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Winner of the 2010 Samuel Johnson Prize
Chapter One
If you look at satellite photographs of the far east by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Next to this mysterious black hole, South Korea, Japan, and now China fairly gleam with prosperity. Even from hundreds of miles above, the billboards, the headlights and streetlights, the neon of the fast- food chains appear as tiny white dots signifying people going about their business as twenty-first-century energy consumers. Then, in the middle of it all, an expanse of blackness nearly as large as England. It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.
North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Hungry people scaled utility poles to pilfer bits of copper wire to swap for food. When the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed up by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.
When outsiders stare into the void that is today's North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has been lost dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road—the skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country.
North Koreans beyond middle age remember well when they had more electricity (and for that matter food) than their pro-American cousins in South Korea, and that compounds the indignity of spending their nights sitting in the dark. Back in the 1990s, the U.S. offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons program. But the deal fell apart after the Bush administration accused the North Koreans of reneging on their promises. North Koreans complain bitterly about the darkness, which they still blame on the U.S. sanctions. They can't read at night. They can't watch television. "We have no culture without electricity," a burly North Korean security guard once told me accusingly
But the dark has advantages of its own. Especially if you are a teenager dating somebody you can't be seen with.
When adults go to bed, sometimes as early as 7:00 p.m. in winter, it is easy enough to slip out of the house. The darkness confers measures of privacy and freedom as hard to come by in North Korea as electricity. Wrapped in a magic cloak of invisibility, you can do what you like without worrying about the prying eyes of parents, neighbors, or secret police.
I met many North Koreans who told me how much they learned to love the darkness, but it was the story of one teenage girl and her boyfriend that impressed me most. She was twelve years old when she met a young man three years older from a neighboring town. Her family was low-ranking in the byzantine system of social controls in place in North Korea. To be seen in public together would damage the boy's career prospects as well as her reputation as a virtuous young woman. So their dates consisted entirely of long walks in the dark. There was nothing else to do anyway; by the time they started dating in earnest in the early 1990s, none of the restaurants or cinemas were operating because of the lack of power.
They would meet after dinner. The girl had instructed her boyfriend not to knock on the front door and risk questions from her older sisters, younger brother, or the nosy neighbors. They lived squeezed together in a long, narrow building behind which was a common outhouse shared by a dozen families. The houses were set off from the street by a white wall, just above eye level in height. The boy found a spot behind the wall where nobody would notice him as the light seeped out of the day. The clatter of the neighbors washing the dishes or using the toilet masked the sound of his footsteps. He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn't matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.
The girl would emerge just as soon as she could extricate herself from the family. Stepping outside, she would peer into the darkness, unable to see him at first but sensing with certainty his presence. She wouldn't bother with makeup—no one needs it in the dark. Sometimes she just wore her school uniform: a royal blue skirt cut modestly below the knees, a white blouse and red bow tie, all of it made from a crinkly synthetic material. She was young enough not to fret about her appearance.
At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices would gradually rise to whispers and then to normal conversational levels as they left the village and relaxed into the night. They maintained an arm's-length distance from each other until they were sure they wouldn't be spotted.
Just outside the town, the road headed into a thicket of trees to the grounds of a hot-spring resort. It was once a resort of some renown; its 130-degree waters used to draw busloads of Chinese tourists in search of cures for arthritis and diabetes, but by now it rarely operated. The entrance featured a rectangular reflecting pond rimmed by a stone wall. The paths cutting through the grounds were lined with pine trees, Japanese maples, and the girl's favorites—the ginkgo trees that in autumn shed delicate mustard-yellow leaves in the shape of perfect Oriental fans. On the surrounding hills, the trees had been decimated by people foraging for firewood, but the trees at the hot springs were so beautiful that the locals respected them and left them alone.
Otherwise the grounds were poorly maintained. The trees were untrimmed, stone benches cracked, paving stones missing like rotten teeth. By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days. But the imperfections were not so glaring at night. The hot-springs pool, murky and choked with weeds, was luminous with the reflection of the sky above.
The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. In the old days, North Korean factories contributed their share to the cloud cover, but no longer. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars etched into its sky.
The young couple would walk through the night, scattering ginkgo leaves in their wake. What did they talk about? Their families, their classmates, books they had read—whatever the topic, it was endlessly fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.
This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.
by the time I met this girl, she was a woman, thirty-one years old. Mi-ran (as I will call her for the purposes of this book) had defected six years earlier and was living in South Korea. I had requested an interview with her for an article I was writing about North Korean defectors.
In 2004, I was posted in Seoul as bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. My job was to cover the entire Korean peninsula. South Korea was easy. It was the twelfth-largest economic power, a thriving if sometimes raucous democracy, with one of the most aggressive press corps in Asia. Government officials gave reporters their mobile telephone numbers and didn't mind being called at off-hours. North Korea was at the other extreme. North Korea's communications with the outside world were largely confined to tirades spat out by the Korean Central News Agency, nicknamed the "Great Vituperator" for its ridiculous bombast about the "imperialist Yankee bastards." The United States had fought on South Korea's behalf in the 1950–1953 Korean War, the first great conflagration of the Cold War, and still had forty thousand troops stationed there. For North Korea, it was as though the war had never ended, the animus was so raw and fresh.
U.S. citizens were only rarely admitted to North Korea and American journalists even less frequently. When I finally got a visa to visit Pyongyang in 2005, myself and a colleague were led along a well-worn path of monuments to the glorious leadership of Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung. At all times, we were chaperoned by two skinny men in dark suits, both named Mr. Park. (North Korea takes the precaution of assigning two "minders" to foreign visitors, one to watch the other so that they can't be bribed.) The minders spoke the same stilted rhetoric of the official news service. ("Thanks to our dear leader Kim Jong-il" was a phrase inserted with strange regularity into our conversations.) They rarely made eye contact when they spoke to us, and I wondered if they believed what they said. What were they really thinking? Did they love their leader as much as they claimed? Did they have enough food to eat? What did they do when they came home from work? What was it like to live in the world's most repressive regime?
If I wanted answers to my questions, it was clear I wasn't going to get them inside North Korea. I had to talk to people who had left— defectors.
In 2004, Mi-ran was living in Suwon, a city twenty miles south of Seoul, bright and chaotic. Suwon is home to Samsung Electronics and a cluster of manufacturing complexes producing objects most North Koreans would be stumped to identify—computer monitors, CD-ROMs, digital televisions, flash-memory sticks. (A statistic one often sees quoted is that the economic disparity between the Koreas is at least four times greater than that between East and West Germany at the time of German reunification in 1990.) The place is loud and cluttered, a cacophony of mismatched colors and sounds. As in most South Korean cities, the architecture is an amalgam of ugly concrete boxes topped with garish signage. High-rise apartments radiate for miles away from a congested downtown lined with Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Huts and a host of Korean knockoffs. The backstreets are filled with love hotels with names like Eros Motel and Love-Inn Park that advertise rooms by the hour. The customary state of traffic is gridlock as thousands of Hyundais—more fruit of the economic miracle— try to plow their way between home and the malls. Because the city is in a perpetual state of gridlock, I took the train down from Seoul, a thirty-minute ride, then crawled along in a taxi to one of the few tranquil spots in town, a grilled beef-ribs restaurant across from an eighteenth-century fortress.
At first I didn't spot Mi-ran. She looked quite unlike the other North Koreans I had met. There were by that time some six thousand North Korean defectors living in South Korea and there were usually telltale signs of their difficulty in assimilating—skirts worn too short, labels still attached to new clothes—but Mi-ran was indistinguishable from a South Korean. She wore a chic brown sweater set and matching knit trousers. It gave me the impression (which like many others would prove wrong) that she was rather demure. Her hair was swept back and neatly held in place with a rhinestone barrette. Her impeccable appearance was marred only by a smattering of acne on her chin and a heaviness around the middle, the result of being three months pregnant. A year earlier she had married a South Korean, a civilian military employee, and they were expecting their first child.
I had asked Mi-ran to lunch in order to learn more about North Korea's school system. In the years before her defection, she had worked as a kindergarten teacher in a mining town. In South Korea she was working toward a graduate degree in education. It was a serious conversation, at times grim. The food on our table went uneaten as she described watching her five- and six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean. Kim Il-sung, who ruled from the time the peninsula was severed at the end of World War II until his death in 1994, was to be revered as a god, and Kim Jong- il, his son and successor, as the son of a god, a Christ-like figure. Mi-ran had become a harsh critic of the North Korean system of brainwashing.
After an hour or two of such conversation, we veered into what might be disparaged as typical girl talk. There was something about Mi- ran's self-possession and her candor that allowed me to ask more personal questions. What did young North Koreans do for fun? Were there any happy moments in her life in North Korea? Did she have a boyfriend there?
"It's funny you ask," she said. "I had a dream about him the other night."
She described the boy as tall and limber with shaggy hair flopping over his forehead. After she got out of North Korea, she was delighted to discover that there was a South Korean teen idol by the name of Yu Jun-sang who looked quite like her ex-boyfriend. (As a result, I have used the pseudonym Jun-sang to identify him.) He was smart, too, a future scientist studying at one of the best universities in Pyongyang. That was one of the reasons they could not be seen in public. Their relationship could have damaged his career prospects.
There are no love hotels in North Korea. Casual intimacy between the sexes is discouraged. Still, I tried to pry gently about how far the relationship went.
This book literally made me cry, which is good. How one could read of North Koreans living in such horrid conditions, cutting grass and weeds to make some awful soup, because they are so hungry and not be sad or mad is beyond me. On page 112 we read of a young female doctor who is trying against all odds to help her people. 'The problem was with the food. Housewives started to pick weeds and wild grasses to add to their soups to create the illusion of vegetables. Corn was increasingly the staple again instead of rice but people were adding leaves, husks, stems, and cobs to make it go further. That was okay for adults, but it couldn't be digested by the young stomachs of children. In the hospital doctors discussed this problem among themselves, and gave the mothers what amounted to cooking advise. 'If you use grass or bark, you have to grind it very fine, then cook it a very long time so it is soft a d easy to eat.' Dr. Kim told them.' One reads how the doctors harvest herbs in the surrounding areas and try to make their own medicines and herbal treatments, because they have no other choice.
Another problem one reads about is pellagra which is caused by lack of niacin in the diet and often seen in people who only eat corn. The hospitals which may have had antibiotics years ago had none now. Mothers didn't eat enough to produce breast milk so baby and toddlers died. And if they could have afforded rice they would have tried to make rice milk, but there was no rice. Think of any horrid situation a country who doesn't care about her citizens can have and this is North Korea.
9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I'm only about a third of the way through this book and it is hard to put down. I always knew and heard of the horrors of living in North Korea, but Ms. Demick really brings the experiences alive. Great writing and journalism. She portrays the characters of the people so well and I was starting to cheer for them when some of them had the lightbulb go off about the true nature of their dictator. That they started getting the slightest flicker that something was not quite right. I had no idea that every thought, word, and action were so closely scrutinized and reported. And what really got me was how much their daily food alotments were being rationed, and even water. and the people still would not (could not) complain about their great leader. And they didn't even have any paper to write on. What a criminal dictatorship N. Korea is.
6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Captain_Nemo
Posted February 6, 2010
This book was heartbreaking, intense and deeply thought provoking. Well at least it was for me. Life in North Korea seems so crushingly hard. Reading this book gave me a much greater appreciation for even the most basic things in my life. Demick did an outstanding job of shedding light on this mysterious country. I am very glad I read it.
6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I've never had a particular interest in North Korea, but I'm an avid dystopian literature fan, and because of that I was drawn to this book to read more about the parallels between George Orwell's "1984" and present-day North Korea. What I found was a truly amazing tale of a half-dozen defectors who recount their day-to-day lives in the last truly Communist enclave.
Regardless of your general inclination toward this type of book, if you enjoy a good story, this book delivers. Demick makes North Korea come alive, using multiple sources to rebuild accounts of the early lives of the defectors she interviewed. Not everyone she spoke with made it into the book as central characters, but she uses pieces of her many contacts to build a full tale. For example, in the notes section of the book, she mentions how one defector's explanation of the Chongjin geography was used as she told the story of another defector.
I truly had no idea the depths of suffering that North Koreans have endured. After finishing the book, I went on to YouTube to re-watch footage of mourners of Kim Jong-Il, and I had a whole new understanding of why they were behaving in that way. The truth is devastating, and this book illuminates it in a rare way.
From tales of strange customs and shocking Communist rules, to amusing anecdotes of some of the first days in South Korea for defectors, you'll be totally fascinated. Highly recommended.
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted June 21, 2010
This book is a must read for all Americans. This book gives you insight into the power of information. By limiting access to truth & information, North Korea is able to control their people by providing a distorted picture of the outside world. Finally we have a view of what life is like inside the most controlled country in the world. It is hard to imagine a country without animals or vegetation because the people have foraged everything in an attempt to fend off starvation. Reading this book gives the current tensions a new perspective.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted February 20, 2010
Solid read from front to back. Really grabs your attention and draws you in. I think the best words to use are eye opening
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I read this after reading Escape from Camp 14, for some comparison. It was an excellent choice. The fact that several of these folk featured had no intention of escaping, but couldn't believe how they'd been taken in when they did was fascinating. It was a relief to hear in the end of the book that things are changing, although sounds like it will be a painful excrutiating process before one could call it progress. These poor people, with a leader who treats them all like toys. Horrific.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Agespeaks
Posted February 22, 2010
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Living in the United States I realize how fortunate I am that I was born in the "greatest nation on God's green earth"(Medved). Reading about a country who brain washed their citizens into thinking that they were the envy of the world as they saw eachother fall over from starvation is mind baffling in this day and age and yet it happened. This was (is) happening to citizens of the world as we are fortunate enough to have plenty to eat and drink without even thinking twice about it. Ms. Demick was very descriptive in her writing transporting me to North Korea I felt as if I saw the atrocities brought on by the communist regime with my own two eyes. This book makes me want to take action and do something to help others less fortunate.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Some of the stories in this book are not for the faint-hearted. It describes the daily horrors that the people of N. Korea faced and continue to face under the regime of a resolute and fearful dictator. For anyone who desires to know more about the Koreas, they should read this book.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted January 31, 2013
I read Nothing to Envy as part of a book group. Everyone in the group said they probably would not have picked up the book if it hadn't been a group selection, but everyone was glad that they had read it. The author, Barbara Demick, takes an unusual approach to telling a story about life in North Korea since the Korean War. She gives a detailed account of the lives of six residents of a North Korean city, Chongjin, from the 60's and 70's through 2009. While describing how they try to cope with the deteriorating economic situation, famine, and political repression, she provides insight into the history, culture, and social norms of the people. The conditions are grim and the book reveals the incredible courage of the North Koreans. Reading this book gave me a much better understanding of the current tensions between North Korean and the U.S., South Korea, Japan and China. I highly recommend this book.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.What an amazing book! Written by a journalist living in South Korea, it follows the lives of six North Korean defectors from childhood to present day. It weaves a story of loyalty, honor and personal conviction while tossing in some rebellion and acceptance. It’s not a happy story and at parts can be hard to stomach (reality often is), but it is definitely worth reading.
What I liked most about this book is that it tells the story from the point of view of the North Koreans, leaving out judgment, American politics and every preconceived notion one might have going into the book. It is not a book designed to paint North Korea as anything but what the people involved believe it to be. The reality can be, at times, unnerving, but it is refreshing to read about North Korea without the brackets of international judgment around it.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.An educating, yet disturbing account of the lives of people who have escaped from North Korea. Demick has traveled to North and South Korea many times and has mixed feelings about the state of these countries. North Korea in good times can only produce 60 percent of the food it needs to feed and does not import the rest. South Korea does provide refuge for people escaping from North Korea but it's not a simple as we might imagine for them to adjust to a different lifestyle. The government of North Korea does everything in its power to suppress people and if an individual commits crimes against the government the punishment and shame stays with the family for 3 generations. In our global, progressive world it is nearly incomprehensible that the horrors of how this country treats its people continue to thrive. A few of us may wonder where God is in this mess.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted October 21, 2012
Beautiful account of the endurance of human spirit against al odds!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted April 28, 2012
Best current book on North Korea out there. Avoid Escape from Camp 14 and read this if you only have time to read one book on North Korea!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted April 22, 2012
I love North Korea as a last vestige of the Cold War. However, after reading this book, I find it much more difficult to joke about it. Incredible read. Great, great book! I recommend it to anyone who wants a dramatic non-fiction read. Well done!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted April 22, 2012
This is a heartbreaking book. The suffering in North Korea is unimaginable. This is a remarkable read. It gives tremendous, personal insight into the hermit kingdom.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 26, 2012
Curiosity added this book to my order. I'm so glad! The stories are interwoven and personal to a level that you cannot put this book down. Completely engrossing and enlightening!
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.The book, while only 300 pages, follows the lives of 6 defectors, from childhood into adulthood. Each made their escape in the late 90's, following the devastating famine. What makes the book especially heart-wrenching is exactly that which makes the defectors lives so hard: you watch, through the lives of these defectors, as the successful North Korean society of the late 60s falls away into absolute shambles.
In the truest sense of the word, North Korean society is Orwellian. Neighbors turning in neighbors, the chronic simultaneous fear and idolization of the state, true absolute governmental power, every aspect of the North Korean regime in all its despicable ignorance and failure is made painfully clear as each defector matures.
In short, this book is an exposee on a society rarely seen with an expertly done personal touch.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 8, 2013
This is a great story to read, and learn about the lives of those living in North Korea! The pain and suffering is astounding, but their resilience is amazing! This is a very insightful book!
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Posted April 19, 2013
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Overview
Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years-a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the unchallenged rise to power of his son, Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape never before seen, Demick brings to life what it means to be an average Korean citizen, living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today-an Orwellian world in which radio and television dials ...