Nothing to Envy: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

Throughout the famine, as her family had grown hungrier, Oak-hee had only grown angrier. She had already been contemptuous of the regime prior to Kim Il-sung’s death—as circumstances throughout the country worsened and her own marriage grew more tumultuous, Oak-hee decided she’d had enough. Her husband, Yong-su, who had a scrap-metal scam going that provided their family with stockpiles of food, refused to share his resources with Oak-hee’s family, keeping the goods locked up in a cellar to which only he knew the code. He often went off on week-long benders, leaving Oak-hee and their children hungry. In August of 1998, after being beaten badly by her husband one evening, Oak-hee left her house in only a nightgown. She walked north along the train tracks until she reached the next town, then snuck onto a train headed for the border town of Musan.

Oak-hee knew that there was a thriving market in China for North Korean wives. At the Musan station, she waited around until a man solicited her, promising to guide her across the river into China and find her a respectable, resourceful man to “marry.” The union would not be recognized by Chinese law, but Oak-hee would be fed, cared for, and, most importantly, she would be far away from North Korea. Oak-hee asked to be set up with a man who didn’t speak Korean—she wanted an entirely fresh start. The broker set Oak-hee up with a short, quiet, gentle man named Minyuan. Oak-hee stayed with Minyuan for two years, but eventually, she decided that she needed to return for her children back home. Minyuan cried as he escorted her to the bus station, warning her to be careful on her mission.

By 2000, things in North Korea were different than they had been when Oak-hee defected. More and more people had started to sneak across the border, and officials on both sides were fed up. Crackdowns had been initiated—especially in busy border towns like Dandong, where Oak-hee stopped before crossing the border to try and get a job in a restaurant and save up some money. A Chinese spy, recognizing her as a North Korean, apprehended and arrested her. In January of 2001, she was sent back to North Korea. She served only two weeks in prison—there were so many women like her being rounded up and arrested it was impossible to keep them all locked up given the paltry resources in the low-level labor camps.

Oak-hee snuck across the border again right away, where she found work with a Chinese broker like the one who’d set her up with Minyuan. She was sent on an assignment to fetch a child that had been left behind in North Korea and sneak him across the river—but on her first day of the mission, she was caught again and turned over to the Bowibu. Oak-hee was tied together at the thumbs with two other women—the Bowibu did not have any handcuffs—and sent on a train to a detention center in Chongjin. Oak-hee was right back where she started—and this time, she did not get out of prison so quickly.

Oak-hee and her fellow prisoners were all defectors, most of whom were women like her who’d tried to sell themselves off in China. The women took care of one another, picking lice from each other’s heads and looking out for each other during the long, hard hours making bricks and weeding fields as guards shouted government propaganda at them through large bullhorns. One day, while working in some fields far from the center of the compound, Oak-hee caught sight of an old woman tending goats in a nearby field. Oak-hee talked to the woman through the fence and bribed her. Oak-hee gave the woman her underwear—a rare good available only in China—in exchange for the woman’s promise that she would find Oak-hee’s mother and tell her where Oak-hee was.