Book Review by John Cairns

Editor's Note: Most book reviews appear elsewhere in this magazine. But the book examined here deserves greater prominence.

Journalist Barbara Demick's insightful, behind-the-barriers revelations about daily lives in broken-down, demented North Korea bear the title Nothing to Envy, Real Lives in North Korea (2010, Granta Books, London, 318 pages). A better choice would have been Nothing to Eat.

A foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, Demick used to live in Seoul, South Korea. From there, she repeatedly visited the isolated, secretive nation to the north.

“Even after I succeeded in getting into the country, I found that reporting was almost impossible,” Demick said. “Western journalists were assigned ‘minders’ whose job it was to make certain that no unauthorized conversations took place and visitors hewed to a carefully selected itinerary of monuments. There was no contact permitted with ordinary citizens. In photographs and on television, North Koreans appeared to be automations, goose-stepping in formation at military parades or performing gymnastics en masse in homage to the leadership. Staring at the photographs, I'd try to discern what was behind those blank faces.”

Obviously, “the strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely”. So what to do? “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.”

The author approached “ordinary” North Koreans who had escaped to find freedom, opportunities and adequate food. “In South Korea, I began to talk to North Koreans who had defected, escaping to South Korea or China, and a picture of real life in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea began to emerge.”

Befriending such people and telling a half-dozen of their stories in detail, the author slices away the supreme secrecy usually maintained by aging dictator Kim Jong-il and previously by his predecessor / father Kim Il-sung. She exposes the dilemma of 23 million people suffering, struggling and prematurely dying due to government policies that cripple their economy and verge on insanity. “Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty.”

Demick focuses on people from one city, namely Chongjin (population 500,000-plus). “I believed that I could verify facts more easily if I spoke to numerous people about one place,” she said. “I wanted that place to be far from the well-manicured sights that the North Korean government shows to foreign visitors.”

The few foreigners allowed to visit North Korea rarely can travel much past the “official” sites in Pyongyang, the “model-city” capital. Sights, sounds and stories in Chongjin would be entirely off-limits. By treading deep into a hidden land, Nothing To Envy qualifies as “ground-breaking".

Even in North Korea, Chongjin endures more isolation than most places. “...the drive between Chongjin and Pyongyang, just 250 miles apart, can take three days over the unpaved mountain roads with dangerous hairpin turns.”

The interviewees prove fascinating, none more so than former teenaged best friends (never-quite lovers) Mi-ran and Jun-sang who often secretly strolled together in the near-total darkness of North Korean nights. There's also an idealistic doctor, a homeless boy, a model factory worker and her rebellious daughter.

These people remember much about hunger. “Mi-ran was in high school when she first noticed that city people were taking trips to the countryside to scavenge for food.”

Teachers noticed changes in their students. “Their big heads lolled on top of scrawny necks; their delicate rib cages protruded over waists so small that she could encircle them with her hands. Some of them were starting to swell in the stomach.”

Of course, the interviewees knew hunger personally. “The first few days she'd gone without eating she'd felt so hungry she would have stolen food from a baby. But after four days or so, she felt nothing but a strange sensation that her body was not her own, that she was being lifted into the air and dropped down again.”

Desperate people struggle to survive. “They devised traps out of buckets and string to catch small animals in the field, draped nets over their balconies to snare sparrows. They educated themselves in the nutritive properties of plants.”

For many, such efforts failed. By 1998, an estimated 600,000 to two million North Koreans had died due to famine.

“Hardly a day went by that Mrs Song didn't stumble across the dead and dying. For all she had been through with her own family, she could not get used to the constant presence of death. Late one day on her way home from the market, she took a detour to the train station, hoping to find customers for some unsold cookies. Workers were sweeping up the station's plaza. A couple of men walked by, pulling a heavy wooden cart. Mrs Song looked to see what they were transporting. It was a heap of bodies, maybe six of them, people who had died at the station overnight. A few bony limbs flopped out of the cart.”

Readers even go along into a prison (labor camp). “Tied together with thick ropes, they marched through the town and into the mountains to the camp. An engine growled, and the heavy iron gate slowly creaked open to admit the new arrivals. Above the gate were quotations of Kim Il-sung. Hyuck was too intimidated to lift his eyes to read them.”

Others suffer a worse fate. “The condemned man was bound to a wooden stake at the eyes, the chest and the legs. The firing squad would aim to sever the ropes in order, three bullets in each location – nine in total, top to bottom. First the lifeless head would slump over so that the body would crumple in an orderly heap at the foot of the stake. Neat and efficient. It would look like the condemned was bowing in death as if to apologize.”

Why not fight back? “There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. Any anti-regime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins.”

Demick pauses to ponder sad history. “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.”

Everyone recalls when Kim Il-sung died in 1994. “Mrs Song went blank.... She rushed down the staircase and out into the courtyard of the building. Many of her neighbors had done the same. They were on their knees, banging their heads on the pavement. Their wails cut through the air like sirens.”

Ample attention goes to the warped notions of Kim Jong-il, the economy's complete collapse, onset of famine and endless waves of propaganda in praise of “Our Deal Leader". Slogans “leap out of the gray landscape”: “Kim Jong-il: Sun of the 21st Century", “We Will Do As the Party Tells Us” and “We Have Nothing to Envy in the World".

Why does anyone believe the lies and nonsense? “North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy during the 14-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent 50 years, every song, film, newspaper article and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung's divinity. Who could possibly resist?”

Worse, no one can be trusted. “There were spies everywhere. Neighbors denounced neighbors, friends denounced friends. Even lovers denounced each other.”

No wonder more people plucked up the courage for dangerous, illegal border-crossings. “The town is situated near one of the narrower stretches of the Tumen River and... was developing into one of the hubs for illegal border crossings into China. It was a growth industry, perhaps the only one in North Korea.”

After one defector, a long-suffering medical doctor, reaches rural China, she quickly discovers big differences. “On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer – it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr Kim couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark. Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.”

The words “nothing to envy” come from a “patriotic” song:

“Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world.
Our house is within the embrace of the Workers' Party.
We are all brothers and sisters.
Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet children do not need to be afraid.
Our father is here.
We have nothing to envy in this world.”

Another song favored in schools has an extra-catchy title, “Shoot the Yankee Bastards”.

“Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. Bang, bang, bang.”

Even when safely settled in South Korea, the defectors still have problems, albeit less serious ones. “He was desperately lonely. He had a hard time connecting with new people. If South Koreans were sympathetic toward him, he found them condescending. Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he'd get defensive when South Koreans criticized it. This was a common predicament for defectors.”

Past actions still take a toll. “She had steeled herself to walk by the bodies of the dead without breaking stride. She had learned to eat her lunch down to the last kernel of corn or grain of rice without pausing to grieve for the children she taught who would soon die of starvation. She was racked with guilt. Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.”

Books more analytical than this one highlight Kim Jong-il's lust for nuclear bombs. The different approach of telling about ordinary people in a nearly hopeless dilemma makes Nothing to Envy special.

Originally from New Jersey, Demick now works as her newspaper's bureau chief in Beijing. Earlier she represented the Philadelphia Inquirer in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Having been in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, she wrote an earlier book, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.

Demick devoted much of seven years to her chats with North Koreans. Anyone curious about the world's most secretive regime will be glad she did. She succeeds admirably to shine light onto streets and into homes in a dark and sinister nation.

Approval rating: 90 per cent.

For more information: www.grantabooks.com

(May 30, 2011)

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