Nothing to Envy: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Discussing satellite photos of the far east at night, Barbara Demick notes that one “splotch [of land is] curiously lacking in light.” This “splotch” is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea to most of the world. The country, she writes, both literally and metaphorically faded into darkness in the early 1990s. Without aid from the collapsed Soviet Union, the North Korean economy plummeted, and the lights stopped coming on at night. Still, it is inaccurate, Demick says, to call North Korea an undeveloped country—she sees it, rather, as a place that has dropped out of the developed world.

The darkness, while startling, has its advantages. Demick recalls an interview with a North Korean defector, Mi-ran (a pseudonym), who would take illicit, forbidden nightly strolls with Jun-sang (also a pseudonym), a boy three years her senior, each night after the lights went out. Even in darkness and even beyond the limits of their rusted-out, empty town, Mi-ran and Jun-sang kept their distance from one another physically yet conversed for hours, sharing thoughts about their families, classmates, and lives. Demick writes that most people see North Korea as a bleak, black hole and thus fail to realize that love exists even there.

Demick first met Mi-ran in 2004, when Mi-ran was already 31 years old. Mi-ran had been living in South Korea for six years. Demick was the Seoul bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, where she covered news from the entire Korean peninsula. Though covering South Korea was easy, simply gaining admission into North Korea was nearly impossible—and when Demick and a colleague of hers did manage to get in, they were shepherded through the showcase capital of Pyongyang, where they were shown government propaganda and discouraged from asking any real questions about life in North Korea. Demick realized that if she wanted to get answers about the country’s famine and its repressive regime, she would need to talk to defectors.

In 2004, Demick connected with Mi-ran, who was living in the Seoul suburb of Suwon. Mi-ran was dressed fashionably—not, Demick notes, in conservative or mismatched clothes, as many North Korean refugees do even after years of living abroad. At the time, Mi-ran was newly married and expecting a child. Demick met with Mi-ran, who had worked as a teacher in North Korea, to learn more about the school system there. While they ate bowls of hot food, Mi-ran discussed watching students as young as five or six years old die of starvation at the height of the famine. Mi-ran recalled that even as her students withered and died before her eyes, she was instructed to teach them each day that they were “blessed to be North Korean” and that they should revere their Great Leader as a benevolent god.

Demick then turned the topic to lighter territory, asking Mi-ran what young North Koreans did for fun. When Demick asked if Mi-ran had had a boyfriend there, Mi-ran said she did. Her “boyfriend” of more than six years, Jun-sang, was a tall, lanky young man who was studying at a university in Pyongyang when she left. Mi-ran confided in Demick that though she still considered Jun-sang her first love and closest confidant in North Korea, she had always withheld from him the biggest secrets of her life: her anger toward the regime and the plans she and her family were making to defect. In North Korea, Mi-ran said, not even loved ones could be trusted—spies were everywhere. Mi-ran said she had no idea what had become of Jun-sang—whether he’d stayed or left, and whether he would, if they were to be reunited, hate her or understand her.

Demick describes the stark differences between the landscapes of North and South Korea. While South Korea is busy and even cluttered, with heavy traffic in its cities and large, bright signage and advertisements nearly everywhere, North Korea is sparse, mountainous, and oddly “devoid of color.” The housing throughout the country, built largely in the 1960s and 1970s following the destruction of the Korean War, is made of cement block and limestone. Apartment high-rises in the cities are common, but in the countryside, most families live in long single-story buildings called “harmonicas,” named after their boxlike structures symbol to the many chambers of a harmonica.

The only color to be found in North Korea, Demick observes, is on the brightly colored propaganda posters that adorn roadsides, railroad stations, and public buildings. The posters glorify Kim Il-sung, the first Great Leader of North Korea, and his son, Kim Jong-il. “We will do as the party tells us,” many posters say; “we have nothing to envy in the world.”

Mi-ran grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a small mining town just outside of the industrial city of Chongjin. Though she and her family were poor, she had no reason to doubt the propaganda posters that told her nowhere else in the world was better off than North Korea. Mi-ran grew up with four sisters and one younger brother. Her father bribed the head of the local inminban, or people’s committee, for access to an adjacent apartment in their harmonica housing unit. Mi-ran, her sisters, her mother, and her grandmother had to do everything separately from her brother and father; while the men ate rice, Mi-ran and the other women ate cornmeal. Mi-ran became indignant and rebellious at a young age, flouting gender roles by taking her family’s bicycle out for rides into Chongjin and screaming at anyone who mocked her for being a girl on a bike.

Mi-ran loved the cinema from a young age. Though outside media is banned in North Korea, Kim Jong-il’s love of film—and his crucial role, beginning in the 1970s while his father Kim Il-sung was still in power, as the overseer of the Workers’ Party’s Bureau of Propaganda and Agitation—meant that he produced many propaganda films. The movies denigrated capitalism and extolled the values of juche.

One day, Jun-sang—a fellow cinema lover—was waiting outside of the culture hall in Chongjin where movies were shown, waiting for his younger brother. He spied a wild-looking girl with short hair stamping her feet in frustration as a crowd poured ahead of her into the building and was entranced right away. The girl, Demick notes, was Mi-ran. Jun-sang considered approaching the girl and offering her his extra ticket, which he had been saving for his brother, but he could not work up the courage to do so. All through the propaganda film, Jun-sang wondered if he’d ever have another chance with her.