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    Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
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    Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
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    Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
    Ebook425 pages6 hours

    Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

    By Barbara Demick

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books), with a new afterword that revisits these stories—and North Korea more broadly—in 2022, in the wake of the pandemic

    NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

    In this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six North Korean citizens over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il (the father of Kim Jong-un), and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population.
     
    Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, where displays of affection are punished, informants are rewarded, and an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life. She takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors, and through meticulous and sensitive reporting we see her subjects fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we witness their profound, life-altering disillusionment with the government and their realization that, rather than providing them with lives of abundance, their country has betrayed them.

    Praise for Nothing to Envy

    “Provocative . . . offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.”—The New York Times

    “Deeply moving . . . The personal stories are related with novelistic detail.”—The Wall Street Journal

    “A tour de force of meticulous reporting.”—The New York Review of Books

    “Excellent . . . humanizes a downtrodden, long-suffering people whose individual lives, hopes and dreams are so little known abroad.”—San Francisco Chronicle

    “The narrow boundaries of our knowledge have expanded radically with the publication of Nothing to Envy. . . . Elegantly structured and written, [it] is a groundbreaking work of literary nonfiction.”—John Delury, Slate

    “At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateDec 29, 2009
    ISBN9780385529617
    Author

    Barbara Demick

    Barbara Demick is the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club’s award for human rights reporting as well as awards from the Asia Society and the American Academy of Diplomacy. Her coverage of Sarajevo for the Philadelphia Inquirer won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Her previous book is Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.

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    Reviews for Nothing to Envy

    4.5/5

    1,085 ratings108 reviews

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    • 4/5
      "Nothing to Envy" is North Korean propaganda, it means they do not envy other countries since they are so superior. Of course from the outside looking in the saying is ironic, meaning exactly the opposite we have nothing to envy of them. This book is a braided retelling of about half a dozen North Koreans who defected and told their life story. It's pedestrian and personal, day to day life, loves, work, there's not much high-level overview or history. I was disappointed Demick didn't weave more general information about North Korea (other than the opening and last chapters), but the individual lives tell a different kind of story that is helpful in understanding what it's like to live in a '1984'. I came away understanding that NK after the death of "Dear Leader #1" in the early 90s has essentially failed as a state, but due to cultural reasons the people will never revolt. They can only raise about 60% of the food needed, due to geography constraints, so the population is literally dieing and atrophying, each generation smaller and weaker. An elite few at the top fatten off the majority like in a Medieval kingdom, it's unsurprising since Korea once had the worlds longest lived dynasty at over 1000 years. It's already lasted longer than anyone expected, and sadly most likely will continue for years more to come. The only ones to blame are the Koreans themselves, who put the needs of the state above the needs of the individual, for whom we have nothing to envy.
    • 4/5
      In this book, Demick immerses us in what it was like to grow up, live in and escape from North Korea. She does this by portraying the lives of six individuals and their families in the 1990's and 2000's. There is a lot of insight into why so many have put up with the regimes of the Kims for so long. The horrors inflicted on the North Korean people by their government are chilling, yet the indoctrination prevailing in their lives from birth caused many to believe that things are worse in the west.Millions died in the famines of the 1990's when most families were reduced to walking out of town each day to gather weeds and grass to make a soup for their daily meal. Factories closed down because there was no electricity or raw materials to run them. People died of starvation and from rampant epidemics. The development of a generation of children was stunted by prenatal starvation and lack of sufficient nutrition in childhood. Doctors were helpless to save starving children. There were also packs of children called "kochebi" or "wandering sparrows" left to fend for themselves when their parents died or abandoned them to go in search of food.Each of the six people profiled in this book ultimately made the difficult decision to defect to South Korea. We learn how they accomplished their escapes. Even when they arrived in South Korea their difficulties continued: they had to learn how to live in a free capitalistic society, which was not easy.This is an excellent book, and it reads like a novel or a series of excellent memoirs. I couldn't put it down while I was reading it. Even though it is almost 10 years old at this point, it did not feel out of date at all.Highly recommended.4 stars (maybe 4 1/2)
    • 4/5
      To be very clear, I most appreciated this book for what it says than for how it says it. It can easily be called nitpicking, but I found this book read like NPR radio sounds, namely, ultra calm and civilized, no matter what the topic. Having said that, the author is a fine writer, clear, never off topic. I have to compliment her for doing such a thorough job of pointing out the extraordinarily unique country of North Korea and doing it under extraordinarily difficult to investigate circumstances. In a real sense, North Korea is nearly as isolated in its own bubble as a lost tribe in the deepest jungle. As the narrative progresses, the reader may wonder what makes North Korea end up so differently in the present day world from other communist inspired governments of the past or from other dictatorships, for that matter. The author really doesn't comment on that, but for someone who has studied the Khmer Rouge era of Cambodia, perhaps the ultimate "pure" communist state, as I have, you start noticing the key differences between how North Korea was created and how other communist countries did, such as Cambodia. What affect did the lengthy occupation by Japan play, for instance? While there are great similarities between how the Khmer Rouge Cambodians struggled and how North Koreans struggle, there are noted differences in how the different peoples respond to those troubles. For me, the great value in this book is the questions it provokes in how countries and peoples in those countries respond to global dynamics. Many people will read this and dwell only on how North Koreans struggle. Other countries' peoples have struggled and do struggle. What makes North Korea different from other countries is, in my mind, the more important issue behind this book, even if the author does not point out the contrast directly.
    • 4/5
      Nonfiction story of 6 defectors from North Korea. Well written journalism and history of the development of North Korea under a totalitarian regime.
    • 5/5
      Wow! I recently read Logavina Street and loved it so I picked one up too. I was definitely not disappointed. The style was a little different than Logavina Street and took me longer to get engaged with the characters on a personal level, but by the end I was engrossed. The initial history lesson, while dry, was required to set the context for the story to come. The whole situation is a testament to the human will to survive, and a strong cautionary tale of authoritarianism. I strongly recommend this book, even if you don't think you like non-fiction. It largely reads as a novel as Demick doesn't insert herself much and is mostly just relaying the tales told to her by the defectors.
    • 5/5
      Incredibly interesting and enlightening. I love how I learned about life in North Korea thru ordinary people and their stories, rather than a bunch of boring political figures or a litany of dry historical facts. This is my kind of nonfiction!

      I highly recommend getting the ebook. I was able to check it out from one of my local library systems. It has a chapter at the end that was updated July 2015, so it discusses the recent political happenings and the current climate of North Korea since Kim Jong-un came to power in 2011. You won't find that in the printed book (I know, I had checked that out first, but then got the ebook when I found myself wanting to read snippets at my lunch or other breaks at work!).
    • 4/5
      Very interesting, insightful and heartbreaking, about five individuals and their families living in North Korea, and how they defected to South Korea, after the famine, and the culture shocks when they finally arrived there.
    • 5/5
      Barbara Demick interviewed about 100 North Korean defectors and made nine trips to North Korea between 2001 and 2008. Her notes in the back of the book give a glimpse of the tremendous amount of research that went into this portrayal of six selected lives of defectors. Each story of the lives is alarming for the living conditions, cultural restraints and the demands from the leaders of North Korea, Kim il sung, Kim Jong il and Kim Jong un. The real focus is on the lives of the ordinary people trying to survive. Their lives are very different from those in South Korea. From brainwashing starting in kindergarten to the constant struggle to find enough to ea.t The telling of the Great Famine by defectors is horrendous. It brings to mind the famines in China but unlike China, the people have not fully recovered. Many have had stunted growth from the famine in the 1990s and the food supply is still not good. There is tremendous pressure to keep your own secrets. If not, your own children may report you. Each person portrayed had tremendous obstacles and barriers to survival. The best part of this book was the finding the updates at the end of the book about the defectors. I highly recommend this book as a true picture of life in North Korea, the difficulty of escaping and then the final difficulty of adjusting to a completely different world than you have been raised in.
    • 5/5
      I liked very much the book. Specially the fact that the writer put normal persons in normal situation to show everyday life in North Korea. The only point that could have made this book even better would be a more deep description about the Kim dynasty.
    • 5/5
      In the 1990s, Barbara Demick conducted extensive interviews with North Korean defectors about their lives, and in Nothing to Envy she interweaves their personal tales with some broader historical context to present a portrait of everyday life in North Korea under the reigns of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. It is, of necessity, an incomplete portrait, as even journalists who have been there (as Demick has been) get only a carefully managed, deliberately distorted view of the place, and fact-checking anyone's stories is largely impossible. But it's enough to give a sense of what life is like there. And that life is just... hard to fathom, at least from where I sit, here in the United States.It's one thing, I think, to know intellectually that North Korea is basically an Orwellian nightmare brought to life, but another to see how that actually plays out in the lives of ordinary people. More than that, I was struck by the extent to which North Korea in the 90s comes across as not merely Orwellian, but as almost post-apocalyptic. It's a place where the lights have quite literally gone out, a place that once had infrastructure that's now broken down, once had industry whose remains have been cannibalized for scrap, once was able to feed its populace but now leaves its people to desperately scour the countryside for whatever meager pickings they can find.It's often horrific to read about, and yet, in its own disturbing way, absolutely compelling. As are the very human stories of the people affected. This is definitely a book that deserves all the buzz it's gotten. (Even if I am very, very late in adding to that buzz.)
    • 4/5
      I'm not sure if you can call a book about the breakdown of entire society and the death of thousands as 'wonderful', or 'great', but I'm going to anyway ...
    • 5/5
      The title truly speaks what my sentiments evolved into as the stories came along. Nothing about the North Korean life portrayed in this piece was enviable or admirable... but it was a look inside an otherwise completely isolated and unknown world that I had never seen before.
    • 5/5
      The narrative Demick provides about the lives of North-Koreans and how the country's state policies affect people in North-Korea is fascinating and insightful. The writing style is clear and engaging, and personal stories are complemented with accurate and well-documented historical and economical information. Demick provides insights up to 2010, which is extremely recent. This is an important read, especially because the infringement of human rights is ongoing.This is a must read for anyone in the world, and especially for those interested in North-Korea, communist regimes, human rights, foreign cultures/countries, and/or great works of non-fiction. I loved it!
    • 5/5
      Cannot say I loved this book, because what the people of north Kore have been subjected to is criminal and inhumane, but I throughly recommend it. It was eye opening, informative and engrossing. A glimpse at a world that is hidden from us.
    • 5/5
      This book presents a glimpse behind the curtains of the enigmatic DPRK. It's a really dark read but such is the nature of life over there.
    • 5/5
      An incredible viewpoint of North Korea during 1950s to 1990s of 6 Koreans telling their life story. The author also does a great job of including historical information to give a good understanding of what life would be like in North Korea at this time. I found it very interesting and the stories to be riveting. I highly recommend this book to anyone.
    • 5/5
      A humanized look into the inhumane treatment of an entire country by its own leadership resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of North Korean citizens and the stunting of many more due to long-term malnutrition. An important read.
    • 4/5
      North Korea has been a closed society since the end of the Korean war, And whilst South Korea has gone from a dictatorship in the 1970’s to a full democracy now, North Korea has maintained its position as a 1950's communist totalitarian state.

      Under the leadership, and I use the word hesitantly, of Kim Il-sung then Kim Jong-il and now Kim Jong-un the country has made little progress. As other communist states have fallen or transformed themselves, the North Koreans have become ever more cruel and brutal to maintain the status quo. Both father and son were treated as Gods by the population, and following the death of Kim Il-sung many people never recovered from they loss. Informants were present when people were paying they respects to see if they were being sincere enough.

      Corruption is endemic at military and Party level, with a lot of the food aid having been taken a sold or consumed by them, and not passed to the population as expected. The population is steadily being starved to death, with there being little or no food available these days. Mass state brainwashing still takes place, with the 'enemies' of the state regularly slated by the authorities.

      Demick has sensitively recorded the lives of six people who escaped this repugnant regime. Through the book she retells their stories of hardship, starvation, deaths of family members, imprisonment and of working for the state as it slowly crumbles around them. When these people had managed to escape into China, and then onto South Korea they could not believe their new world, unlike anything that they had ever seen. And so very different from the world outside according to the authorities.

      It is a painfully book to read, partly because that you cannot believe that a state like this cannot and should not exist in the 21st century, but also because it at the moment shows no signs of collapse. The ending is most poignant, whilst the elite and select visitors get to dine of fine foods the population is malnourished, stunted and has taken to sitting on their haunches whilst time stand still in this country.

      It makes for grim reading, but people must read this.
    • 4/5
      Wow, what an eye-opening book this was! It’s no wonder that I don’t know much about North Korea, it doesn’t seem like much information gets in or out of this locked- down country. It is truly amazing that an “industrialized” country can be this oppressed and backward in the 21st century.

      It was mind-boggling to hear how this country is run. Electricity is only available for short amounts of time during the day ever since Russia and China stopped subsidizing their electricity. They have to have travel passes to go from one city into another, it is illegal for private individuals to own a car, there are few televisions and everything that is broadcast is government produced or distributed, few have computers and no one has access to the internet. There are still huge food shortages, even though the famine of the 1990’s is technically over, and malnutrition is still very high. The list of things they don’t have or can’t do goes on and on.

      Demick tries to cover a lot of ground in this 294 page account, from background history on how Korea was split, and other contextual information on how the government is run, to historical information about specific cities and regions, to the personal stories of her main 6 characters, to background stories of their family members and friends, to details about the famine. Her narrative goes back and forth between all of these different stories and accounts, as well as between time and region, and honestly I got confused a lot about who was who, or who was whose daughter, and who was whose husband. I found this to be the only real flaw in the book.

      Overall I thought it was an insightful, informative look into one of the last Totalitarian regimes in the world.
    • 4/5
      I found this book on display at the library with the theme of armchair travel. Nothing to Envy is a fascinating story of the lives of various North Korean defectors and what their daily lives were like. Demick does a great job of weaving the stories together, and leaving your interested, curious, but not wallowing in sadness, though there were parts in the middle that were pretty tough to read. I will look into reading more of Demick's work.
    • 5/5
      Definitely the best book on the realities of the situation in North Korea I've read. Read it in a day as I was so fascinated by the people's stories and their description of every day life. A sobering but brilliant read.
    • 5/5
      This book was recently shortlisted for a National Book Award, and Demick totally deserves to win for her meticulous reporting on six North Korean defectors to South Korea. I didn't realize how little I knew about North Korea until I read this book. It is full of indelible images: the doctor who discovers that in China, dogs eat better than the people of North Korea; the two young lovers sneaking into the darkness, too frightened and too innocent to do anything more daring than holding hands; a wife watching her foodie husband die of starvation.

      Nothing But Envy is heartbreaking in places, but ultimately hopeful (although even the hope is tempered by the realization that so many people lost so many years they can never get back). It's a cliche to say that a nonfiction book is "as compelling as fiction," but I could not put this book down, and even after I finished it I was scouring the Internet for updates on the lives of the six defectors.
    • 4/5
      Wow! What a horrible life folks live in North Korea and all because of one sick dictator and his lemmings. He and they should be charged and convicted with crimes against humanity. it was an upsetting book to read.
    • 5/5
      52. Nothing to Envy : Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demickpublished: December 2009format: 315 page hardcoveracquired: borrowed from my library read: Aug 17-20rating: 5 starsIt's very strange how little we know of what is happening inside North Korea. Demick provided a rare view in through the personal stories of six defectors. These are amazing stories of a very strange place, a real-world [1984] where the ruler is presented as a god, and his son and successor as the son of god. Where everyone watches everyone, and a well liked person can get in trouble for stating out loud the slightest criticism of the government. It's a country so closed off that the best and brightest and most supported students have never used the internet. North Korea is off the grid.But, this Orwellian world collapsed. After the Soviet Union dissolved, it stopped financially supporting North Korea, and the country, far from self-sufficient, began an economic collapse and then an all-out starvation throughout the 1990's. You might have heard something about this, along the lines of President Clinton frustrated North Korea refused to shut down it's nuclear weapons program in return for foreign aid. But, with such a closed off country, there was no real coverage, there were no visuals, no striking dramatic pictures. I have to admit I missed the whole famine. All of North Korea was starving, perhaps 2 million of a the 23 million population died, and some 40% of the children of that period have life-long symptoms related to starvation. I had no idea. And yet the power structure did not waver. North Korea remains, along with Cuba, the last of the communist holdouts.For such a well reviewed book, there is not much I can add to the picture. I am surprised both at how little information Demick was able to present, and how much she made out of it. An oddity of North Korea's famine is that there were no refugees. It's not that hard to get to China if one is desperate enough, but the numbers of Koreans trickling through was pretty small, and, for various reasons, the numbers welcomed to South Korea, whose official policy is to welcome North Koreans as fellow countrymen, is minuscule. A couple hundred a year through the 1990's, and maybe a couple thousand a year through the early 2000's. These are all Demick was able to interview, and, for these stories, she only interviewed 100 people. Of course, she only presents six life stories. But what lives.
    • 5/5
      Ever since my best friend told me about the blog Kim Jong-il Looking at Things, I’ve been wanting to learn more about communist dictator Kim Jong-il and his father and predecessor, Kim Il-sung. I knew the basics of life in communist North Korea: no internet access, not much food, no television or radio beyond the government stations, and absolutely no criticizing the Dear Leader. But I didn’t know much about Korean history, or about the particulars of everyday life there.Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea is written by Barbara Demick, the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. Here’s an excerpt about her from the book’s website:Barbara Demick has been interviewing North Koreans about their lives since 2001, when she moved to Seoul for the Los Angeles Times. Her reporting on North Korea won the Overseas Press Club award for human rights reporting, the Asia Society’s Osborne Eliott award and the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Arthur Ross Award.Demick tells the stories of six North Koreans — from “normal” life under Kim Il-sung, to life during the famine of 1994-1998, to their eventual defection to South Korea — with great care and respect.What struck me throughout the book was how incredibly strict and regulated pre-famine life in North Korea was — yet the North Koreans believed they were living fortunate lives of plenty. They were completely indoctrinated by Kim il-Sung’s propaganda; they believed that every good thing they had in life came from their Dear Leader. In fact, he was more than a leader — he was like a god to them."Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim il-Sung." (45)So when their government failed to provide food, and thousands starved to death, homeless on the streets after selling all of their possessions to buy food that was becoming increasingly unavailable, it was a betrayal of the worst sort.This book is the story of a young teacher who lost 35 of her kindergarten students to the famine. It’s the story of a university student who watched South Korean television in secret in his apartment at night, terrified of being overheard. It’s the story of the doctor who worked countless hours with little or no pay, broken-hearted at being unable to help her starving patients. It’s the story of a wife and mother with unwavering faith in the regime, whose husband and son starved to death. It’s the story of a young man sent to a labor camp for crossing the Tumen River into China.After Kim il-Sung’s death, life in North Korea becomes unbearable. (His death conveniently preceded the famine, leaving his reputation relatively “untarnished.”) There is no food, no electricity, no freedom to speak, move about, or make decisions for oneself.Eventually, each of Demick’s interviewees makes a daring, life-threatening escape, crossing the border to China in the dead of night and afterward making their way to South Korea to begin new lives. Some of them leave sisters and daughters behind who are captured and either executed or sent to labor camps as punishment for having family members who defected.Nothing to Envy is a captivating and enlightening book. It tells the kinds of stories that we don’t hear in the news. It brings to light the details that the regime tries so hard to hide. I won’t quickly forget the stories of the courageous North Koreans who risked everything to start a life in the free world."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."— A well-known North Korean song. (119)
    • 4/5
      If madness is the leavening in history’s nightmares, then North Korea is surely the next furnace of human destruction.
    • 5/5
      I started reading this book as a buddy read with a Goodreads friend, but she decided it wasn’t the right book at the right time for her, so I continued on alone, grateful that it had been her suggestion and I got it off my to read shelf, and I’m so glad that I did.There is a helpful map and I love maps in books, though I wish it had been even more heavily labeled as many places were mentioned didn’t appear on it. I also appreciated the photos. Each chapter started with one photo, though I wish that that many more photos were included. Why there are so relatively few is certainly understandable though.I found it helpful to read the notes for chapters that are at the end of the book as soon as I read their corresponding chapters. They’re not long and I think that there is great benefit to reading them when the chapters’ contents are still fresh in the reader’s mind. While I wanted more, more people and more updates on each person and more information, it’s just because what’s there is so good.When I read books such as this I go back and look at what I was doing, eating, etc. during the periods and on the days mentioned. (I have schedule books going back to 1977.) I’m always stunned to read what some people have gone through during my lifetime, and unfortunately that includes now.Somehow this feels like a perfectly crafted book. It’s non-fiction that reads like fiction, so much so that a few times I caught myself thinking something such as oh that’s too bad but it is realistic, and then realizing of course it’s realistic because these are real people’s real stories. The reader really gets to really know the six main people and gets a clear sense of how it was for others mentioned and also for the general populace. While a tremendously upsetting account, it helped me to know that the six people focused on had all gotten out of North Korea (though it’s impossible to not think about the people still there or who were stuck there and are likely dead and those who did die) but these are brave and strong people, and there was some humor, and the storytelling was so riveting, that despite the horrors, it wasn’t exactly a exactly a depressing book, though there were plenty of heartbreaking events I will likely always remember. I felt a lot of suspense wondering how people were going to manage to escape. The way their stories were told did not disappoint. This is an excellent book. I had none of my usual contemplating whether it should be 4 or 5 stars or whether I needed to include a half star. 5 stars it was, and I knew that most of the way through. It would have had to go way downhill for me to give it anything other than 5 stars and that never happened. Top notch! Very hard to put down! It’s a true page-turner and always engaging. Very well researched. It didn’t improve my mood about people or governments though, including the North Korean and also my own United States government. I already knew a few things about how things were in North Korea, but I learned so much more about the country, and while much of what was described was highly disturbing it was also fascinating. It helped that for the most part the people were likeable and at least relatable, even with the cultural differences and often experiences vastly different from anything I’ve experienced. I really can’t recommend this book highly enough. The author’s other book also looks intriguing. She certainly chooses interesting and challenging topics. I’m eager to see what she will write next.
    • 5/5
      Excellent.
    • 4/5
      Great! I was worried at points that the interpersonal drama would water down the picture of North Korea, but that never happened. The book is much more approachable than Bradley Martin's Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, and a great introduction to the bizarre world of NK. The best compliment that I can give the book is that I was at times genuinely worried about the survival of main characters, even though it was an obvious conclusion that they survived and escaped NK to tell their tales.
    • 4/5
      A really good account of what life is like for many in North Korea. Much of it was so horrific, I couldn't believe that it was actually happening. It seemed more like a dystopian novel, as Becky said. I would recommend it, although parts were quite depressing.