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
The industrial coastal city of Chongjin contains 500,000 people—yet it is considered by most North Koreans to be an undesirable place to live. Chongjin is far from the capital of Pyongyang and closer to Russia. During the Japanese occupation, Japanese forces built up Chongjin’s port and created steelworks factories. Chongjin was devastated in the wars that wracked the peninsula in the 1940s and 1950s, but after the end of the Korean War, Kim Il-sung’s regime rebuilt them, centering Chongjin as the site of North Korea’s largest steel factory. Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, Chongjin became a city of great economic and strategic importance, and the regime installed a ruling elite to monitor the region’s villagers and factory workers.
Here, Demick provides some background on Chongjin, the metropolitan area in and around which the book is set. In doing so, she helps her readers understand the geographic and economic position in which her story is primarily situated. Chongjin looks unwelcoming and is far from the center of the regime, making it a place primed for dissatisfied and rebellious citizens. The institution of a “ruling elite” to serve as a kind of elevated people’s watch, she suggests, was meant to curtail or weed out dissatisfaction in the area.
Themes
One of these factory workers was Song Hee-suk, or Mrs. Song, as she liked to be called—a “true believer” in the regime who grew up in Chongjin in the 1950s and 1960s. Her father was killed during the bombing that took place throughout the Korean War. The loss was devastating, and it cemented the young Mrs. Song’s anti-Americanism. The young Mrs. Song and her family received a certificate declaring their patriarch a “martyr of the Fatherland Liberation War.” As a young woman, she married a man named Chang-bo, a prominent member of the Worker’s Party. Mrs. Song dreamed of moving to Pyongyang, but the Party requested she and her husband remain in Chongjin.
Here, Barbara Demick introduces Mrs. Song, another of her interviewees. Unlike Mi-ran and Jun-sang, Mrs. Song was a model citizen and a devout adherent of the regime’s messaging from a young age. Demick tells Mrs. Song’s story from early childhood in order to contextualize her need to have faith in the regime following the terrible losses she and her family suffered. By clinging to the regime’s isolationist, anti-American stance, Mrs. Song was able to feel, perhaps, that she could somehow make certain that her father’s death was not in vain by giving her all to the Party and the regime.
Themes
Chongjin is a stark but imposing city with broad sidewalks and a large thoroughfare that could accommodate six lanes of traffic—if there were that many cars in Chongjin. Though Chongjin looks impressive to those just passing through by car or train, Demick notes that upon closer inspection, parts of the city are falling apart. The apartment building Mrs. Song and Chang-bo moved into as newlyweds wasn’t yet in disrepair—though it didn’t have an elevator, the young couple had two whole rooms to themselves. Their first daughter, Oak-hee, was born in 1966. Mrs. Song gave birth to two more girls before finally having a boy—in North Korean culture, boys are prized over girls.
Demick continues describing Chongjin, using its slow slide into disrepair as a metaphor for the problems simmering beneath the surface of North Korea that would soon become impossible to hide. She uses Mrs. Song’s hopeful, optimistic move to the heart of Chongjin to metaphorize Mrs. Song’s wholehearted belief in her country’s promises.
Themes
Even with four young children, Mrs. Song worked hard six days a week at a clothing factory nearby. Her children played and learned at the factory’s daycare center while Mrs. Song worked. Between caring for her family, cooking, and attending meetings of the Socialist Women’s Federation, Mrs. Song hardly had any time for herself—yet her belief in the regime stayed strong, and Mrs. Song proved herself to be a model citizen and a perfect emblem of Kim Il-sung’s juche ideology. Drawing on Marxism-Leninism, Confucianism, and intense nationalism, juche encourages stoicism and intense self-reliance, completely rejecting dependence on others.
Demick continues to explore the concept of juche and how a country founded on values of isolationism, stoicism, and intense distrust functions—or fails to function. Though Mrs. Song believed dearly in the ideal of juche and strove to embody its teachings, Demick foreshadows the ways in which juche would fail Mrs. Song and her family.
Themes
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Through juche, Demick writes, Kim Il-sung hoped to build both a better country and better people. Seeking ways to establish total social control, he oversaw the creation of propaganda that would make him appear to his people more like Santa Claus than Stalin: an omnipresent, ever-watchful, benevolent father figure who commanded respect, love, and devotion. Kim Il-sung, whose maternal uncle had been a minister in North Korea’s pre-Communist days, understood religion’s power to sway people. He began positioning himself as a godlike figure capable of supernatural feats—and presented his son, Kim Jong-il, as a Christ figure who possessed similar powers. As Demick explains Kim Il-sung’s coordinated effort to make himself a living god in the eyes of his people, she urges readers to understand the level of total indoctrination that assails isolated North Koreans every hour of every day.
By delving more deeply into the calculated approach Kim Il-sung took as he figured out how to control his people, Demick helps to contextualize the reasons why North Koreans like Mrs. Song found his regime’s propaganda so compelling and believable. Kim Il-sung used a combination of religious overtones, coercion, and saturation to make himself the center of his people’s every waking moment. Though outsiders may not understand how North Koreans came to believe such far-fetched things about their leader, Demick posits that Kim Il-sung’s insidious tactics trumped reason.
Themes
In 1972, the Workers’ Party began distributing lapel pins bearing Kim Il-sung’s image. All North Koreans were required to wear them over their hearts. Additionally, all homes in the country were required to keep framed portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on their walls—but forbidden from hanging any other images. Inspectors from a special police force, the Public Standards Police, dropped in on homes at random to ensure the pictures were hung prominently and well-maintained. Mrs. Song was more than happy to follow these stringent rules—she believed in the party’s aphorism that “loyalty and filial devotion are the supreme qualities of a revolutionary.”
Demick delves even further into the tactics the regime instituted in order to ensure that most citizens’ minds never strayed far from thoughts of their Great Leader and his son. By creating an atmosphere of extreme surveillance and total control—and by urging citizens to love their leader dearly, as they would a father or a god—the regime successfully convinced millions of people that total devotion was the only path to safety.
Themes
When Oak-hee reached adolescence, Mrs. Song’s life, which revolved around the regime, began to change. Oak-hee was rebellious and irritable. She felt that the volunteering associated with her “patriotic duty” to her country was pointless and mind-numbing. She bragged about coming up with ways to get out of her duties, which worried her mother. Chango-bo helped get Oak-hee a good job with a local propaganda department after she graduated high school. There, she enjoyed the easy work and soon agreed to marry a young Korean People’s Army employee, Choi Yong-su, who was a shoo-in for the Workers’ Party. The two wed in 1988 in front of a statue of Kim Il-sung, as most young couples did, and enjoyed a happy wedding feast. Soon after, however, Yong-su developed an alcohol problem, began abusing Oak-hee, and was rejected from the Party—but there was nothing Mrs. Song could do.
Mrs. Song held high hopes for her children while they were growing up—but Oak-hee’s rebellious nature and fairly open criticism of the things the regime demanded of her threatened to compromise all of Mrs. Song’s hard work to create the perfect North Korean family. Mrs. Song and her husband tried to reel Oak-hee back in and help her build an acceptable life—but their prioritization of Oak-hee’s adherence to the regime over her well-being had devastating consequences for all of them. This illustrates how the fear of being surveilled or punished for falling out of line often trumps the pursuit of genuine happiness, connection, openness, and honesty amongst people in North Korea, even within families.
Themes
Mrs. Song’s son, Nam-oak, was recruited for a special athletic school in Pyongyang at a young age. Mrs. Song was proud—but as the years passed, Nam-oak’s visits home became less frequent and he himself grew more distant. Mrs. Song learned that Nam-oak had an older girlfriend in Chongjin—on visits home, he would stay at her apartment. Mrs. Song knew that by seeing an older woman and engaging in premarital sex, her son was greatly endangering his chances for future entry into the Workers’ Party.
Mrs. Song’s world continued to fall apart as yet another of her children acted in ways which threatened to compromise not just their own security within the regime—but by extension their mother’s as well.
Themes
Things got even worse for Mrs. Song in the late 1980s when Chang-bo applied for a permit for a television from his work unit. He was granted the permit, and the family got a TV preloaded with government channels that broadcast state propaganda and movies produced by Kim Jong-il at all hours. They often allowed neighbors over to watch the television. One evening, while watching a report on a factory supposedly made huge numbers of fine rubber boots, Chang-bo laughed and asked where his children’s boots were if there were so many to go around. A neighbor reported Chang-bo to the head of the inminban, who passed the information on to the Ministry for the Protection of State Security. Changbo was arrested and interrogated by state agents for three days. When he returned home, his wife railed against him for jeopardizing all they had.
This passage introduces the concept of television as a symbol for the insidious ways in which the North Korean regime gives its citizens the illusion of openness and control—while actively continuing to indoctrinate them with fawning propaganda. This instance also shows just how extreme the punishment in North Korea is for speaking out in any way, small or large, against the regime. Even though Chang-bo and his wife held prominent positions in society and were widely known as dedicated adherents of the regime, Chang-bo was still tortured for simply making a joke that criticized the propaganda he was being fed.
Themes
Chang-bo and Mrs. Song were both grateful that because of their relatively high positions in society, he’d gotten off easy. But Chang-bo, a journalist who had occasional access to foreign media—which he sanitized and spun for North Korean consumption as part of his work—soon began questioning the regime. While Chang-bo commiserated with a likeminded coworker one night in the privacy of his own home, Oak-hee overheard and told her father she agreed with him. Chang-bo and Oak-hee began having frequent, secret conversations about what was really going on in the rest of the world. Chang-bo supplied Oak-hee with facts about South Korea’s economic greatness and Communism’s failure all over the world. Chang-bo and Oak-hee were very careful to never have such conversations when Mrs. Song—“the true believer”—was at home.
This passage continues to illustrate how the atmosphere of constant surveillance in North Korea hamper the potential for truthfulness and connection. Indeed, this society lauds and rewards those who snitch on their closest friends and family members. Though Chang-bo and Oak-hee found ways to share information and express their discontent, they did so with the constant fear that Mrs. Song—the person whom they were both, in their own ways, closest to—might turn them in for their beliefs.
Themes
