Book Review: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by Barbara Demick

[inverarity]

The Korean War never officially ended. To this day, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea engages in insane posturing and grandstanding, reminding the world that they have nukes while demanding food, all the while issuing apocalyptic threats worthy of Saddam Hussein aimed at South Korea, Japan, and the United States.

The posturing is no idle threat. While economists worry about how North and South Korea will integrate in the event of a future unification (most agree that even in a best-case scenario it will be vastly more difficult and uglier than the unification of East and West Germany), some observers fear that it is entirely possible that Kim Jong Il or whoever is in charge at the time might decide to go out in a blaze of glory rather than simply collapsing as the Soviet Union did. Should hostilities break out, even assuming no nuclear warheads are involved, North Korea has enough artillery within range of Seoul to flatten the city, home of 12 million people (and the US 2nd Infantry Division).

The South Korean and US response, of course, would probably leave everything on the North Korean side of the DMZ looking like the surface of the moon, but after reading Nothing to Envy, it’s hard to imagine that the North Korean people would actually be any worse off.

From the book’s website

What if the nightmare imagined by George Orwell in 1984 were real? What if you had to live in a country where radio dials were fixed to a single government station? Where the surroundings were entirely black-and-white except for the red lettering of the propaganda signs? Where you were required to keep a large portrait of the president on your living room wall and bow to it on national holidays? Where sexuality was repressed except for purposes of reproduction? Where spies like Orwell’s Thought Police studied your facial expressions during political rallies to make sure you were sincere not only in your speech but your thoughts?
This is a real place – the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea or North Korea. The Communist regime that has controlled the northern half of the Korean peninsula since 1945 might be the most totalitarian of modern world history.

George Polk Award and Robert F. Kennedy Award-Winning Journalist Barbara Demick’s NOTHING TO ENVY: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Spiegel & Grau) offers a never-before-seen view of a country and society largely unknown to the rest of the world.

North Korea is probably the most insulated and repressive country in the history of the world. While other dictators can boast greater body counts, not even Hitler or Mao or Stalin were able to seal their borders and control their populations as thoroughly as Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, have done. But despite the fact that North Korea is virtually a closed world, some people do get in (journalists and tourists and a few aid workers, with a two-person team of “guides" assigned to every one, as well as diplomats), and some get out, mostly crossing the border into China, and a few of those making their way to South Korea.

Barbara Demick was in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war and wrote a book about the conflict there. Nothing to Envy (the name comes from a North Korean song) is the same sort of journalism: it’s a picture of life in North Korea based on interviews she conducted with defectors she interviewed over several years while she was working for the Los Angeles Times in Seoul.

It’s a fascinating but depressing picture. Most Americans imagine an Orwellian police state, and it is -- people get sent to labor camps for making jokes about the Dear Leader’s height -- but it’s the complete sense of unreality that permeates the book. The government exists in a delusional dream world in which the godlike figure of Kim Jong Il causes the sun to rise and set, and it’s hard to tell who earnestly believes the propaganda and who has seen through it but doesn’t dare talk about it with anyone else. This was the case with one couple interviewed in the book. They were romantically involved for nine years, but had never so much as held hands, and both were making plans to escape the country, neither ever telling the other. It is one of the bittersweet ironies of this book that both of them did, separately, eventually make their way to South Korea, and were reunited, only to find that they had little in common outside the repressive regime where they had grown up.

While the anecdotes about what daily life is like in such a repressive country are fascinating, and it’s very interesting to hear the tales about how defectors escape, the most terrible and affecting part of the book is the story of the famine that killed millions of North Koreans in the 1990s. No one knows how many, but by some estimates it was upwards of 10% of the population. Everyone who survived saw people literally dropping dead in the streets. There are tales of mothers, husbands, daughters and sons starving to death, all while the government exhorted the population to “square their shoulders and continue the Arduous March" and forbade them to grow their own food. People exchanged tips on how to thicken stone soup with ground up bark and grass. A schoolteacher watched her students stop coming to class as they died at home, one by one. Doctors worked in hospitals that had no medicine and no food. As Demick grimly points out, when the worst of the famine ended, it wasn’t because North Korea was producing enough food, but because most of the people who were going to die already had. To this day, observers say that the North Korean population is chronically undernourished.

It may seem incredible that after seeing all this happen, North Koreans would still remain loyal to their government and believe the propaganda, but this is a testament to how difficult it is for people to let go of their most cherished beliefs: many defectors in South Korea have difficulty adjusting, and some admit to wishing they had never left.

Nothing to Envy is a very readable and accessible (I hesitate to use the term “entertaining") book about a society most people don’t know much about. It’s not a history book -- the Korean War and the formation of the DPRK are concisely summarized -- and it’s not a political treatise. There’s no need for a screed against communism or a denunciation of police states when the stories of ordinary people’s lives tell the tale succinctly enough.

There is no upbeat ending, and no predictions about what will happen next. Most of the people Demick interviewed for the book are getting on with their lives, but North Korea continues to stagger along like a violent, angry drunk who might simply fall over at any moment, or who might abruptly step into traffic or start attacking everyone around him.


Verdict: A book worth reading. It puts human faces on a country that most people know only as part of the “Axis of Evil." We may worry more about Al Qaida than we do about North Korea nowadays, but that could change very quickly.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

There is one serious error of interpretation in your review: the implication that starving people rebel. You wonder why the starving North Koreans did not revolt against the monstrous entity that pretended to govern them. As a matter of fact, historically, the very opposite is the case. Revolts and revolutions tend to happen when groups and classes are growing in power and prosperity and feel constricted, not when they are starving. Ireland did not revolt in 1845, but in 1798 and in 1916. Starvation is the wisest and most successful tool of tyranny; no wonder that Hitler, Lenin and Stalin used it systematically. The reason why the Communist government did not fall within a few years of its takeover of Russia - apart from the military genius of Trotsky, alas - was that it was busy from the beginning starving the population; by 1919, the desperate famine of Russia was notorious all over the West, yet Lenin obstinately - and wisely, from his point of view - resisted any attempt at organized Western relief. And as for the North Koreans, you don't have to wonder why they don't revolt; they don't revolt because they don't have the strength. Dying people don't raise their hands in violence.

Other than that, North Korea is one of those places of which I know enough not to want to know any more. You don't mention the obstructions to internal travel, the obscene religious persecution, the universal snitching and spying. But at the end of the day it is only another Communist regime, not really worse than Pol Pot's, Stalin's, or Menghistu's.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

Well, I couldn't address everything in my review. Those things are covered in the book, of course.

I wasn't wondering why the starving population didn't rebel. I understand that phenomenon well enough. My observation was that the defectors who made it out and now knew the truth still often felt vestigial loyalty to North Korea, and even a desire to return.

In some cases this was because, as Demick points out, many of them thought that Kim Jung Il's regime was on its last legs and that they'd soon be able to return to a different country.

Others react with the natural defensiveness all people feel for their own, the phenomenon of knowing perfectly well how screwed-up your own family is but even though you know that Uncle Bob is a lousy drunken creep, you'll get pissed off when an outsider says it.

Still, there were many heartbreaking ironies in the book illustrating just how deeply the North Koreans have been inculcated in the philosophy of Juche. My impression is that while East Germans for the most part knew they were living in a totalitarian police state and that West Germany was much better off, many North Koreans have truly been convinced that as bad as they may have it, the rest of the world has it worse. That's what makes North Korea different than many other dictatorships, the degree to which its leaders have successfully brainwashed the populace.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I apologize, I'd misunderstood.

Of course people will resist foreign criticism of their country. It is not just loyalty, vestigial or otherwise, either; it is as often that even the best-meaning foreigners rarely know enough to give an informed criticism. I read criticisms of Italy, and even of Berlusconi (whom you may be sure I don't admire) whose ignorance is downright scary - people who predict that Germany will force Italy (and Spain, and so on) out of the Euro, people who cast Berlusconi as Mussolini reincarnated. AT that point, reacting is not even so much a duty to one's own country as to truth and commonsense. I witnessed the same reaction from an American reading an Australian article about the excessive rates of incarceration in the USA. It was something that she was worried about herself, but when the Australian writer mentioned "a hell-fire religion" as one of the possible reasons for the abnormal statistics from American courts and jails, she simply lost interest. And you should hear my conservative German friend, the Editrix, on American perceptions of Germany! It happens all the time.

As for the bizarre dynamics of North Korean society, I have a suspicion - I don't know enough to have more - that they have some sort of subterraneous connection with the cultural forces that led the Chinese, Japanese and Korean states to close themselves off from foreign contact for centuries.

[ray243.livejournal.com]

Although do not underestimate how various East Asian societies value their "face" or sense of pride as a reason why North Korea is so isolated.

Then there is the fact that during the 60s and the early 70s, where North Korea started to rebuild itself, it did became quite "prosperous". The lives of people in North Korea did improve as compared to what it was under the Japanese occupation. That is probably one of the few reasons why some Koreans would think that their country is one of the best in the world, especially when few people actually managed to travel overseas.

Even those that did travel to neighbouring countries, such as China and South Korea, I hardly think that they would think that those two nations are any better, considering that South Korea isn't really too far ahead of North Korea.

Take a look at the GDP difference between North and South Korea till the late 70s.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Two_koreas_gdp_1950_1977.jpg

You can notice GDP wise, North Korea is actually better than the South till 1973-4. This mean some of the older generation, those that are in their 60s would have help to instil the idea that North Korea isn't that bad of a nation onto the younger generation.

All those factors could have contributed to why North Koreans don't think anything is wrong with their nation.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

This is also covered in the book. North Korea was more prosperous than South Korea until the 70s. But this was solely due to their massive subsidization by China and the Soviet Union, who basically gave them everything from food to industrial equipment to technology.

When the USSR collapsed, and China began to find North Korea an embarrassing crazy neighbor on their border that they wished they could be rid of, the money stopped flowing and that led directly to the famine of the 90s. Meanwhile, South Korea continued to become more democratic and more prosperous.

But you're right that the view the North Koreans have of the world still dates back to the 60s.