Nothing to Envy: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

At 15, Jun-sang was studious and smart. His father had high hopes that Jun-sang would make it out of the village and go on to university in Pyongyang. Because of this, he was strict with Jun-sang, and Jun-sang didn’t have much time for girls or friendships. Still, he could not stop thinking of Mi-ran. Though he didn’t know her name, he began asking around about her, and soon heard about her family and their roots.

Mi-ran’s father, Tae-woo, was a miner from South Korea—which was, during his youth, under Japanese control. After World War II ended in 1945, Japanese troops pulled out of Korea and ceased a 35-year occupation. The Americans, fearing the power vacuum would let the Soviets would seize control of the Korean peninsula, divided it into two territories at the 38th parallel. They left the Soviets to administer the northern half and took control of the southern half themselves, disregarding or simply remaining ignorant to the fact that the bifurcation between north and south did not exist previously in Korean history. If anything, Demick notes, Korea was divided ideologically on an east-west plane.

Both governments hated the new division, and both claimed to be the sole legitimate government of the entire peninsula. In June of 1950, the leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, stormed across the South Korean border with Soviet tanks and began a war that would last three years. Though North Korea’s troops nearly succeeded in seizing control of the peninsula, American troops stormed in, along with soldiers from Britain, Australia, Canada, France, and the Netherlands. They recaptured Seoul, and pushed North Korean forces back up to around the 38th parallel. In July of 1953, North and South Korea signed a ceasefire. The war had been destructive but unproductive—the physical division remained in roughly the same place as it had in 1950.

Tae-woo was 18 in 1950 when the Communists from North Korea invaded South Korea. He joined the army and rose to the rank of sergeant. Toward the end of the war, however, he was captured and taken to North Korea as a prisoner of war. His life as a South Korean was over, and yet his heritage would follow him through his new life in North Korea. Relegated to an unappealing job in a coal mine, Tae-woo kept his head down and integrated into life in North Korea. He married and moved to Chongjin, where he hoped to settle down. But, in 1958, Kim Il-sung began a campaign to purge South Koreans from the government and even from ordinary society, using background checks and the concept of songbun, a kind of feudal social hierarchy, to keep potential “hostile[s]” such as former South Korean soldiers at the bottom of the social pyramid.

Tae-woo would spend the rest of his life watched carefully by his local inminban, or people’s watch, and reminded constantly that he was beulsun—a person of “tainted blood.” His status, he knew, was permanent and immutable, and any children he had would find their blood tainted and their horizons limited. Mi-ran grew up ignorant of her father’s past and of her own lowly songbun. She found her father’s lack of relatives odd and his refusal to talk about his past frustrating—but Tae-woo knew that talking about the Korean War (and who really started it) could land him in a labor camp, so he kept quiet. North Korean propaganda labeled South Korea as the aggressors in the Korean War and claimed they’d invaded the north, spurred on by American “Yankee bastards.”

As Mi-ran watched her sister Mi-hee face rejection after rejection from specialized high schools, Mi-ran began to worry about her own prospects. One day, when a team of recruiters from the Workers’ Party visited Mi-ran’s high school, she learned that they were looking for girls to be sent off to a military-style training camp before going to Pyongyang to serve on the “personal staff” of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Mi-ran wasn’t recruited, and the rejection stung. Mi-ran and her siblings began to realize that their family history might be the problem—and when their brother Sok-ju failed to gain admission to college, Tae-woo’s children confronted him. He told them the devastating truth. Sok-ju was so angry that he ran away from home for a few days before returning, sorry and emotional.

Meanwhile, Jun-sang was preparing to seek admission to colleges in Pyongyang. Jun-sang, however, knew that his own family background was a problem. His parents had been born in Japan—they were part of a sizable (but discriminated-against) population of ethnic Koreans who lived there before the end of World War II. After the partition of Korea, many of these people didn’t know which part of the peninsula to return to—Jun-sang’s grandparents, off-put by the South Korean leader Syngman Rhee’s government, which was stacked with Japanese officials, chose to live in North Korea.

Jun-sang’s family had more money than most when he was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. They enjoyed luxuries such as modern appliances, nice furniture, and even a vegetable plot. However, Japanese Koreans were often isolated from the rest of society, speaking with distinctive accent and tending to marry individuals from other Japanese Korean families, and they occupied a low position with poor songbun.

The North Korean regime saw Japanese Koreans as a threat: they often had contact with family members back in Japan, and those family members often sent money. A regime that drew strength from isolating its people needed to cut these ties—and in the 1970s, many prominent members of these communities were rounded up and sent to the gulag. Jun-sang knew what families like his were often forced to endure, and he went through his adolescence trying to keep his head down and hide his nice possessions. Jun-sang knew that his family regretted their decision to live in North Korea rather than South Korea—and he knew that he was their only hope for elevating their songbun and being forgiven for their “bourgeois Japanese past.” By getting into a good college and perhaps even the Workers’ Party, Jun-sang could change his family’s fate.