Nothing to Envy

Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Barbara Demick

This detailed reportage is a glimpse inside North Korea, providing an all-too-human face for a place most of us will never see.

This is a book that makes you shout WHAT?! every four or five pages. You might pick it up expecting some hard-luck immigrant stories, and you will get them. But by page twenty, you’ve learned that North Korea runs on an informer network so dense — by defectors’ accounts, roughly one informer for every fifty people — it puts East Germany’s Stasi to shame. WHAT?!

From 2001 to 2006, the author Barbara Demick was the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Seoul and Beijing. What she wanted to do was go to North Korea, ask around, check the facts — normal journalism stuff. But that route was not available to her. Instead, she spent years interviewing North Korean defectors. This book centers on six of them, all from the same place: the grim industrial port city of Chongjin, on the northeast coast of the Korean Peninsula.

Six ordinary people: a schoolteacher; a factory worker who believed in the regime with her whole heart; her husband, a state journalist who secretly knew everything he wrote was fabricated; their rebellious daughter; a pediatrician; and a homeless kid who grew up scavenging in the streets. The book follows all six through the same twenty-odd years, during the famine of the 1990s, when as many as two million North Koreans starved to death. Eventually, separately, years apart, these six people escaped.

The book goes deep into detail about what it’s like to live under total repression. It’s even worse than you might imagine. But Demick also makes the case that even in North Korea, people still want to connect, emotions are still messy.

It begins with the love story of two of the subjects: a schoolteacher named Mi-ran and a science student named Jun-sang. The fell for each other as teenagers, but had to keep their feelings a secret for nearly a decade, partly because of the country’s loyalty-ranking system called songbun. Mi-ran’s family was permanently marked because her father had once been a prisoner of war from the South. But the secret was also necessary because there was no way for them to be alone together without raising suspicion. So they dated in the dark: Most nights there were blackouts, so they’d walk for hours under a starlit sky, free of light pollution, one of the most brilliant night skies left in Northeast Asia.

Another subject, Mrs. Song, a factory worker, is so devoted to the regime that even in the mad scramble to get four kids out the door each morning, she’d stop to dust off her framed portrait of Kim Il-sung. (Unfun fact: Local officials often checked the cleanliness of the leader’s portrait in residents’ homes.) Mrs. Song’s husband cracked one joke, at home, about a state TV segment. When a neighbor reported him, he was interrogated for three days and nearly landed the whole family in a labor camp.

The other four also get their moments in the spotlight. A pediatrician at a hospital without working heat, water, and electricity — where IV fluids were stored in patient-supplied beer bottles. The orphan living on the streets who got so fast at stealing food, he could snatch a snack from someone’s hand and swallow it whole before they realized it was gone.

The book’s title is taken from a propaganda song every North Korean child was required to learn: ‘We Have Nothing to Envy in the World.’ It was sung, Demick reminds you, by children who were quietly starving in the classroom while their teachers taught them the lyrics.

This is a challenging read, but it’s written without sensationalism. You’ll finish it feeling less like you’ve read a history of North Korea and more like you’ve met six extraordinary people. That’s a rare feat for a book about a place locked away from the rest of the world.

North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s divinity. Who could possibly resist? — Barbara Demick

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