My own feelings:

Personally speaking, I feel deeply sympathized to Mrs.B. She tried her best in taking up the responsibility as a wife, as an ex-wife, and as a parent of two sons. Even though some of her ways of doing things might not be acceptable, no one can defy that she tried her best in balancing out her roles.

Meanwhile, the documentary also demonstrated partly how the absence of parents might influence the children mentally. The younger song of Mrs.B mentioned how he wants to kill the North Korean officer and he would never let his mom go back to China even if she wants to. This is of course very extreme but also understandable considering the amount of past negative experience he had, especially without a mother to help supporting him and soothing out the suffering.

As the documentary mentioned, human trafficking and smuggling are still two very big industries in the undeveloped areas. Even thought it is definitely not a good representation of all the areas in East Asia, but it is something that has been going on and people need to pay attention to.

One last comment would be from the linguistics perspectives. The fact Mrs.B can speak Chinese and Korean so fluently was very impressive to me even though it is partly under the pressure of survival. However, this partially indicated the similarity between many different languages in East Asia.

My questions:

1. What are the rules and regulations on getting a working permit in South Korea? To be more specific, why would the Chinese husband encounter such a big difficulty even though he can get an international marriage status.

2. How frequently do North Korean get suspected of being a spy and hence encounter difficulties in surviving in South Korea?

3. How difficult is it to smuggle between the Northern China and North Korea? Meanwhile, is it actually true that there are a lot of North Korean policemen in the Northern China or is it just Mrs.B being over cautious?

Reflection: After watching the documentary and attending Yeonmi Park's talk at Duke, I noticed many discrepancies between the stories told, which prompted me to delve further into these stories. I read many articles that Park's stories contradict themselves and are exaggerated compared to other defector stories, such as the documentary. Regardless, all instances told about life in North Korea are unfathomable to me, and I have difficulty wrapping my head around these often terrible, difficult, and heavy topics. While I may not be able to relate the these experiences, I hope to keep an open mind and be a listener to all the students I work with in Korea.

Dohyun Kim

I'm most curious about the process of resettlement, which I assume is a jarring experience for many refugees as they experience freedom for the first time and are faced with making many life choices.