Kim Jong Un was severely ill a few days ago, but then, he made a mysterious recovery all of a sudden. Kim Jong Un is the dictator of North Korea who followed the footsteps of his father and grandfather. However, if we look into his childhood, there are some mysterious aspects of the child that come into the picture. Kim Jong Un, quite hidden from the world, used to study under a fake name in Switzerland.
When he was about 12, and a devastating famine had almost killed about 3 million people in 1996, Kim Jong Un was sent to Switzerland. His brother was also sent there for his studies. He was taken care of by his aunt, who was later defected to the USA. She ran a dry cleaner in Manhattan.
Joao Micaelo, a classmate of Kim Jong Un, described him to be a temperamental kid with an obsession for basketball. He loved Michael Jordan. He was also a lover of the movies of Jean-Claude Van Damme. His basketball went to such a level that he used to sleep beside a basketball and wore NFL jerseys most of the time. He also had many expensive Nike shoes.
Though he struggled to speak the Swiss-German dialect, he got along well with the other classmates. Michel Riesen, Kim’s teacher, also remembers Kim as a well-natured kid. “If I look back I see a friendly, gentle Asian boy,” he says. Plus, the school in which Kim went had also provided him with the ethics of Western values. He knew about Democracy.
In school, Kim had also confessed that he was the son of the Great Leader of North Korea but none believed him.
It’s clear that the international experience did not change Kim in a significant way. Jason Lee, a person who is 1 year younger than Kim and was born in North Korea says: “All of us speak multiple languages and many of the kids of the elite families travel a lot and live outside the country when they can. Nobody can access the Internet in the country but they can when they leave. They know the education is fake, the mythology of the Kim family is fake. But they can’t speak out against it. Their whole family would be punished. They call it the three-generation rule.”
As per a CIA analyst Jung H. Pak, “He’s a master at running the country but he’s also trapped by the country and the mythology.”
