Nothing to Envy Summary

In Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, American journalist Barbara Demick blends historical context, content from interviews with North Korean defectors, and her own imagination as she recreates the journeys of six refugees who escaped from North Korea in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Demick begins the book by describing the fraught history of Korea in the 20th century. Prior to the end of World War II, Korea was one united peninsula, occupied by the Japanese. After the Allies won the war, American forces feared that a power vacuum in the wake of the end of the Japanese occupation would create strife—so they arbitrarily divided the peninsula into two countries along the 38th parallel, offering the northern half to the Soviets and occupying the southern half themselves. Both governments hated the division. In June of 1950, Kim Il-sung, the leader of North Korea, stormed across the border with Soviet tanks and began the Korean War. The bloody but ultimately fruitless war lasted three years—by the end, North Korean forces had been pushed back even further beyond the bounds of the 38th parallel, and the peninsula remained divided. The two governments signed an armistice—essentially a cease-fire which offered no real resolution to the division in the region.

Kim Il-sung assumed totalitarian control over North Korea, took on the title of Great Leader, and created a Communist, isolationist, hyper-militant hermit state which revolved around the concept of juche, or extreme self-reliance. Kim introduced stringent background checks and the concept of songbun, a kind of feudal social hierarchy, to reward those loyal to his regime while punishing those whose ancestors came from South Korea, those who spoke out against his leadership, and those whose behavior appeared even slightly “anti-state.” Kim sent hordes of people off to gulags while instituting local inminban, or people’s watch groups, to spy on their neighbors and snitch on those who seemed suspect. All of daily life in North Korea revolved around propaganda that glorified Kim Il-sung while painting all outside forces—especially Americans—as pillaging “bastards” who devoted their lives to sabotaging North Korean interests. North Koreans were taught from infancy to revere Kim Il-sung as a god, to hate the outside world, and to sacrifice all they had for the good of the regime and the Workers’ Party.

By the 1990s, Communist regimes around the globe began to collapse. North Korea’s failing Communist allies demanded repayment for long-standing debts in order to stay afloat. North Korea couldn’t pay their debts, and their economy collapsed. Workers and farmers around the country had long known the hermit kingdom could not sustain itself—but they often fudged numbers to their superiors, who then lied to their superiors, creating a bedrock of instability that, when tested, plunged the country into a miserable famine that would ultimately claim the lives of hundreds of thousands—if not millions. In 1994, Kim Il-sung died, sending the country into renewed throes of uncertainty and devastation. His son Kim Jong-il took hold of the country, instituting mass military purges and ordering crackdowns on any anti-state activities—including the black markets that were blossoming all over the country as desperate citizens bought and sold anything they could to survive.

Over the course of the book, Demick introduces the occasionally intersecting storylines of six defectors, sharing their experiences throughout the infamous North Korean famine of the mid-1990s. She tells the stories of Mi-ran and Jun-sang, a pair of young lovers who took to writing love letters back and forth when they were separated by their respective college plans. As the famine descended upon their families, both Mi-ran and Jun-sang began to question the regime and consider defecting—but because of the constant atmosphere of surveillance in North Korea, neither felt comfortable sharing their most intimate thoughts with the other, especially via the carefully monitored postal service. Demick describes the life of Mrs. Song, the deeply loyal wife of a prominent Workers’ Party member, Chang-bo, who found herself faced with increasingly impossible decisions as her rebellious children Oak-hee and Nam-oak grew weary of the regime’s refusal to acknowledge the famine even as more and more people starved and died. When Mrs. Song lost her mother-in-law, Chang-bo, and Nam-oak to the famine in the span of a year, she grew despondent—and found herself turning to capitalist black-market commerce. After Oak-hee escaped her abusive marriage and fled to China—with a couple of stints in labor camps in between—Mrs. Song followed her daughter across the border, where she began to realize that life in North Korea looked very different from the outside world. Demick tells the story of Kim Hyuck, a kochebi or “wandering swallow” whose father placed him in an orphanage at the height of the famine. Hyuck survived on scraps for years, traveling around with gangs of orphans and abandoned children for protection before realizing, as a teenager, that he could make money selling goods across the border in China. He made many trips back and forth—but when he was eventually caught and placed in a grueling labor camp, he knew he had to defect for good. Demick also tells the story of Dr. Kim, a physician with dreams of Workers’ Party membership who watched countless patients—mostly children—starve and die as North Korea failed to import medicine or supplies, let alone food, for its suffering citizens. When Dr. Kim learned that her superiors were spying on her, suspecting her of deception in spite of her deep loyalty to the regime, she consulted a list of Chinese relatives her dying father had given to her and decided to escape at last.

Demick’s interviews with Mrs. Song, Oak-hee, Mi-ran, Jun-sang, Kim Hyuck, and Dr. Kim all took place between 2004 and 2009—some of them had just arrived in South Korea when she began interviewing them, while others had lived there for years already. As Demick interviewed each subject about their childhood, their struggles during the famine, their experiences risking their lives to defect, and their often-painful periods of adjustment to life outside North Korea, she crafted their stories into narratives that would reveal to readers the intricacies of what ordinary life in North Korea looks like. Demick alternates between tales as she examines how propaganda and misinformation have long served to control North Korean citizens’ thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors; how surveillance and a lack of trust impacts the formation of long-term intimate relationships between friends, lovers, and even family members; and how scarcity, starvation, and lack push ordinary people to do extraordinary things in order to survive.

In an epilogue written in 2015, Demick comments on the newest developments in North Korea, including the ascendancy of the young and volatile Kim Jong-un to the role of Supreme Leader following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, as well as the rollout of North Korean nuclear tests, missile strikes, and cyberattacks aimed at the United States. She also notes the ongoing food, electricity, and resource shortages that continue to plague the citizens of North Korea, even as their government focuses its funds on beautifying the showcase capital of Pyongyang to attract intrigued tourists who will hopefully sustain its economy.

Demick checks back in with her interviewees, as well. Though they are all doing well in their personal and professional lives, and though some of them speak publicly before human rights organizations and the United Nations about their trials, none of them, she writes, could ever have imagined that the North Korean regime would have the staying power it currently has. With no end to the regime in sight, there is nothing for defectors and refugees to do but wait—and to try their best to escape the trauma, shame, and survivor’s guilt that continues to hold sway over their own lives.