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
When the famine hit, Demick writes, the people of North Korea did not go passively to their deaths—instead, they came up with increasingly creative (and dangerous) ways of feeding themselves: they trapped sparrows, foraged for plants and tree barks, cooked and ate frogs, and even picked kernels of undigested corn from animal excrement. The North Korean government, meanwhile, would barely even admit that the food shortage was real.
Even as people devoted exponential amounts of time, energy, and brainpower to figuring out their next meager meal, the North Korean regime refused to concede that mass starvation had taken hold of the country. This cognitive dissonance left many people in denial themselves—and that denial would have devastating effects for those who, like the government itself, refused to see how widespread, how dangerous, and how unending the famine was.
Themes
Mrs. Song was reticent to turn to the black market—but when her and her husband’s pay dried up and their food rations ceased, she began selling off their family’s possessions to buy soybeans so that she could make and sell tofu. When a fuel shortage began, she could no longer cook the tofu—and so she and Chang-bo, who once fancied themselves skillful cooks, took to foraging in the mountains for weeds, grasses, nuts, and barks to bolster their small rations of cornmeal made from husks and cobs.
This passage begins to show the lengths to which Mrs. Song would go to prevent her family’s starvation. She compromised her Communist ideals and turned to illegal trade, and she also began compromising the kinds of foods she would stoop to eat.
Themes
When there was nothing left to sell, Mrs. Song and her husband decided to illegally sell their apartment—which was technically owned by the regime, as was everything in North Korea. After earning about $3,000 for the sale, Chang-bo and Mrs. Song moved to a single room. Mrs. Song used the profits to illegally purchase rice, which she and her husband hadn’t eaten in years. On her way home from the faraway market, Mrs. Song’s tightly packed train crashed—the back carriages were almost entirely destroyed. Mrs. Song survived, as she was toward the front of the train, but she lost most of her rice and suffered a debilitating back injury that would leave her in chronic pain for years to come.
Increasingly desperate to find ways to provide her family, Mrs. Song found herself doing things she never thought imaginable—and enduring things she’d previously thought unthinkable. Demick uses the train incident to illustrate how, as scarcity and starvation began to form the rhythm of Mrs. Song’s life, she found herself powerless to fight back against the structural, systemic failures all around her that slowly decimated her, her family’s, and her neighbors’ quality of life.
Themes
As chronic malnutrition seized hold of the population, the most vulnerable—children and the elderly—began dying of ordinarily preventable conditions worsened by starvation. Dysentery and pneumonia overtook the frailest individuals who were so weakened that they were unable to fight off ordinary conditions like colds and stomach flus. Those who refused to steal food or break the law by turning the black market—those who remained innocent and did as the regime told them to do—died first.
Here, Demick describes the painful facts of starvation. Those who believed that the regime would take care of them—or that to lie, cheat, steal, or turn to the black market would be to dishonor the regime, the concept of juche, and the Great Leader—were the first victims of a famine that the regime allowed to happen.
Themes
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Mrs. Song’s mother-in-law died in the spring of 1996. Mrs. Song felt she had failed, as a daughter-in-law, to keep her alive. Even as more and more propaganda posters urging citizens to “charge forward into the new century in the spirit of victory in the Arduous March,” Mrs. Song realized that things were getting worse. Mrs. Song and Chang-bo moved to an even smaller place, an unheated and crumbling shack. They hardly had any possessions left, and money was running out.
This passage shows how even as loyal citizens like Mrs. Song worked to stay afloat, the regime preyed upon their citizens’ faith in them and denied that anything was amiss. By urging citizens to take up the “Arduous March” as a personal, noble cause, the regime spread dangerous misinformation and fueled mass denial, confusion, and desperation.
Themes
Mrs. Song and her husband both suffered from extreme lethargy, and Chang-bo had a stroke. After returning home from the hospital, his legs began swelling horribly—a sign of fluid retention brought on by starvation. He began hallucinating and talked incessantly about food. One morning, he offered to take Mrs. Song out to a nice restaurant. Sensing his desperation, Mrs. Song hurried out to beg for food. By the time she returned home, Chang-bo was stiff and unresponsive—he had died alone.
Demick tells the story of Chang-bo’s slow, terrible death, highlighting how in his final days he could think of nothing but a real meal. This passage illustrates the long-term physical and psychological effects of starvation and scarcity, both on those who are suffering most acutely and those who must watch their loved ones waste away, knowing there is little they can do.
Themes
Nam-oak came to live with Mrs. Song following Chang-bo’s death. Nam-oak’s dreams of athletic glory had collapsed; now, he worked for the railway system for no pay and no rations. In the winter of 1997, he caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. Mrs. Song went to the hospital and asked for a penicillin prescription. A doctor wrote her one—but when she got to the market to buy it, she found it cost the same as a kilo of corn. Mrs. Song chose the corn. Without medicine, Nam-oak wasted and died—he passed away, like Chang-bo, while Mrs. Song was out foraging for food.
In this passage, Demick shows how people living in an atmosphere of constant scarcity are forced to make devastating, unthinkable decisions. Mrs. Song believed that in buying food to feed her son, she was helping him more than medicine could—yet the decision she made proved to be a fatal one, one she would have to live with for the rest of her life.
Themes
By 1998, an estimated 10% of North Korea’s population had died. Exact numbers remain unknown, as hospitals were forbidden from citing starvation as a cause of death. Foreign aid agencies gave the country $2.4 billion between 1996 and 2005, but when representatives from these agencies arrived in North Korea to assess the situation, they were shepherded through the showcase capital of Pyongyang and shown a city that appeared to be bustling and thriving. Agencies couldn’t assess how serious the famine was, and they could not determine whether the aid rations were getting to those who needed them most. The military stockpiled a lot of the food that came in from the outside world, and the regime sold rations on the black market for their own profits. By the end of 1998, Mrs. Song told Demick during one of their interviews, “everybody who was going to die was already dead.”
This passage illustrates how even at the height of a devastating famine, the North Korean regime remained obsessed with presenting a strong, self-sufficient, isolationist façade to the outside world. Their pride, Demick argues, resulted in hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths. Demick illustrates how the rhetoric of juche became, in essence, a death sentence for millions of North Koreans who lived at the mercy of their corrupt, incompetent government.
Themes
