North Korea has been in the news a lot in the past year (due to its recent skirmishes with South Korea and its continued drive to build nuclear weapons). But I’m guessing that the average American doesn’t know much at all about the country—and especially about its citizens. Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea provides a wealth of information.
Demick—who lived and worked in Seoul, South Korea, as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times—conducted extensive interviews with North Korean defectors to construct this book. She wisely focuses on the stories of just five or six former North Koreans, using rich detail to capture the lives of ordinary citizens in one of the world’s last communist regimes: a young pediatrician, a university student at the country’s top college, a mother and model citizen, an orphan who turns to crime, a kindergarten teacher who rises above her family’s “tainted blood” to a respectable profession.
Working from the Korean War in the 1950s (which ended with the separation of the Korean peninsula into two countries, an act which suddenly separated family members) to the present, Demick traces her subjects’ lives through the rule of Kim Il-Sung, through devastating famine, through the loss of jobs and electricity, through hunger and homelessness, through black market capitalism, and finally through escape. (All of this while South Korea becomes one of the most technologically-advanced countries in the world.)
Nothing to Envy is incredibly informative, but it is also incredibly touching. Perhaps one of the most powerful stories in the book is that of Mi-Ran and Jun-Sang. She was a young woman from a “tainted family” (as Demick explains, North Korea under Kim Il-Sung still had a strong caste system) who lived with her parents and siblings in a two-room apartment in an impoverished town in the north of the country. He was a young man from a better family who earned the rare privilege to attend a top university in Pyongyang. When the couple fell in love, they couldn’t risk being seen together (for fear that Mi-Ran’s low family status would damage Jun-Sang’s future). For over a decade, their only “dates” were long walks through the dark city (which—due to the lack of electricity for all but an hour or two a day—was truly dark); their only physical contact was holding each other’s hand on those walks.
As a reader, you can’t help but care about these men and women. You will learn, but you will also feel.
