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
That July, the hospital in central Chongjin where Kim Ji-eun worked received many patients who sustained injuries or collapsed while mourning Kim Il-sung at his statue in the city. Rooms were crammed due to a recent typhoid outbreak and dark due to electricity failures. The 28-year-old Dr. Kim hardly ever left the hospital, as she was always the first to volunteer for extra shifts in hopes of being chosen to join the Workers’ Party one day soon. Dr. Kim’s father, an ethnic Korean from Manchuria, moved to North Korea in the 1960s and expressed extreme devotion to the regime right away, grateful to have fled Mao’s China. Dr. Kim always mirrored her father’s enthusiasm for the regime and sought to impress her father with her loyalty and hard work.
Even though Dr. Kim lived in a failing regime and witnessed daily her hospital’s inability to provide adequate care for suffering people, she still had some blind faith in North Korea born of her father’s own trust in the state. Demick begins to examine the ways in which Dr. Kim sought to embody ideals of juche and to do all she could to prove herself a loyal citizen.
Themes
Dr. Kim gave herself to her patients body and soul. From making house calls in poor neighborhoods to donating her own blood to gathering medicinal herbs to supplement the hospital’s paltry treatments, Dr. Kim managed to meet the unique demands of being a doctor in resource-strapped North Korea. By the early 1990s, however, medical equipment continued to break, yet no new supplies or machines arrived from abroad; pharmaceutical factories shut down, leading to a shortage of medicine. When Dr. Kim’s higher-ups started rationing painkillers and antibiotics based on their personal preferences for different patients, Dr. Kim began experiencing tension with her superiors. She asked to be transferred to pediatrics. Dr. Kim was already divorced and living with her parents—the struggles in her personal and professional lives were compounded by the sudden misery of Kim Il-sung’s death.
By delving more deeply into Dr. Kim’s complete and utter devotion to her patients and to her profession, even amidst a total collapse of resources, Demick shows how those suffering through scarcity and starvation often do unthinkable, unimaginable things, both good and bad. While Dr. Kim did unimaginable things to provide for her patients, her superiors began showing just how insidiously starvation and scarcity transform human behavior and illuminate the human capacity for cruelty.
Themes
Dr. Kim was devastated when she learned of Kim Il-sung’s death. She and her colleagues, deep in denial, traded conspiracy theories about how Kim Il-sung had been assassinated. She was so wrapped up in the response at work that by the time she realized her father was intentionally starving himself to death, it was too late for her to do much of anything. Though Dr. Kim begged her father to eat and even gave him intravenous fluids, her father’s condition worsened. He grew delirious and began railing against the Great Leader. One night, he scrawled a strange pyramid labeled with names and numbers on a piece of scrap paper. He handed it to Dr. Kim and told her that he had written down the names of relatives in China who would help her when she needed them. Dr. Kim locked the paper away in a box, confused and upset.
Dr. Kim loved the Great Leader so much in part because of her father’s example—so when her father, in his final days, began speaking out wildly against the regime and even suggesting Dr. Kim find a way to defect or escape, she was unable to process her emotions. Just as Dr. Kim was unable to accept Kim Il-sung’s death, she was unable to find a way to reconcile this new information about her father and her family with the things she thought she knew. This highlights the ways in which life in North Korea—and any environment marked by constant surveillance—transforms, erodes, and obscures human connection, even amongst family members.
Themes
After her father died, Dr. Kim threw herself into her work with even more gusto. Summer turned to winter, and the normal rhythms of life in North Korea resumed—but when the weather once again warmed and rains flooded the rice paddies, the government admitted publicly, at last, that the nation was enduring a food shortage. Dr. Kim began to notice that her patients in the pediatric unit were skinny and weak, with heads too large for their bodies and strange pains in their stomachs. Fed on wild grasses foraged in the woods and the husks of corncobs, the children were unable to digest or receive any nourishment from the scraps they were eating.
As Dr. Kim began witnessing the devastating effects of the worsening famine, she found herself forced to reckon with the fact that her country had failed her and her fellow citizens. The admission that there was a food shortage was too little, too late—it was clear to Dr. Kim that the long-term effects of starvation were already seizing hold of her patients’ lives, and that there was nothing she could do.
Themes
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Other patients began coming in with devastating, strange symptoms. Rashes around the neck and hands indicated pellagra, caused by a lack of niacin in the diet, and many women came in unable to produce milk for their newborns due to their own malnourishment. Many came to the hospital looking for food, but the hospital had no rations, either. Dr. Kim watched many of her pediatric patients die, unable to do anything to relieve what ailed them: starvation and wasting.
Dr. Kim’s reckoning with the ways in which scarcity and starvation force people into unthinkable situations is unique. She was, in essence, forced to give up on a lot of people and turn a blind eye to their suffering: there were no options for these people, and Dr. Kim had already given her all to a system that could not sustain itself.
Themes
By 1995, North Korea’s economy had come to a total standstill. Exports dropped from $2 billion to $800 million; factories began to rust, Chongjiin’s ports were empty, and even the ubiquitous propaganda signs began to chip and fade. Demick notes that Kim Il-sung died at a “convenient” time—his legacy, in the eyes of his people, would be protected from association with the immense destruction that was just beginning.
Demick uses this passage to emphasize, once again, how those responsible for North Korea’s complete collapse ultimately failed to face any consequences for their actions. Demick stresses that Kim Il-sung is still revered in North Korea to this day; the fact that he drove his country into famine goes largely ignored by those who devote themselves to him.
Themes
