Nothing to Envy. Plenty to Fear.

Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea is a really hard book to read. Not the writing — it’s wonderfully written — but the subject is so dark and depressing that I had to keep putting it down and stepping away. But it’s hard because it’s true — people are living in fear and famine in North Korea, and if we don’t learn about it, how will anything change?

“It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn’t realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.”

Demick interviewed many North Koreans — some still in their home country, many others who escaped to China or South Korea — to write Nothing to Envy. She focuses on six main characters, and tells their stories. How they grew up in the doctrine of Kim Il-sung, and how his death affected them. Then how his son, Kim Jong-il, and took a bad situation — massive poverty, famine, lack of education and work — and made it worse. These stories are rough — millions of people starved to death or died of diseases they were too weak to fight off in the 1990s, and things aren’t really any better now.

Demick makes the point that we make fun of North Korea, and its cult-like worship of Kim Jong-un by its brainwashed citizens — but how could they possibly know any different? She shows how propaganda by the and the government controlled every aspect of these peoples’ lives, and explains how that affected their perception of everything. Even those who escaped have trouble assimilating, even years later. It’s really an incredible book — very well written, very well researched.