Nothing to Envy: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

In August of 2002, Mrs. Song boarded a flight from China to Incheon, South Korea’s international airport. She was carrying a forged passport—a young handler who’d doctored it for her was on the plane, too, just a few rows ahead of her, and had counseled her to claim the passport was real up until the moment she landed in South Korea, at which point she could turn herself in as a refugee and receive unconditional asylum. Mrs. Song was nervous about the journey, but overall at peace with her decision: she knew she was doing the right thing. She’d returned to Chongjin for a month to say goodbye to her other daughters and explain why she needed to fight for a new life for herself—after successfully making it back to China, it was time now to move on at last.

South Korea—unlike China—has a policy that permits asylum-seekers from North Korea to establish South Korean citizenship, as long as they get to South Korea by their own volition. South Korea—like North Korea—believes that the countries’ two peoples are really one, and they feel a duty to helping their fellow Koreans from the north. Some defectors make their way in by flying from China with fake passports, like Mrs. Song; others slip out of China into Mongolia or Vietnam and make their way from there. As of 2009, between one and three thousand North Koreans were making their way into the country each year; Mrs. Song was one of those lucky few. 

After stopping in the restroom at Incheon, Mrs. Song was unsure of who to talk to about being a refugee. She approached a janitor, not knowing his role at the airport, and requested asylum. The man steered her toward the immigration office, and Mrs. Song’s long process of beginning life in South Korea began. Airport officials got in touch with the National Intelligence Service, the South Korean equivalent of the CIA, and transferred her to a dormitory for newly arrived defectors. There, Mrs. Song endured a month of interrogations meant to ensure that she was not a spy or a fraud seeking to monitor—or recapture—previous defectors, or a Chinese national trying to scam their way into $20,000 worth of resettlement benefits offered to all North Korean refugees.

After her stay at the dormitory, Mrs. Song was transferred to Hanawon—a secluded campus 50 miles south of Seoul. Hanawon was opened in 1999 as a kind of halfway house meant to reeducate and acclimate sheltered, starving North Koreans and prepare them to begin life in one of the most technologically and socially advanced countries in the world. Even after three months at Hanawon, during which Mrs. Song was taught about the contemporary world, taken on shopping and beauty excursions, and given a stipend of $20,000, Mrs. Song found herself flustered and overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the bustling city of Seoul.

After leaving Hanawon, Mrs. Song took a job as a housekeeper and secured an apartment of her own in Suwon, a suburb of Seoul. She saved money and took trips with tourist groups throughout South Korea, China, and even Poland. When Demick met Mrs. Song in 2004, just two years after she’d left North Korea, Mrs. Song was a woman in control of her life—she dressed well, wore makeup, and even had plastic surgery to add an extra crease in her eyelids, a popular procedure among South Koren women. Still, Demick noted that Mrs. Song harbored anger toward the North Korean regime and a terrible sense of survivor’s guilt. Over a delicious meal at a Seoul restaurant, Mrs. Song began to cry—she confessed she was thinking of Chang-bo’s last words, “Let’s go to a good restaurant.” Yet in spite of her guilt and sadness, Demick states, “Mrs. Song had arrived.”

Oak-hee, however, was not as happy in South Korea as her mother. Oak-hee remained troubled, dark, bitter, and obsessed with staying busy. When she first arrived in South Korea, she worked as a smuggler, helping other women escape North Korea, and she was often debt. She took a job at a funeral home to make enough money to bring Mrs. Song over. Later, she became involved in the karaoke business, recruiting young women—all North Koreans straight out of Hanawon—to entertain men at Seoul clubs. As Oak-hee enjoyed more success in the recruiting business, she was able to bring over her sisters, nieces, and nephews—yet she was unable to obtain custody of her teenage children. In her interviews with Demick, Oak-hee often spoke of dreams she had about trying to smuggle her children out of North Korea on her back, dodging men in uniforms who were hunting them down.