Nothing to Envy: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

Kim Hyuck, one of the “wandering swallows,” or kochebi, whose parents had died or gone off in search of food, spent his early teen years scavenging and begging at the Chongjin train station, wearing vinyl bags as shoes and an oversized factory uniform for warmth. At 14, he was a skilled thief—yet he was so malnourished that he was no bigger than an 8-year-old. Born into a well-to-do family in 1982, Hyuck mother died when he was young. His father remarried a woman with children of her own—she gave them food, but withheld rations from Hyuck and his brother. They began stealing—when they were caught, their father whipped them and told them it was better to starve than to steal.

Hyuck and his brother continued to steal. Their father used his connections to get them into an orphanage, where he hoped they’d stay fed and out of trouble. Initially, the boys were fed adequately—but by their first winter there, the children were eating plain salted soup. In the first three months of 1996, 27 children living at the orphanage died. Hyuck and his brother began escaping the orphanage to scavenge for food, eating frogs, rats, and cicadas to stay alive. Hyuck and a friend he met on the streets drowned a dog and barbequed it. He felt guilty about killing animals, but he wanted to live. After Hyuck’s brother aged out of the orphanage, Hyuck was left along to fend for himself—he was regularly beaten up by the other children and was once even attacked with an ax.

After the slashing, Hyuck ran away back to Chongjin. The city was eerily silent and dilapidated. When he returned to the apartment building where he’d once lived, he found that his father was gone; he’d left the new tenants with instructions to tell his sons, should they return, to look for him at the train station. The train station, Hyuck knew, was where people went when they had nothing left. Hyuck wandered through the crowds of starving men and women there, looking for his father, but couldn’t find him. Exhausted, Hyuck fell asleep at the train station with the other homeless who sought refuge there.

Hyuck became a wandering swallow, joining up with gangs of other children for mutual protection. Together they would steal from market vendors and from slow-moving trains. At night, the children protected one another—there were rumors of adults who stole children and ate them. Stories about cannibals were everywhere. People who lived at the station often died in the middle of the night, leaving cleaning staff to load their bodies onto a cart each morning and take them away to be buried in a mass grave. Hyuck never found his father—and many years later, he told Demick that he believes this is the fate with which the man eventually met.

Hyuck began sneaking onto trains and riding around the countryside in search of food, but the woods and orchards were stripped bare. He knew that if he returned to the orphanage, he could make his way to the gray river just beyond it—the Tumen River. On the other side was the lush countryside of China. Though Hyuck knew from his time at the orphanage that the shores of the river were closed military areas, heavily monitored by border police on both sides—but Hyuck was desperate.

Late one night in late 1997, when he was 15 years old, Hyuck crossed the Tumen for the first time by wading through the icy water. He reached the other side without incident, amazed that he was in another country. He wandered into a small town, where he was instantly recognized at a market as a North Korean due to his oversized clothes and malnourished frame. A vendor stopped him and asked him if he could bring an old-fashioned iron over from the other side of the river. Hyuck realized that there was money to be made selling goods in China.

Hyuck began traveling back and forth across the river with North Korean pottery, jewelry, paintings, and household goods strapped to a pack on his back. He learned which spots along the river were under-staffed and poorly surveilled. He never remained too long in China, fearful of being handed over to the police. Hyuck was making more money than he had ever seen in his life. He stopped stealing—he bought himself new clothes, and he could afford to eat every day. Even as his life changed, Hyuck knew that at any minute it could all come crashing down—and once he turned 16, he had to bear the additional knowledge that, if captured, he would be tried for his crimes as an adult.