One of the things we see at the Center for Effective Living is the effect of emigration on those who traveled to the United States voluntarily and on those who came here as refugees seeking asylum. The mental and emotional effects of leaving your homeland for a new place can be significant, especially if your move was more of an escape than a choice. Marie Myung-Ok Lee captured some of this in an opinion essay for the New York Times that we though was worth sharing. Below is an excerpt, and we hope you will click the link provided for the full text. And if you are transitioning into life in the United States and living in the greater Cleveland area, know that there are resources available to help with the process– including the less tangible aspects.
This was a summer of refugees, of walls, of border police, of daring journeys, of violence and death, sometimes of rescue, of separated families, each side not knowing what to do.
As Iraqis now join Syrians and Eritreans in a mass exodus out of their home countries on to Europe and beyond, one might wonder, what has to possess someone to leave everything they know for a dangerous unknown? And not just the single and the mobile, but families.
As I read these stories from a comfortable remove, in America, I am reminded of my mother’s odyssey and how these movements are not always purely voluntary and how, even in a “successful” escape, the psychic scars from the dislocation last forever. A teenager in Korea in 1945, she had hoped that the defeat of the Japanese in World War II meant that Korea, until then a Japanese colony, could finally have an independent sovereign government. Instead, Korea was given over as a spoil of war to the winners, the Soviet Union and the United States. Two young American officers were given the job of figuring out how to partition the country; after only 30 minutes, they decided to split the country roughly in half at the 38th parallel.
At the time of the partition, my mother lived a privileged life in Pukchong, in what would become North Korea after the formation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948. As the Soviet-backed government began descending with a hand that appeared to be just as heavy as that of the Japanese, people in their village whispered of moving south while they still could. She recalls Soviet soldiers moving from house to house, gang-raping the women, stealing, gratuitously trampling on crops. But it was impossible to know if things down south, with a United States military-led government, were any better.