Nothing to Envy: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

By 1990, the Soviet Union was falling apart, the Berlin Wall had come down, and Communist regimes around the world were being dismantled and replaced with capitalist systems. But in the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea, Communism continued to reign supreme. North Korean media reported on the weakness of the nations whose regimes had crumbled and reassured citizens that Kim Il-sung would keep North Korea on its own path. Mrs. Song believed these reports, willing herself to disregard the voice inside that told her something was terribly wrong.

Electricity was becoming increasingly unreliable in Chongjin. At first, the power would simply flicker every once in a while—but within a few months, it shut off completely, as did running water. Mrs. Song began collecting water from a public well each morning and walking miles to work because the electric tram that normally ferried her there was now almost always out of service. At the clothing factory where Mrs. Song worked, shipments of fabric began to slow, and then they stopped all together.

The factory managers sent workers out on “special projects,” which were really just scavenging missions to hunt for things that could be sold or bartered for food—things like scrap metal and dog feces, the latter of which could be used as fertilizer. Mrs. Song knew she couldn’t quit her job—she needed the coupons she received from her employer in order to receive her food rations. Soon, bosses began filling days with mandatory lectures on Kim Il-sung’s life and exploits. When the electricity became too unreliable for even that, a factory manager called Mrs. Song into her office and suggested she find some “other way” of bringing in money. She wasn’t suggesting prostitution—she was suggesting Mrs. Song work on the black market.

Buying and selling things on the black market was illegal in North Korea, but the trade nevertheless went on in lots behind apartment complexes and other remote communal spaces. In theory, Demick writes, North Koreans are not supposed to need to shop—their government is supposed to provide them with everything they need. Salaries are unbelievably low, and work is generally compensated in the form of food rations. Major purchases such as watches and televisions must be approved by one’s work unit.

While North Korea’s food distribution system, Demick writes, did seem to work for a time in the 1960s and 1970s, the entire country’s economy was propped up on lies. Supervisors and officials made up statistics about agricultural and industrial production to save their own skins from coming under fire from the regime. The lies were so prevalent at every level of the supply chain, Demick suggests, that not even Kim Il-sung could pinpoint the moment when the economy went into free-fall.

Though North Korea affected a self-sufficient stance rooted in juche, it was always dependent on subsidized rice, fertilizer, medicine, and transportation equipment from its Communist allies. The country wasted significant resources on its disproportionately large defense budget—despite not having been to war since 1953, the North Korea of the early 1990s had over 1 million military servicemembers. When Kim Jong-il assumed control of the military in 1991, he introduced the concept of songun, or “military first,” and oversaw the production and stockpiling of plutonium so that North Korea could have a “nuclear deterrent” against American forces. The preparations for creating nuclear weapons further ate into the country’s budget. North Korea was $10 billion dollars in debt by the early 1990s, and its allies stopped sending resources. Without fuel imports, the electricity stopped. The coal mines shut down. Collective agricultural farms could not sustain their crops.  

In the early years of the 1990s, Mrs. Song began to notice that her weekly food rations were being cut further and further down. There was hardly any more rice, only corn and barley. The regime reported that the government was stockpiling food to send to their “starving South Korean” neighbors. The regime claimed that the U.S. had instituted a blockade against North Korea and was keeping out food, and that the “Arduous March” North Korea was now enduring was a chance to demonstrate one’s patriotism. Billboards encouraged citizens to cut back to two meals a day. A television station showed a documentary about a man whose stomach burst from overeating. Newspapers reported that a bumper crop was on the way soon. North Korean citizens, isolated and constantly surveilled, had no choice but to believe what they were told and hope for the best.

Mrs. Song was the head of her neighborhood’s inminban. She reported to a woman named Comrade Kang from the Ministry for Protection of State Security. As the food shortage went on, Mrs. Song noticed that Comrade Kang was almost desperate for Mrs. Song to report to her about people who were complaining the shortages, even encouraging Mrs. Song to complain to her neighbors first in order to bait them into saying bad things about the regime. Overwhelmed, exhausted, and hungry, Mrs. Song realized that she would need to start selling her belongings on the black market to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, in September of 1993, Kim Ji-eun—then a medical graduate doing her residency—accompanied her family to an orchard owned by a collective farm to scavenge for pears. A group of wandering orphans including a young boy named Kim Hyuck, had already descended upon the farm and picked it bare. Kim Ji-eun and her family found only one rotten pear on the ground, took it home, and split it amongst themselves. The next day, Kim Ji-eun would remember later, was the first day in her life she went without food.