Nothing to Envy: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Jun-sang was home for summer vacation when, one day, the head of the inminban went around knocking on doors, summoning people to bear witness to a public execution. Jun-sang didn’t want to go, but he didn’t want to call attention to himself either. He marched with some three hundred of his neighbors to the embankment of a small stream to watch state security execute a man who’d been accused of selling copper wire. Nobody stood up for the man or intervened on his behalf. Jun-sang was growing weary of and disgusted by these “unpleasant discoveries” about his country. During his visit home, Jun-sang had been shocked and dismayed by how many classmates and teachers from his youth had died recently, either of starvation or by execution. Jun-sang now saw corruption everywhere—he was fully disenchanted with the country and its regime.

At his university, Jun-sang was, as an elite student, allowed to read some Western literature. Novels like Gone with the Wind and One Hundred Years of Solitude had charmed him—but when he began reading nonfiction about human sexuality, Communism, foreign politics, and economics, he found his eyes opening to the regime’s faults. After graduating in 1996, Jun-sang moved into a small apartment in Pyongyang. He got permission to purchase a television. Though it was dangerous, he constructed an antennae attachment that would let him watch South Korean television late at night while his neighbors slept. Though officials from a special bureau dedicated to the regular inspection of televisions paid a visit, Jun-sang was able to cover up what he was doing.

Each night, Jun-sang listened to broadcasts from South Korea that telegraphed speeches from President Bill Clinton about what was happening, from an outsider’s perspective, in North Korea. Jun-sang was perplexed and horrified to learn that over two million people had died of starvation, and that 200,000 more were in labor camps and gulags. He now knew how the rest of the world saw his country—yet a part of him wondered if the South Korean news reports were exaggerated, “just like North Korean propaganda.”

Jun-sang took many train journeys home to Chongjin. These journeys were arduous and often dangerous, with trains frequently breaking down in the middle of mountain ranges for days on end. On one journey, Jun-sang noticed a young kochebi singing on a platform: “We have nothing to envy,” he cooed. Jun-sang knew the song by heart, but he was surprised to hear that the child replaced Kim Il-sung’s name in the lyrics with Kim Jong-il’s. Jun-sang pitied the child who sang a song glorifying his benevolent father even as he begged for scraps in soaking, filthy clothes. In later years, Jun-sang would look back on this encounter as his breaking point.

Though Jun-sang had had enough, he found himself going through the motions of being a loyal subject of the regime. He was disgusted with himself, initially, for continuing to attend lectures glorifying the Kim regime and the Workers’ Party—but when he began looking out at the faces of his fellow attendees and recognizing the blank look in their eyes, he realized he couldn’t be the only nonbeliever out there. Jun-sang wished he could find others to talk to, but North Korea was so repressed and surveilled that no organized resistance to the regime could really take place, even in the form of reading groups or political meetings. Jun-sang told himself to lie low and keep his mouth shut. Even around Mi-ran, he was careful not to speak of his secret television antennae, his Western reading, or his burgeoning desire to defect.