Nothing to Envy: Chapter 9 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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”