Nothing to Envy: Epilogue Summary & Analysis

At noon on December 19th, 2011, the North Korean regime broadcasted a news bulletin: Kim Jong-il was dead of heart failure. The government and the people, Demick writes, followed the precise “choreography” of Kim Il-sung’s death down to the tiniest detail: a 10-day mourning period ensued once again; once again, people took to the streets to wail and scream. Kim Jong-un, an unlikely choice to ascend to the status of Great Leader as Kim Jong-il’s third son, became the world’s youngest head of state. Demick notes that in her continuing interviews with refugees, many expressed ambivalence or anger toward Kim Jong-il, whom they blamed for the famine, but felt optimism about Kim Jong-un’s ability to open up North Korea and change things for the better.

Kim Jong-un looked, for a time, like a new kind of leader: he and his wife appeared in public together often, and he seemed open to economic reform. Within a year of his ascendance to power, however, Kim Jong-un began launching satellites and missiles and conducting underground nuclear tests. U.N. sanctions came down swiftly; in response, North Korea ripped up the 1953 armistice and threatened strikes against the United States. The U.S. bolstered its military presence in the Pacific, while China supported the U.N. sanctions.

Kim Jong-un’s strange behavior grew more erratic over the years. In December 2013, he had his uncle, the second-most-powerful man in the country, executed; by the end of the year, five of the seven men who had dominated his father’s regime were dead, too. Kim Jong-un focused on hosting American basketball player Dennis Rodman and rebuilding amusement parks in Pyongyang. He also oversaw a cyberattack on Sony Pictures’s studio network in retaliation for the studio’s production The Interview, a comedy centering around a pair of journalists, played by Seth Rogen and James Franco, who infiltrate North Korea and assassinate Kim Jong-un.

Though Kim Jong-un’s antics since his rise to power have often been strange or ludicrous, North Korea’s technological and nuclear capabilities are, Demick admits, frightening. North Korea, she says, has begun to show a “faint economic pulse”—in 2012 and 2013, its economy grew by tiny percentages. North Koreans are allowed to have mobile phones, now, though service is only available through one state-approved provider, and though phones can’t make calls outside the country or connect to the internet. Kim Jong-un seems to be making an effort, Demick observes, to “pry open the economy without loosening the regime’s grip.”

North Korea seems to be trying to attract tourists by making changes to the showcase capital of Pyongyang and conducting renovations in cities like Chongjin—yet Demick suggests that for most North Koreans, nothing is really changing. She recalls some strange memories from her 2005 trip to Pyongyang: after she and her fellow journalists left the hotel in which they were staying, a U.N. representative also staying there followed up with Demick to tell her that as soon as the press left, the lights went out and stayed out. Demick also recalls seeing kochebi wandering along country roads just outside Pyongyang, searching for food and shelter. After interviewing recent defectors as late as 2012 and 2013, she writes, she believes Kim Jong-un is squandering his people’s hopes and goodwill by doing frivolous things like building up theme parks in the midst of an ongoing food shortage.

Demick’s most recent interviewees also tell her that cash bribes, violent crime, and drug addiction—specifically methamphetamine addiction—are all on the rise. People are still hungry, and more and more citizens are homeless. One new interviewee told Demick that she estimates hardly any North Koreans actually feel any belief in or loyalty to the regime anymore; “It is belief in life,” she told Demick, that keeps North Korea’s people going. Demick is uncertain of how much longer the situation in North Korea will hold—it has defied countless predictions about how long the regime would last over the years. Many of Demick’s interviewees, such as Jun-sang, have expressed great despair over North Korea’s unbelievable, inconceivable staying power.

Demick provides an update on the lives of her original interviewees. Mrs. Song and Oak-hee have brought all the younger members of their family—Oak-hee was even able to get her daughter out. Kim Ji-eun has her medical exams and become certified as a doctor in South Korea; she, too, was able to get her child out of North Korea. Mi-ran lives in a trendy, upscale neighborhood and has begun to learn English; she often volunteers at a reorientation center for newly arrived North Koreans just north of Seoul. Jun-sang lives a quiet life in North Korea and runs a small business; he is married to a woman who also defected. Kim Hyuck obtained his master’s degree and began work on a Ph.D. in North Korean affairs; he has testified publicly before the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea.

Demick believes that Hyuck is the most public-facing member of the group because he has no living family. Many other defectors in South Korea, Demick writes, eventually become shy and reticent; they worry about being blackmailed by spies or facing government retaliation against their families back home should they speak out. Though these individuals have left North Korea, Demick states, they still cannot completely escape its terrors.