Nothing to Envy
(Kim Il-Sung mural)
Just read “Nothing to Envy” by Barbara Demick. It’s a good read of five different North Korean defectors and their harrowing accounts of escaping to South Korea. I couldn’t put the book down and stayed up until 5:30 a.m. to finish reading it.
This was quite different from other books I read about North Korean defectors. “Aquariums of Pyongyang” and “Eyes of the Tailless Animal” were written by North Koreans who were imprisoned in the gulags. The accounts were horrifying; too gruesome to believe.
Other interesting books on North Korea are “Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea“, by Guy Delisle and “Rogue Regime” by Jasper Becker. The former book is a comic strip account of Delisle’s experience there as a supervisor over a kids cartoon show and the latter details how Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il were able to stay in power and provides figures on everything from famine-related deaths to North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal.
But Demick’s book is an intimate look of everyday life in North Korea through five different people. Through their accounts, you see how their lives, their jobs, their potential suitors, are randomly ruled by rigid class lines much not unlike the Indian caste system. When Miran realizes that her father’s background from South Korea has decided her future – “a job in a factory, marriage (most likely to a fellow factory worker), children, old age, death,” – she blurted to her boyfriend, ” I feel I have no purpose in life.”
Still, even good standing and job performance will not guarantee you security, promotion or even food. When a frail Dr. Kim crossed over to China, she was surprised to see a bowl of rice mixed with meat on the ground outside a house. As she heard a dog barking, she realized that dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
What’s tragic of course, is that these realizations and self-epiphanies can’t be voiced or shared without the risk of imprisonment, torture, beatings or execution. Spies are everywhere, even among your families and friends, so who’s to be trusted? Plans to escape the country could not even be shared between two star-crossed lovers who sacrificed and risked so much to date each other for nine years. One can’t help but to see their story be made into a movie when they do end up meeting again in South Korea. These are extraordinary stories of sacrifice, survival, risk and guilt that need to be told.
There is one quote from the book that resonated with me and sums up the heartbreaking decisions North Korean defectors need to make:
“Liberty and love
These two I must have.
For my love I’ll sacrifice
My life.
For liberty I’ll sacrifice
My love.”
Sándor Petőfi
(1823- 1849)
Tags: barbara demick, north korea, nothing to envy