Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
by Barbara Demick
Summary
The title is from a North Korean children's song, we have nothing to envy in the world, and the book is the quiet, devastating audit of that claim. Demick, a Los Angeles Times correspondent, interviewed scores of defectors and chose six, all from Chongjin, a closed industrial city in the far north, precisely because it is not Pyongyang: no showcase, just the country as most of its people lived it.
The six unfold over fifteen years. Mrs Song, a true believer and model citizen, whose faith survives almost everything the state does to her family; her daughter Oak-hee, born sceptical; Mi-ran, a teacher from a tainted family, and Jun-sang, the privileged student who loves her, a courtship conducted on night walks in the blackouts, six years to hold hands, each hiding forbidden thoughts of escape from the other; Dr Kim, a hospital physician who watches her ward fill with starving children she has nothing to treat with; and Hyuck, a street kid the famine orphans into pure survival.
The famine of the 1990s is the book's dark centre: the rations stopping, the grass eaten, the frog and pine bark recipes, teachers watching pupils thin and vanish, and the moment Demick's people each discover, differently, that the lie is total, Dr Kim crossing the Tumen and finding a Chinese farm dog eating white rice, better fed than a North Korean doctor.
Around three hundred pages, structured like a nonfiction novel.
Best for readers who want the inner life of the world's most closed country, told through people rather than geopolitics.
Historical Context & Significance
Nothing to Envy won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2010 and was a National Book Award finalist in America, and it has settled since into the small shelf of books that define a country for outside readers: for North Korea it is the standard first assignment, the human baseline against which the missile coverage makes sense.
Demick's method, years of repeated interviews cross checked against satellite imagery, defector networks and her own reporting trips into the North, set a standard for writing closed societies; she applied it again to a Tibetan town in Eat the Buddha and to China's adoption trade in Daughters of the Bamboo Grove.
The book's people kept living past its ending, and Demick's afterwords in later editions track them through South Korean resettlement, prosperity, homesickness and regret, the defector's second story that the book was among the first to take seriously. The children's song of the title is still taught.