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
Demick explores how South Koreans view their North Korean brethren—she suggests that refugees who arrive from North Korea looking gaunt, worn, and decidedly old-fashioned “remind them of a past they would rather forget.” The increasing influx of defectors between 2000 and 2005 alone, Demick says, also creates a sense of apprehension about the unstable, overwhelming future that might take place if North Korea were to collapse: as many as 23 million refugees in need of food, shelter, and education would flood over the border. Though the governments on both sides broadcast their great shared desire for reunification one day, Demick suggests that for South Koreans, imagining such a scenario inspires only uncertainty and dread.
Demick includes this passage to contextualize her interviewees’ arrivals to South Korea. While South Korea accepts all defectors and helps them adjust to life in South Korea, the larger refugee crisis that looms should the North Korean regime fall remains a source of anxiety and uncertainty. Not only would these refugees need basic support for survival—the collective trauma and grief that would wash across the border would be unimaginable.
Themes
Dr. Kim crossed into China in 1999 with no intention of defecting to South Korea—all that was on her mind was finding her father’s relatives. She wanted to use their connections to find food, shelter, and work so that she could save up enough money to bring her son over—eventually, she still dreamed of returning to North Korea to work at the hospital. She still felt she owed her country a debt. After seeing the dog bowl full of rice and meat, however, something broke within Dr. Kim—each day she spent with the family of ethnic Koreans who put her up and helped her find her father’s family made her angrier and angrier at how she’d been treated back home. When she finally met her relatives, they embraced her immediately as kin. Suddenly, Dr. Kim had no plans of going back.
This passage contrasts Dr. Kim’s original hopes of recovering just enough to get back to North Korea and continue paying the imagined “debt” she had to her country and her people against the disillusionment she began to feel once she realized how oppressive, painful, and cruel the treatment she’d faced back home truly was. Dr. Kim found herself embraced by kind, generous people who lived hard but dignified lives—she suddenly could not imagine returning to a country ruled by fear, lack, and deception.
Themes
Dr. Kim was caught three times by Chinese police—each time, her relatives bribed her out of trouble. After her third arrest she traveled to Beijing, where she passed herself off as a Chinese ethnic Korean and took a job nannying for a South Korean professor’s young child. At the end of the professor’s yearlong sabbatical in China, she suggested Dr. Kim return with her to South Korea. Dr. Kim confessed the truth of who she was and where she came from—the professor, overwhelmed with emotions, helped get Dr. Kim to South Korea so she could begin a new life.
Dr. Kim once again found herself moved by the kindness of strangers. She felt she had to hide her past in order to survive in the world—but the professor’s kindness showed her that she could own the truth of her past and still find acceptance and support. Dr. Kim was so used to hiding things out of necessity in North Korea, and this impacted the way she approached relationships even beyond its borders.
Themes
Dr. Kim arrived in Seoul in March of 2002, but her transition to life in South Korea was not easy. She used her resettlement stipend to buy into a business she later learned was a pyramid scheme. She couldn’t use her medical training in South Korea; her North Korean degree was useless, and she’d have to start school all over again. When Demick and Dr. Kim first met in 2004, Dr. Kim expressed regret over her decision to come to South Korea. She still dressed in the stuffy fashions of the north, and she admitted that she’d fantasized about killing herself.
This passage shows that for Dr. Kim—and for countless other defectors—the struggle of adapting to life outside North Korea is a serious one. Years of living on a predetermined course, of learning to be agreeable and compliant, and of living in a hegemonic society have made North Korean refugees ill-prepared for the demands of the modern world. This often plunges them into depression and fills them with a sense of insufficiency.
Themes
Get the entire Nothing to Envy LitChart as a printable PDF.
Years later, when Demick and Dr. Kim reconnected in 2007, Dr. Kim was a completely different person. She’d gotten a fashionable haircut and enrolled in a medical program. She lived in a dorm with young students and she was full of life. Still, however, when Demick asked Dr. Kim about her dreams for the future, she said she hoped to study geriatrics so that one day, when North Korea opened up, she’d be able to bring South Korean ideas of elder care back to Chongjin and open a nursing home.
This passage illustrates that even as Dr. Kim slowly adjusted to life in South Korea, opening up and making friends, there was still a part of her that clung to hopes of returning home. This shows how deep survivor’s guilt often runs—and how one can never truly leave behind such intense past traumas.
Themes
Demick writes that like Dr. Kim, many defectors experience difficult circumstances in South Korea—their problems, she states, often trail them across the border. When Kim Hyuck was released from labor camp in the summer of 2000, he resolved to cross the Tumen one last time and get out of North Korea for good. Across the border, in China, he found a church in Shenyang—he knew that South Korean churches in China took in refugees all the time. Hyuck claimed he wanted to learn about Christianity. He joined a group of other defectors who prayed and studied the Bible all day every day—he hated swallowing the church’s ideology, but he needed food and shelter.
As Demick transitions to Hyuck’s point of view, she begins to show just how completely desperate Hyuck was to escape North Korea for good. With no family and no job to speak of, Hyuck was perhaps the most vulnerable of Demick’s interviewees—and he had to resort to uncomfortable methods to ensure that he would be able to get out and stay out.
Themes
After Chinese police began monitoring the church, the leader of the missionary team told Hyuck he needed to move on. The leader gave Hyuck some money and asked him to lead a group of refugees to the Mongolian border—from there, they could make their way to South Korea. The journey was difficult—border patrol agents on the Chinese side were on high alert, and getting to Mongolia required crossing a long, unforgiving stretch of the Gobi Desert. Hyuck’s group wandered in the desert for a night and a day—the youngest boy in their group died. When the Mongolian border police found them at the start of their second night in the desert, they brought them across the border—but a lengthy investigation to ensure no foul play was involved in the boy’s death began, and Hyuck was stuck in a Mongolian prison for 10 weeks.
This passage compares Hyuck’s painful and traumatic journey to freedom to the relatively easy journeys south that Mrs. Song and Dr. Kim experienced. While all of Demick’s interviewees were desperate to leave North Korea, Hyuck’s journey specifically reflects the extremes to which people will go when faced with a lifetime of scarcity, starvation, and lack. The things Hyuck witnessed on his journey to Mongolia, Demick suggests, paled in comparison to the terrors he’d already witnessed in North Korea.
Themes
In September of 2001, Hyuck and others from his group flew from Mongolia to South Korea. His period of interrogation was especially long and grueling given his shady background and stints in prison—he hated being confined, and he hated being sent to Hanawon. Quick to anger, suspicious of authority, and unskilled in South Korean social etiquette, Hyuck isolated himself from others and had trouble making friends or holding a job. When Hyuck and Demick met again in 2008 he had moved to a busier part of Seoul and enrolled in college—he’d made many friends and started taking classes in English. He’d arrived at last.
Hyuck, like Dr. Kim, had a difficult transition to life in South Korea. Both of them clung to traumas from their pasts in very different ways—and both, for a long time, refused to do the emotional and social work needed to begin forming relationships and pursuing joy. Demick attributes their difficult transitions to a measure of culture shock—and to a healthy dose of survivor’s guilt.
Themes
