when the time comes....many of the players live in the U.S. And, from what I understand, S Koreans are VERY Christian....
Cubans probably have their equivalent of Pine Tree cake. The so called "black caucus" should all be run out of office.
That's old communism. Now, the post Mao ChiComs and The Obammunist, they know how to do it right.
yitbos
Yum. The liberal future for us all, courtesy Hilla... er.. Obama's Chicago machine.
Yum. The liberal future for us all, courtesy Hilla... er.. Obama's Chicago machine.
Our wonderful media loves to talk about the "failures" of "unregulated free markets." I would dearly love to stuff a tree-bark souffle down their fat, market-fed throats.
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