Nothing to Envy: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

The industrial coastal city of Chongjin contains 500,000 people—yet it is considered by most North Koreans to be an undesirable place to live. Chongjin is far from the capital of Pyongyang and closer to Russia. During the Japanese occupation, Japanese forces built up Chongjin’s port and created steelworks factories. Chongjin was devastated in the wars that wracked the peninsula in the 1940s and 1950s, but after the end of the Korean War, Kim Il-sung’s regime rebuilt them, centering Chongjin as the site of North Korea’s largest steel factory. Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, Chongjin became a city of great economic and strategic importance, and the regime installed a ruling elite to monitor the region’s villagers and factory workers.

One of these factory workers was Song Hee-suk, or Mrs. Song, as she liked to be called—a “true believer” in the regime who grew up in Chongjin in the 1950s and 1960s. Her father was killed during the bombing that took place throughout the Korean War. The loss was devastating, and it cemented the young Mrs. Song’s anti-Americanism. The young Mrs. Song and her family received a certificate declaring their patriarch a “martyr of the Fatherland Liberation War.” As a young woman, she married a man named Chang-bo, a prominent member of the Worker’s Party. Mrs. Song dreamed of moving to Pyongyang, but the Party requested she and her husband remain in Chongjin.

Chongjin is a stark but imposing city with broad sidewalks and a large thoroughfare that could accommodate six lanes of traffic—if there were that many cars in Chongjin. Though Chongjin looks impressive to those just passing through by car or train, Demick notes that upon closer inspection, parts of the city are falling apart. The apartment building Mrs. Song and Chang-bo moved into as newlyweds wasn’t yet in disrepair—though it didn’t have an elevator, the young couple had two whole rooms to themselves. Their first daughter, Oak-hee, was born in 1966. Mrs. Song gave birth to two more girls before finally having a boy—in North Korean culture, boys are prized over girls.

Even with four young children, Mrs. Song worked hard six days a week at a clothing factory nearby. Her children played and learned at the factory’s daycare center while Mrs. Song worked. Between caring for her family, cooking, and attending meetings of the Socialist Women’s Federation, Mrs. Song hardly had any time for herself—yet her belief in the regime stayed strong, and Mrs. Song proved herself to be a model citizen and a perfect emblem of Kim Il-sung’s juche ideology. Drawing on Marxism-Leninism, Confucianism, and intense nationalism, juche encourages stoicism and intense self-reliance, completely rejecting dependence on others.

Through juche, Demick writes, Kim Il-sung hoped to build both a better country and better people. Seeking ways to establish total social control, he oversaw the creation of propaganda that would make him appear to his people more like Santa Claus than Stalin: an omnipresent, ever-watchful, benevolent father figure who commanded respect, love, and devotion. Kim Il-sung, whose maternal uncle had been a minister in North Korea’s pre-Communist days, understood religion’s power to sway people. He began positioning himself as a godlike figure capable of supernatural feats—and presented his son, Kim Jong-il, as a Christ figure who possessed similar powers. As Demick explains Kim Il-sung’s coordinated effort to make himself a living god in the eyes of his people, she urges readers to understand the level of total indoctrination that assails isolated North Koreans every hour of every day.

In 1972, the Workers’ Party began distributing lapel pins bearing Kim Il-sung’s image. All North Koreans were required to wear them over their hearts. Additionally, all homes in the country were required to keep framed portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on their walls—but forbidden from hanging any other images. Inspectors from a special police force, the Public Standards Police, dropped in on homes at random to ensure the pictures were hung prominently and well-maintained. Mrs. Song was more than happy to follow these stringent rules—she believed in the party’s aphorism that “loyalty and filial devotion are the supreme qualities of a revolutionary.”

When Oak-hee reached adolescence, Mrs. Song’s life, which revolved around the regime, began to change. Oak-hee was rebellious and irritable. She felt that the volunteering associated with her “patriotic duty” to her country was pointless and mind-numbing. She bragged about coming up with ways to get out of her duties, which worried her mother. Chango-bo helped get Oak-hee a good job with a local propaganda department after she graduated high school. There, she enjoyed the easy work and soon agreed to marry a young Korean People’s Army employee, Choi Yong-su, who was a shoo-in for the Workers’ Party. The two wed in 1988 in front of a statue of Kim Il-sung, as most young couples did, and enjoyed a happy wedding feast. Soon after, however, Yong-su developed an alcohol problem, began abusing Oak-hee, and was rejected from the Party—but there was nothing Mrs. Song could do.

Mrs. Song’s son, Nam-oak, was recruited for a special athletic school in Pyongyang at a young age. Mrs. Song was proud—but as the years passed, Nam-oak’s visits home became less frequent and he himself grew more distant. Mrs. Song learned that Nam-oak had an older girlfriend in Chongjin—on visits home, he would stay at her apartment. Mrs. Song knew that by seeing an older woman and engaging in premarital sex, her son was greatly endangering his chances for future entry into the Workers’ Party.

Things got even worse for Mrs. Song in the late 1980s when Chang-bo applied for a permit for a television from his work unit. He was granted the permit, and the family got a TV preloaded with government channels that broadcast state propaganda and movies produced by Kim Jong-il at all hours. They often allowed neighbors over to watch the television. One evening, while watching a report on a factory supposedly made huge numbers of fine rubber boots, Chang-bo laughed and asked where his children’s boots were if there were so many to go around. A neighbor reported Chang-bo to the head of the inminban, who passed the information on to the Ministry for the Protection of State Security.  Changbo was arrested and interrogated by state agents for three days. When he returned home, his wife railed against him for jeopardizing all they had.

Chang-bo and Mrs. Song were both grateful that because of their relatively high positions in society, he’d gotten off easy. But Chang-bo, a journalist who had occasional access to foreign media—which he sanitized and spun for North Korean consumption as part of his work—soon began questioning the regime. While Chang-bo commiserated with a likeminded coworker one night in the privacy of his own home, Oak-hee overheard and told her father she agreed with him. Chang-bo and Oak-hee began having frequent, secret conversations about what was really going on in the rest of the world. Chang-bo supplied Oak-hee with facts about South Korea’s economic greatness and Communism’s failure all over the world. Chang-bo and Oak-hee were very careful to never have such conversations when Mrs. Song—“the true believer”—was at home.