For refugees, “bittersweet” still beats “hell on earth”
I loved this Reuters video of a graduation ceremony for North Korean refugees in Seoul.
I would concede that for the ten-year period following my own graduation from high school and a background of fairly severe poverty (by American standards), I, too had difficulty adjusting to the concept of credit.
Although I don’t deny the profound psychological barriers between North Koreans and life on the Outer Earth, I sometimes wonder if the much-vaunted difficulty some North Koreans have with that adjustment is exaggerated. We are speaking of an entire category of 27,000-odd people of all ages, most of whom arrived within a recent five-year period, all of whom are struggling with the same lack of sophistication that all of us also had to outgrow as we pupated into our less-yet-still-slightly cruel world.