Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Nothing to Envy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Propaganda, Misinformation, Deception, and Control
Isolationism and Self-Reliance
Surveillance, Trust, and Relationships
Scarcity, Starvation, and Desperation
Escape, Trauma, and Survivor’s Guilt
Summary
Analysis
North Koreans, Demick writes, have multiple words for prison, the same way the Inuit do for snow. There are detention centers, police units, “enlightenment centers” for the rehabilitation of those charged with smuggling, labor camps, and the most notorious prisons of all—kwanliso, or “control and management places” located in the northernmost reaches of the country. An estimated 200,000 prisoners are housed in these gulags today—politicians, descendants of landlords or Japanese collaborators, Christian clergymen, and those who have been charged with insulting the authority of the leadership. Sentences in these camps are life sentences, so few ever emerge to tell their stories.
By introducing the unique and violent ecosystem of North Korea’s vast network of prisons and labor camps, Demick turns the focus of the book, for this chapter, to the profound consequences of any criminal or “antistate” activity in North Korea. Though Demick has spent much of the book exploring the rigid societal rules that govern the country, she has not yet examined the practical consequences of defying the state and the Workers’ Party. Now, she offers readers a glimpse into just how serious the punishments for the small crimes her interviewees have all committed truly are.
Themes
When Kim Hyuck was arrested just after his 16th birthday, a fleet of undercover police from the Bowibu, the national security agency that investigates political crimes, brought him to a holding center where they beat him incessantly and questioned him unendingly about having drawn a map of the easiest border crossings for a Chinese citizen. After a few months, he was transferred to a county jail; there, without a trial, he was charged with an illegal border crossing and sentenced to three years in a labor camp.
Kim Hyuck began making border crossings in order to survive—he knew that if he wanted to eat, he would have to come up with a way to feed himself. Now, Demick shows how Hyuck was forced to face the unbelievably harsh consequences reserved for criminals in North Korea. The famine pushed Hyuck into unthinkable territory—and now, he had to wade into even darker, more painful waters.
Themes
At the camp, Hyuck and about 1,500 other prisoners worked from sunrise to sunset, laboring in lumberyards, farmlands, a brick factory, and a mine. The labor camp produced furniture, bicycles, and more. The men were fed one small rice ball padded with corn husks each day. At night, they slept on concrete. The prisoners were mostly “economic criminals,” or those who’d been caught working the black market. Many mornings, Hyuck and his fellow prisoners would wake up to find a man had died in the night. Beatings, the withholding of food, and executions were commonplace. Hyuck was released at last in July of 2002 after just 20 months—he was told that his early pardon was in celebration of the upcoming anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party, but Hyuck believed the camp simply had more “important enemies” than him scheduled to arrive soon.
As Demick relays the terrible conditions Hyuck described within the labor camp where he was held for his crimes, it becomes clear that the desperate North Korean regime turned to prison labor, exploiting a captive workforce to produce goods in an attempt to keep the economy and the production of goods from shutting down altogether. This suggests implicitly that North Korea sought to round up people for petty crimes in order to take advantage of their labor—even if it wound up costing these individuals their lives.
Themes
As the food shortage stabilized, Kim Jong-il decided that he needed to be less “tolerant” of those who had resorted to buying and selling goods on the black market during the crisis. The regime ramped up its arrests, bringing anyone who worked as a vendor, trader, or smuggler to a camp. Kim Jong-il sent reinforcements to heighten security along the Chinese border; he also encouraged Chinese undercover police to start patrolling markets and towns on the other side, hunting for defectors and smugglers. He created prisons for the homeless, hoping to keep hidden away the drifters whose presence on the streets revealed just how bad things were.
This passage shows that the increased presence in North Korea’s labor camps in the late 1990s and early 2000s was not due only to the government’s desire to profit off prison labor, but also due to Kim Jong-il’s desire to increase his own power, infamy, and clout by cracking down on those who threatened his regime. Kim Jong-il needed to present a front of relative normalcy and prosperity in order to prove the superiority of juche, Communism, and the Kim dynasty—and he was willing to do anything in pursuit of that goal.
Themes
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Kim Jong-il also purged the 6th Army, a division of the military stationed in Chongjin, and replaced them with new troops from the 9th Army. Rumors of an attempted military coup spread throughout Chongjin—many people waited for something terrible to happen. Demick writes that the more plausible explanation for the purge was that Kim Jong-il wanted control over the infantry’s financial activities—the military ran trading companies that exported rare delicacies alongside illicit drugs, which the regime condoned as it made a profit. But when the military was suspected of skimming off the top themselves, Kim Jong-il had had enough.
This passage shows that Kim Jong-il and his regime were more than willing to tolerate corruption—and outright theft of aid materials from the people of North Korea by the military—when it benefited them financially and diplomatically. When those profits were lessened, however, he took decisive and punitive action.
Themes
After the purge, even harder crackdowns began. Special prosecutors traveled to the region to investigate factory managers who had organized employees to start an illegal scrap metal trade across the border; the managers were executed by firing squad in a public area near the market. More and more executions began taking place—prostitutes, hoarders, and petty thieves whose only crimes were stealing and selling copper wires from now-defuncted telephone poles were accused of “antistate activities” and gunned down in the streets. Life in North Korea became increasingly chaotic and dangerous, and the rules that had governed life there for so long were changing fast.
This passage shows readers how the government crackdown on “antistate activities” was used to violently, systematically weed out any threat, large or small, to the Communist, isolationist status quo in North Korea. Even as the government took food from hungry citizens and profited off their pain and starvation, it sought to destroy any dissent, industry, or individual enterprise. People doing their best to get by in dangerous, unimaginable times of famine were punished harshly—and sometimes paid for their crimes with their very lives.
Themes
