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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea Paperback – September 21, 2010
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FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD WINNER OF WINNERS AWARD
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
- Print length336 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateSeptember 21, 2010
- Dimensions5.13 x 0.7 x 7.95 inches
- ISBN-100385523912
- ISBN-13978-0385523912
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Deeply moving . . . The personal stories are related with novelistic detail.”—The Wall Street Journal
“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.”—Slate
“At times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Haunting . . . a clear-eyed and deeply reported look at [North Korea].”—The Plain Dealer
“Nothing to Envy must do what journalism hasn’t been required to do for nearly a century: use words to create pictures of scenes that cannot be captured by a camera. With an eloquence seldom found in newspaper journalists, Demick has risen to the occasion—all the more remarkable when you consider that she hasn’t seen these sights herself. She has a novelist’s knack for eliciting the telling detail.”—Salon
“In a stunning work of investigation, Barbara Demick removes North Korea’s mask to reveal what lies beneath its media censorship and repressive dictatorship.”—The Daily Beast
“No writer I know has done a better job of clothing these academic concerns with the rich detail of the lives of ordinary people—explaining, simply, what it feels like to be a citizen of the cruelest, most repressive and most retrograde country in the world. . . . [An] outstanding work of journalism.”—The Times (London)
“These are the stories you’ll never hear from North Korea’s state news agency.”—New York Post
“[A] superbly reported account of life in North Korea.’’—Bloomberg
“[Nothing to Envy] has the ring of authority as well as the suspense of a novel.”—The Washington Times
“The last time I read a book with something truly harrowing or pitiful or sad on every page it was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and those characters had the good fortune to not be real.”—St. Louis Magazine
“Strongly written and gracefully structured, Demick’s potent blend of personal narratives and piercing journalism vividly and evocatively portrays courageous individuals and a tyrannized state.”—Booklist (starred review)
“A fascinating and deeply personal look at the lives of six defectors from the repressive totalitarian regime of the Republic of North Korea . . . As Demick weaves [the defectors’] stories together with the hidden history of the country’s descent into chaos, she skillfully re-creates these captivating and moving personal journeys.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
If you look at satellite photographs of the far east by night, you'll see a large splotch curiously lacking in light. This area of darkness is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Next to this mysterious black hole, South Korea, Japan, and now China fairly gleam with prosperity. Even from hundreds of miles above, the billboards, the headlights and streetlights, the neon of the fast- food chains appear as tiny white dots signifying people going about their business as twenty-first-century energy consumers. Then, in the middle of it all, an expanse of blackness nearly as large as England. It is baffling how a nation of 23 million people can appear as vacant as the oceans. North Korea is simply a blank.
North Korea faded to black in the early 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had propped up its old Communist ally with cheap fuel oil, North Korea's creakily inefficient economy collapsed. Power stations rusted into ruin. The lights went out. Hungry people scaled utility poles to pilfer bits of copper wire to swap for food. When the sun drops low in the sky, the landscape fades to gray and the squat little houses are swallowed up by the night. Entire villages vanish into the dusk. Even in parts of the showcase capital of Pyongyang, you can stroll down the middle of a main street at night without being able to see the buildings on either side.
When outsiders stare into the void that is today's North Korea, they think of remote villages of Africa or Southeast Asia where the civilizing hand of electricity has not yet reached. But North Korea is not an undeveloped country; it is a country that has fallen out of the developed world. You can see the evidence of what once was and what has been lost dangling overhead alongside any major North Korean road—the skeletal wires of the rusted electrical grid that once covered the entire country.
North Koreans beyond middle age remember well when they had more electricity (and for that matter food) than their pro-American cousins in South Korea, and that compounds the indignity of spending their nights sitting in the dark. Back in the 1990s, the U.S. offered to help North Korea with its energy needs if it gave up its nuclear weapons program. But the deal fell apart after the Bush administration accused the North Koreans of reneging on their promises. North Koreans complain bitterly about the darkness, which they still blame on the U.S. sanctions. They can't read at night. They can't watch television. "We have no culture without electricity," a burly North Korean security guard once told me accusingly
But the dark has advantages of its own. Especially if you are a teenager dating somebody you can't be seen with.
When adults go to bed, sometimes as early as 7:00 p.m. in winter, it is easy enough to slip out of the house. The darkness confers measures of privacy and freedom as hard to come by in North Korea as electricity. Wrapped in a magic cloak of invisibility, you can do what you like without worrying about the prying eyes of parents, neighbors, or secret police.
I met many North Koreans who told me how much they learned to love the darkness, but it was the story of one teenage girl and her boyfriend that impressed me most. She was twelve years old when she met a young man three years older from a neighboring town. Her family was low-ranking in the byzantine system of social controls in place in North Korea. To be seen in public together would damage the boy's career prospects as well as her reputation as a virtuous young woman. So their dates consisted entirely of long walks in the dark. There was nothing else to do anyway; by the time they started dating in earnest in the early 1990s, none of the restaurants or cinemas were operating because of the lack of power.
They would meet after dinner. The girl had instructed her boyfriend not to knock on the front door and risk questions from her older sisters, younger brother, or the nosy neighbors. They lived squeezed together in a long, narrow building behind which was a common outhouse shared by a dozen families. The houses were set off from the street by a white wall, just above eye level in height. The boy found a spot behind the wall where nobody would notice him as the light seeped out of the day. The clatter of the neighbors washing the dishes or using the toilet masked the sound of his footsteps. He would wait hours for her, maybe two or three. It didn't matter. The cadence of life is slower in North Korea. Nobody owned a watch.
The girl would emerge just as soon as she could extricate herself from the family. Stepping outside, she would peer into the darkness, unable to see him at first but sensing with certainty his presence. She wouldn't bother with makeup—no one needs it in the dark. Sometimes she just wore her school uniform: a royal blue skirt cut modestly below the knees, a white blouse and red bow tie, all of it made from a crinkly synthetic material. She was young enough not to fret about her appearance.
At first, they would walk in silence, then their voices would gradually rise to whispers and then to normal conversational levels as they left the village and relaxed into the night. They maintained an arm's-length distance from each other until they were sure they wouldn't be spotted.
Just outside the town, the road headed into a thicket of trees to the grounds of a hot-spring resort. It was once a resort of some renown; its 130-degree waters used to draw busloads of Chinese tourists in search of cures for arthritis and diabetes, but by now it rarely operated. The entrance featured a rectangular reflecting pond rimmed by a stone wall. The paths cutting through the grounds were lined with pine trees, Japanese maples, and the girl's favorites—the ginkgo trees that in autumn shed delicate mustard-yellow leaves in the shape of perfect Oriental fans. On the surrounding hills, the trees had been decimated by people foraging for firewood, but the trees at the hot springs were so beautiful that the locals respected them and left them alone.
Otherwise the grounds were poorly maintained. The trees were untrimmed, stone benches cracked, paving stones missing like rotten teeth. By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days. But the imperfections were not so glaring at night. The hot-springs pool, murky and choked with weeds, was luminous with the reflection of the sky above.
The night sky in North Korea is a sight to behold. It might be the most brilliant in Northeast Asia, the only place spared the coal dust, Gobi Desert sand, and carbon monoxide choking the rest of the continent. In the old days, North Korean factories contributed their share to the cloud cover, but no longer. No artificial lighting competes with the intensity of the stars etched into its sky.
The young couple would walk through the night, scattering ginkgo leaves in their wake. What did they talk about? Their families, their classmates, books they had read—whatever the topic, it was endlessly fascinating. Years later, when I asked the girl about the happiest memories of her life, she told me of those nights.
This is not the sort of thing that shows up in satellite photographs. Whether in CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, or in the East Asian studies department of a university, people usually analyze North Korea from afar. They don't stop to think that in the middle of this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love.
by the time I met this girl, she was a woman, thirty-one years old. Mi-ran (as I will call her for the purposes of this book) had defected six years earlier and was living in South Korea. I had requested an interview with her for an article I was writing about North Korean defectors.
In 2004, I was posted in Seoul as bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. My job was to cover the entire Korean peninsula. South Korea was easy. It was the twelfth-largest economic power, a thriving if sometimes raucous democracy, with one of the most aggressive press corps in Asia. Government officials gave reporters their mobile telephone numbers and didn't mind being called at off-hours. North Korea was at the other extreme. North Korea's communications with the outside world were largely confined to tirades spat out by the Korean Central News Agency, nicknamed the "Great Vituperator" for its ridiculous bombast about the "imperialist Yankee bastards." The United States had fought on South Korea's behalf in the 1950–1953 Korean War, the first great conflagration of the Cold War, and still had forty thousand troops stationed there. For North Korea, it was as though the war had never ended, the animus was so raw and fresh.
U.S. citizens were only rarely admitted to North Korea and American journalists even less frequently. When I finally got a visa to visit Pyongyang in 2005, myself and a colleague were led along a well-worn path of monuments to the glorious leadership of Kim Jong-il and his late father, Kim Il-sung. At all times, we were chaperoned by two skinny men in dark suits, both named Mr. Park. (North Korea takes the precaution of assigning two "minders" to foreign visitors, one to watch the other so that they can't be bribed.) The minders spoke the same stilted rhetoric of the official news service. ("Thanks to our dear leader Kim Jong-il" was a phrase inserted with strange regularity into our conversations.) They rarely made eye contact when they spoke to us, and I wondered if they believed what they said. What were they really thinking? Did they love their leader as much as they claimed? Did they have enough food to eat? What did they do when they came home from work? What was it like to live in the world's most repressive regime?
If I wanted answers to my questions, it was clear I wasn't going to get them inside North Korea. I had to talk to people who had left— defectors.
In 2004, Mi-ran was living in Suwon, a city twenty miles south of Seoul, bright and chaotic. Suwon is home to Samsung Electronics and a cluster of manufacturing complexes producing objects most North Koreans would be stumped to identify—computer monitors, CD-ROMs, digital televisions, flash-memory sticks. (A statistic one often sees quoted is that the economic disparity between the Koreas is at least four times greater than that between East and West Germany at the time of German reunification in 1990.) The place is loud and cluttered, a cacophony of mismatched colors and sounds. As in most South Korean cities, the architecture is an amalgam of ugly concrete boxes topped with garish signage. High-rise apartments radiate for miles away from a congested downtown lined with Dunkin' Donuts and Pizza Huts and a host of Korean knockoffs. The backstreets are filled with love hotels with names like Eros Motel and Love-Inn Park that advertise rooms by the hour. The customary state of traffic is gridlock as thousands of Hyundais—more fruit of the economic miracle— try to plow their way between home and the malls. Because the city is in a perpetual state of gridlock, I took the train down from Seoul, a thirty-minute ride, then crawled along in a taxi to one of the few tranquil spots in town, a grilled beef-ribs restaurant across from an eighteenth-century fortress.
At first I didn't spot Mi-ran. She looked quite unlike the other North Koreans I had met. There were by that time some six thousand North Korean defectors living in South Korea and there were usually telltale signs of their difficulty in assimilating—skirts worn too short, labels still attached to new clothes—but Mi-ran was indistinguishable from a South Korean. She wore a chic brown sweater set and matching knit trousers. It gave me the impression (which like many others would prove wrong) that she was rather demure. Her hair was swept back and neatly held in place with a rhinestone barrette. Her impeccable appearance was marred only by a smattering of acne on her chin and a heaviness around the middle, the result of being three months pregnant. A year earlier she had married a South Korean, a civilian military employee, and they were expecting their first child.
I had asked Mi-ran to lunch in order to learn more about North Korea's school system. In the years before her defection, she had worked as a kindergarten teacher in a mining town. In South Korea she was working toward a graduate degree in education. It was a serious conversation, at times grim. 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. Kim Il-sung, who ruled from the time the peninsula was severed at the end of World War II until his death in 1994, was to be revered as a god, and Kim Jong- il, his son and successor, as the son of a god, a Christ-like figure. Mi-ran had become a harsh critic of the North Korean system of brainwashing.
After an hour or two of such conversation, we veered into what might be disparaged as typical girl talk. There was something about Mi- ran's self-possession and her candor that allowed me to ask more personal questions. What did young North Koreans do for fun? Were there any happy moments in her life in North Korea? Did she have a boyfriend there?
"It's funny you ask," she said. "I had a dream about him the other night."
She described the boy as tall and limber with shaggy hair flopping over his forehead. After she got out of North Korea, she was delighted to discover that there was a South Korean teen idol by the name of Yu Jun-sang who looked quite like her ex-boyfriend. (As a result, I have used the pseudonym Jun-sang to identify him.) He was smart, too, a future scientist studying at one of the best universities in Pyongyang. That was one of the reasons they could not be seen in public. Their relationship could have damaged his career prospects.
There are no love hotels in North Korea. Casual intimacy between the sexes is discouraged. Still, I tried to pry gently about how far the relationship went.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; Reprint edition (September 21, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0385523912
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385523912
- Item Weight : 7.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.13 x 0.7 x 7.95 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #20,177 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in North Korean History
- #3 in South Korean History
- #8 in Asian Politics
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Barbara Demick is a former foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who served as bureau chief in Beijing and in Seoul. Her book, Nothing to Envy:Ordinary Lives in North Korea, won the U.K.'s top non-fiction prize, the Samuel Johnson award, in 2010 and was a finalist for both the National Book Awards and a National Book Critics Circle Awards. Demick's earlier book, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood was republished in 2012 by Random House in the U.S.and Granta in the U.K.
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There are enormous differences between the fates of Cuba and North Korea. Cuba had many advantages -- a benign climate with year-round rainfall where three crops a year could be grown, a culture of helping one another out, and Castro prevented middlemen and speculators from charging astronomical amounts for food. For a detailed understanding of what happened in Cuba read the Oxfam analysis "Cuba: Going Against the Grain"
North Korea couldn't be more opposite - a cold mountainous nation with only 15% of its land arable, and dictators so crazy and cruel they're almost unmatched in history. North Korea might be the only nation with more prisoners per capita than America. There are many kinds of prisons, from detention centers to hard-labor camps, to gulags where your children, cousins, brothers, sisters, and parents would also be sent to for a crime you committed for generations to come. About 1% of the population- 200,000 people -permanently work in labor camps. The threat of these prisons has made it impossible for organized resistance to happen.
It's hard to escape, and if you do, then your relatives end up labor camps. Other nations aren't keen on refugees - South Korea fears a collapse of North Korea and being overrun by 23 million people seeking food and shelter, and China has their own problems with 1.2 billion poor people.
The consequences of peak energy in North Korea are worse than what's likely to happen initially in America, though some regions of the United States are likely to suffer more than others. On the other hand, when times get hard, group-oriented cultures that depend on a large network of people tend to do better than highly individualist cultures, which is as you can learn more about in Dmitry Orlov's Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century (2).
The only good aspect I could find about North Korea was that the women there are less repressed than in the past. A century ago Korean women were so completely covered in clothing that the Taliban would find no faults. In one village north of Pyongyang women wore 7 foot long, 5 feet broad and 3 feet deep wicker hat constructions that kept women hidden from head to toe. Perhaps even more than Muslim women Korean women were imprisoned in family compounds and could only leave at special times when the streets were cleared of men. One historian said that Korean women were "very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely than women of any other nation".
After the Korean War ended, North Korea lost most of its infrastructure and 70% of its housing. It was amazing that Kim Il-sung managed to create a Spartan economy where most were sheltered and clothed, had electricity, and few were illiterate. Grain and other foods were distributed as well. In autumn each family got about 150 pounds of cabbage per person to make kimchi, which was stored in tall earthen jars buried the garden so they would stay cold but not freeze and hidden from thieves.
North Korea became utterly dependent on the kindness of other countries for oil, food, fertilizer, vehicles, and so on.
What happens when the oil stops flowing?
In the early 1990s North Korea suffered a double blow at a time when they were $10 billion in debt. China wanted cash up front for fuel and food while at the same time the Soviet Union demanded the much higher price of what oil was selling for on world markets
The nation spun into a crash. Without oil and raw materials the factories shut down. With no exports, there was no money to buy fuel and food with. Electric plants shut, irrigation systems stopped running, and coal couldn't be mined. The results were:
Power stations and the electric grid rusted beyond fixing
The lights went out.
Running water stopped so most went to a public pump to get water
Electric trams operated infrequently
People climbed utility poles to steal pieces of copper wire to barter for food
There were few motor vehicles
And few tractors, farming was done with oxen dragging plows
Hunger struck, which made people too exhausted to work long at the few factories and farms that were still surviving.
Oil is liquid muscle. One barrel of crude oil (42-gallons) has 1,700 kilowatts of energy. It would take a fit human adult laboring more than 10 years to equal one barrel of oil.
Perhaps this is why many nations have had no choice but to rely on muscle power after an economic crash or during a war, which means putting many people to work on farms. After the energy crisis, North Koreans over 11 were sent out to the country to plant rice, haul soil, spray pesticides, and weed. This was called "volunteer work". Now that they couldn't afford to buy fertilizer, every family was expected to provide a human bucketful of excrement to a warehouse miles away. The bucket was exchanged for a chit that could be traded for food.
Like Mao's crazy schemes (3), North Korea's dictators lurched from one mad idea to another -- one day it was goat breeding, the next ostrich farms, or switching from rice to potatoes.
Food staples were grown on collective farms, and the state took the harvest and redistributed it. The farmers weren't given enough to survive on, so they slacked on their collective fields to grow food to survive on, making the food crisis even worse. In the end, it was people in cities with no land to grow their own food on who ended up starving first. Every year, rationed amounts of food went down.
People were told the United States was at fault, and propaganda campaigns encouraged Koreans to think of themselves as tough, and that enduring hunger without complaint was a patriotic duty, and kept everyone's hopes up by promising bumper crops in the coming harvest. The Koreans deceived themselves like the German Jews in the 1930s, and told themselves it couldn't get any worse, things would get better. But they didn't.
Worse yet, instead of spending money on agriculture, the defense budget sucked up a quarter of the GNP. One million men out of 23 million people were kept in arms - the 4th largest military in the world.
The only place to get food became the illegal black market, where prices were terribly high, sometimes 250 times higher than what the state used to sell food for.
Natural disasters made harvests even worse - in 1994 and 1995 Korea was struck with an extremely cold winter and torrential rains in the summer that destroyed the homes of 500,000 people and rice crops for 5.2 million people.
People began picking weeds and wild grasses to stretch out meals, as well as leaves, husks, stems, and the cobs of corn. Children can't digest food this rough and could end up in a hospital, where doctors advised the rough material be ground up fine and cooked a long time. It wasn't long before malnutrition led to increasing numbers of people with pellagra and other diseases. Hospitals soon ran out drugs and other supplies.
Who died?
Children under five. Mothers couldn't produce enough breast milk, nor was there baby formula, regular milk, or even ground up rice. Children were the most vulnerable from poor diets. A minor cold would turn into pneumonia, diarrhea into dysentery.
Then the elderly. First those over 70, then people in their 60s and 50s.
Even men and women in the prime of their lives began to die. Men first because they have less body fat. Also, the strongest and most athletic because their metabolisms burn more calories.
The most innocent. People who wouldn't steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. The simple and kind-hearted who did what they were told. It's said that the survivors of Auschwitz didn't want to see each other again because they'd all done things they were ashamed of.
Death was certain for people who didn't have the initiative to do something.
Chronic malnutrition makes it hard to fight infections, and people grow more susceptible to tuberculosis and typhoid. Once starved enough, antibiotics stop working, so curable illnesses become fatal. Hunger changes body chemistry to wildly fluctuate resulting in strokes and heart attacks.
The city of Chongjin had always suffered epidemics because its sewage system let untreated feces into streams. Once electricity stopped working, running water became so unreliable that people stored water in large vats which bred typhoid bacteria. Between a lack of soap and antibiotics it wasn't long before typhoid epidemics broke out.
By 1998 about 10% of the population had died from famine, and in some areas 20%, up to 2 million people. The numbers would have been much higher if North Korea hadn't received $2.4 billion in food aid between 1996 and 2005.
The North Korean government began to execut people for just about anything: stealing copper wire, goat, corn, or cattle theft, anyone stealing or hoarding or selling grains on the black market, adultery, prostitution, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and so on. Thousands of people were thrown into prisons and many didn't survive.
Who survived?
People did not passively die. When the public food distribution ended they did whatever they could figure out to feed themselves. Some made bucket and string traps to catch small field animals, used nets to catch sparrows, stripped the sweet inner bark of pine trees and ground it into a powder to replace flour. Acorns were mashed into a paste. Kernels of undigested corn were pulled out of the feces of farm animals. Shipyard workers scraped the slime off the bottom where food had been stored and dried the foul-smelling goop on roofs to get tiny grains of uncooked rice out. Others dug shellfish out and ate seaweed. When making cornmeal, the husk, cob, leaves and stem were thrown into the grinder. Grass was added to make stews look like they had vegetables.
People rested instead of moving around to preserve their calories.
To stay alive, you had to suppress any impulse to share food.
You had to stop caring, to be able to see a dead body on the street and walk on by, and not stop to help a beloved neighbor's 5-year-old on the verge of death. Indifference was a survival skill.
At this point, just about everyone looked at what they owned and could sell to get food. Usually within 5 years most people had run out of possessions to sell, and even sold goods that helped them survive like bicycles for transport or sewing machines to make clothes to sell.
One of the most valuable items a person could own was a hand mill to grind corn, because there was no electricity for electric grinders. People would come for miles to have their corn ground manually.
Some walked around the edges of their city looking for shellfish, birds, or berries, but most cities were concrete jungles, and people needed to go much further in their search for food. In the city of Chongjin families hiked 3 miles to a collective orchard to look for fruit that had fallen and rolled under the fence surrounding the orchard. As food dwindled, children cut school to go to the orchard and squeezed through the wire fence to get fruit. When there was no more fruit to be scavenged, people went further out from the cities looking not just for food, but for firewood. Farms began to hire armed guards.
Children climbed walls and dug up vegetables and kimchi pots buried in private gardens. As the famine worsened, hungry soldiers began raiding people's gardens as well.
In smaller towns and villages, people crammed the narrow spaces between homes with peppers, radishes, and cabbages, those with flat roofs put pots of vegetables on top.
Some raised pigs or made tofu. Many women made cookies because they only took 10 minutes to bake, a lot less time than bread, at a time when firewood and anything else that would burn was hard to find. Cookies made a quick meal for hungry people on the move. When many made the same goods, having the best personality counted.
As coal and wood ran out, and electricity very rare, many foods people had made to trade for rice couldn't be done anymore.
Even dandelions and weeds grew scarce. Hot pepper, salt, and other flavorings that might have made weeds, ground sawdust, and inner bark flour palatable were expensive. Oil was unavailable at any price, making cooking even more difficult. It wasn't long before North Korea's frog population was wiped out by over-hunting. People ate grasshoppers, tadpoles, cicadas, and dogs.
Many hung out at train stations, hoping to go somewhere better. The homeless began to live at the train stations, most of them children or teenagers, often because the parents and grandparents had starved themselves to death first to keep the children alive. Many orphans roamed fearing others would steal from them, or even eat them, as rumors of cannibalism spread. Train stations were a place many dead bodies could be found.
Train stations also were full of prostitutes, often young married women desperate to feed their children. The only payment they asked for was food. Those with apartments nearby could get money or food letting prostitutes briefly rent out a room.
Cities that relied on the falling apart roads and rail lines had to pay the most for food, especially rice, the main staple.
Those with keys to abandoned factories dismantled them and made everything from the machinery to the wood doors into other sell-able products.
Women made sneakers from discarded rubber, built carts from old tires and doors.
Some found books on Oriental medicine and picked mountain herbs. Doctors performed abortions because families couldn't afford babies.
Food aid agencies did a survey in the summer of 2008 and found that two-thirds of people were still picking grass and weeds to survive on.
Despite all the crackdowns on the black market, by 2009 there were some who'd made so much money they were becoming almost middle class. Kim Jong-il solved that problem by invalidating the currency in circulation and issuing new bills as a to confiscate the cash people had saved. The new currency was so worthless that the most money you could convert was $30, instantly throwing anyone who'd done well back into poverty. The economy crashed even lower, and starvation became common again.
Supply chains broke down
Just about anything you could think of grew scarce - there were no bricks, cement, glass, or lumber. When windows broke they were covered with boards or plastic. Supply chains were broken. One school, desperate for glass, devised a scheme to sell the famous pottery of their town for salt in Nampo, sell the salt at a profit, and use that money to buy glass from the only factory in North Korea that still made glass.
A clothing factory that made uniforms started to have trouble in 1988 when shipments of fabric were delayed. Sometimes this was because there was no anthracite coal which was a raw material used to make the fabric (vinalon), or there wasn't electricity at the factory. Management tried to keep the women busy by sending them out along railroad tracks to collect dog s*** for fertilizer. Other days they'd look for scrap metal along the tracks or in the effluent coming out of the pipes at the steelworks.
How to be a Dictator
If you want to be a dictator this book is a good how-to manual. Kim Il-sung went further than most dictators by fostering a cult of personality that made him into a God so he could harness the power of faith by invoking religious sentiments in the people. He took the cult of personality to an extreme - everyone had to have a photo of him on a blank wall with nothing else, and use a white cloth that could be used for nothing else to keep the photo clean. Surprise visits of the Public Standards Police ensured this was the case.
He also terrified everyone with the threat of going to prison.
Children didn't celebrate their own birthdays, only Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's, whose birthdays were national holidays and often the only time people got meat. After the energy crisis, these would were the only days when there was electricity, and children got about two pounds of sweets. Children were expected to stand in front of the portrait while enjoying their treats.
Korean teachers are required to play the accordion to motivate children, or "voluntary hard labor" in the fields or a construction site.
Further Reading
Inside North Korea's Environmental Collapse. Phil McKenna 06 Mar 2013. pbs.org
Pfeiffer, Dale Allen. 17 Nov 2003. Drawing Lessons from Experience; The Agricultural Crises in North Korea and Cuba. From the Wilderness.
References
(1) energyskeptic Sustainability and place: How emerging mega-trends of the 21st century will affect humans and nature at the landscape level
(2) energyskeptic Dmitry Orlov: How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union
(3) energyskeptic Mao's War Against Nature
What Demick does rightly in the beginning of the book is to lay her cards on the table of how long the book took to research, interview, and compile the information together. Also, she wisely says that though she has wholesale relationships and stories from the defectors, there are moments where she cannot corroborate them because obviously it is difficult to get information from within North Korea itself. Then she begins her narrative.
She runs through several refugees and their former lives, mostly from the city of Chongjin which is right near the Tumen River on the Chinese border. Demick describes a young couple, Mi-ran, coming from a low-class of North Koreans because her father was a South Korean, and her boyfriend Jun-sang whose family had come from Japan. Then she later tells the tale of Mrs. Song, a woman who was a stout believer in the Communist regime to the dotted i. She thought that nothing could go wrong with their 'eternal' leader Kim Il-sung. There's Dr. Kim, a petit trained physician with an iron will to do what is right. Demick describes these and others as normal human beings where they grow up and knew nothing else of their outside world and what they believed what was normal.
In between each story and chapter Demick describes in more details/historical analysis of North Korea that gives background to each person's existence, such as the Communist nation's supposed equal status for everyone though they officially classify people based on their loyalty to the state, which has effects even on how much food rations that they could receive. Or what happened to Mi-ran's father, a former South Korean POW, and what happened to these people of circumstance who were not allowed to go back home. She describes in great detail the political state structure that creates an environment of mismanagement, like the infamous collective farms or the post-war fall of Communist regimes that led to less support of the Korean regime. Demick balances a human narrative with a historical background so that you identify with the palate of emotions these people go through while getting the necessary information of understanding their circumstances.
The book climaxes with the disastrous famine that occurred around the time of Kim Il-sung's death and towards 1998. Millions died. Famine became noticeable when their food rations were cut. This is the most difficult part to read: there were moments I cringed on how hunger made people turn to beasts or opportunists at the expense of others. People of Dr. Kim's profession, a noble one, were forced to hunt in the mountains and hills for food and medicine. Or watching young children die of malnutrition. At the same time Demick doesn't write a section on blasting Kim Jong-il's regime. Yet the horror stories of lack of food and the absurdity of the government's "let's eat two meals a day" paints the worst sin a government will be ultimately judged by: inaction and neglect. At this time the author puts in a new view of how North Koreans survived, and it was at times ugly and illegal (at least according to their law), but they managed to survive. She describes Chongjin's citizens doing what it takes to trade, barter, or steal to put some substance in their bellies, even if it couldn't be digested. The section about orphans who pick up scraps off the ground was heartbreaking.
The final sections of the book describe the the eventual danger and migration of the refugees out from North Korea to China to South Korea. The dangers of crossing, checkpoints of getting across to another country and their repatriation laws, surviving to the dangers of exploitation, finally to the promise land. And even there our North Korean friends we read about have more gut-wrenching moments of regret in leaving their homeland and the culture shock that follows from adjusting from state control, "you follow me" to land of opportunity.
Again, one of the best reads on North Korea to date. I enjoyed reading Demick's writing style and putting together a story, not an informative, static, long newspaper article about North Korea. Its quality is renowned for good use of language, like describing the love story of Jun-sang and Mi-ran that makes you know that under the umbrella of repression and absurd rules, love abounds. How Demick describes how the darkness of night due to the lack of electricity proves to be the couple's ally in having an innocent love.
Sometimes its what we don't have, or what we read others don't have, that makes us appreciate life and moves us to change for something better.
Top reviews from other countries
It tells the heartbreaking stories of 6 refugees from North Korea.
It's easy to read because it is well-written, but you sometimes need to stop to convince yourself that you're okay and don't have to live there. You think it's terrible from what you read in the news. It's worse.
And yet I'm glad I read this book because it helps me appreciate where I live and what I took for granted:
the free, industrialized, and capitalistic Western world.
Ce ne sont pas juste des témoignages, mais leur histoire, arrangée avec une grande maîtrise dramatique, mais pour la bonne cause, celle de nous faire ouvrir les yeux sur un enfer invisible.
J'attends le prochain... Superbe !















