Barbara Demick

”Schoolboys competed to collect spent bullet cartridges from public executions.”

Barbara Demick is a journalist who has been covering North and South Korea for the Los Angeles Times. Reporting from North Korea is impossible. This book is based on author’s conversations and interviews with defectors from North Korea. All of them were from the city of Chongjin, so both the people and the setting came alive.

These stories are dark, tragic, sickening. I really should have read Nothing to show more Envy in small doses, not everything at once, every day. I was reading with a sense of urgency, as if being in a hurry to bear witness. Deprivation, brainwashing, rigid caste system, public execution, surveillance, famine, concentration camps.

Yet there was also love. Mi-ran’s and Jun-sang’s story was wonderfully told. I appreciated how humane the author was in following these lives.

”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.” show less

Journalist Barbara Demick has compiled her interviews with North Korean defectors living in South Korea to paint a picture of what it was like to live in this notoriously secluded communist nation following the Korean Civil War. The human toll of the famine of the 1990s hit an emotional nerve in the context of the individual tragedies experienced by the book's subjects. I was struck by how the circumstances that lead her subjects to seek refuge seemed appallingly desperate and yet the people show more she interviewed still felt a twinge of guilt for the family and friends they left behind. She begins and ends her account with the most charming love story between two teenagers that persisted even though the darkest of times until the devastation of economic deprivation became too much. Reality finally pierced the veil of propaganda woven by their callous dictator and the urge to survive overcame even the tender romance of young love. show less

Oh my. This is an affecting book precisely because it is about the mundane lives of six people, with mention of but without dwelling upon history or statistics (a section at the end recommends books and other sources of such information). The author is a journalist who was in South Korea for several years, with limited access to North Korea, so instead she interviewed people who had defected. You might think such people were exceptionally aware and political and enterprising, but some had show more been true believers, and defection seems more a response to loss, of family and social position, exacerbated by the exhaustion of famine and economic collapse. Far more compelling than statistics are descriptions of people foraging for bark and grass, salvaging grains of corn from sewage, grinding corn husks to make them barely digestible. The teacher watched her students starve. The doctor watched her patients starve. Parents fed their children first, but then the parents died first, and the orphaned children wandered the train station. How belief that there is "nothing to envy" in the outside world can be sustained under these conditions is nearly incomprehensible, but radios and TVs are crippled to receive only state programming, work includes daily ideological sessions and authority is tied to ideological adherence, travelers must carry documents granting official permission, and every neighborhood has assigned monitors who report suspicious activity. North Koreans have difficulty adjusting to South Korea in part because of an aversion to the casual chitchat that signals friendliness and maintains social connections. In North Korea, a slip that implies criticism is dangerous. A family who owned a TV, a rare luxury, kept the apartment door open so neighbors could drop in to watch. During an upbeat segment about a boot factory, the father commented that if it is producing so many boots, why can't he get any for his children. A neighbor must have reported him, the family never discovered who, because he was hauled in for interrogation, and only his reputation saved him from prison. Safer not to talk at all, and maybe not to think either. On an encouraging note, however, as the central distribution system of food, and electricity, ceased to function, entrepreneurial activity arose. People stopped tending the communal farms, but they began tending personal plots of vegetables to barter or sell, and to a limited extent the markets that appeared in and around abandoned industrial buildings were tolerated in order to prevent outright revolt. Of interest, and maybe obvious but I hadn't known, South Korea has a procedure for integrating defectors into society, which includes money and training in modern technology. This is possible because the numbers are not (yet) overwhelming, but concern exists, and South Korea has been studying examples such as Germany in preparation.

(read 10 Mar 2011) show less

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; show more 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. show less