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Dr. Kim Ji-eun
Kim Hyuck is a former kochebi, or “wandering swallow,” who was just a child when the famine of the mid-1990s hit. Abandoned by his father and separated from his brother, Hyuck was forced to fend for himself in an increasingly dangerous and hostile atmosphere. Hyuck quickly realized that the only way to survive was to make money by selling North Korean goods across the border in China. Kim’s repeated crossings along the Tumen River landed him in and out of labor camps for years. After a particularly long and devastating stint in prison, Kim Hyuck decided to defect for good. The horrors he’d witnessed while wandering the North Korean countryside as a child in search of food, and while enduring miserable days and nights in the labor camps as a young man trying to survive, had convinced him that no life worth living would ever be possible in his home country. Hyuck joined a church in China to obtain refuge from the ever-growing immigration police presence there. He then led a group of other refugees on an arduous and ill-fated trip through a stretch of the Gobi Desert along the Mongolian border. By the time Hyuck made it to South Korea, he was worn out, exhausted, and disillusioned. He struggled for many years to adjust to life in South Korea, afraid of forming meaningful connections with others. Eventually, Hyuck became the most outspoken and public-facing of the interviewees Demick spoke with between 2004 and 2009, even producing a short film about his life and his journey to South Korea. Headstrong, determined, tough, and desperate to outrun the traumas of his youth, Hyuck is an iron-willed young man whose story helps shape the landscape of Nothing to Envy’s many perspectives on what life looks like inside of North Korea.
Kim Hyuck Quotes in Nothing to Envy
The Nothing to Envy quotes below are all either spoken by Kim Hyuck or refer to Kim Hyuck. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 11 Quotes
Dog meat was part of the traditional Korean diet, but Hyuck liked animals and felt bad, though not so bad that he didn't try it again—although by mid-1996 dogs too were scarce.
Hyuck continued to steal. He and his brother climbed walls and dug up clay kimchi pots that had been buried in private gardens. They shoveled the kimchi straight out of the pots into their mouths.
All the while, Hyuck remembered his father's admonition: "It's better to starve than to steal."
In the imaginary dialogue that Hyuck kept up with his father, he retorted, "You're no hero if you're dead."
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Nothing to Envy LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Kim Hyuck Character Timeline in Nothing to Envy
The timeline below shows where the character Kim Hyuck appears in Nothing to Envy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4
...to scavenge for pears. A group of wandering orphans including a young boy named Kim Hyuck, had already descended upon the farm and picked it bare. Kim Ji-eun and her family...
(full context)
Chapter 6
...hard they were crying. Officials often gave out food at the statues—starving children like Kim Hyuck waited in line again and again for hours on end to receive multiple rations. Many...
(full context)
Chapter 11
Kim Hyuck, one of the “wandering swallows,” or kochebi, whose parents had died or gone off in...
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Hyuck and his brother continued to steal. Their father used his connections to get them into...
(full context)
After the slashing, Hyuck ran away back to Chongjin. The city was eerily silent and dilapidated. When he returned...
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Hyuck became a wandering swallow, joining up with gangs of other children for mutual protection. Together...
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Hyuck began sneaking onto trains and riding around the countryside in search of food, but the...
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Late one night in late 1997, when he was 15 years old, Hyuck crossed the Tumen for the first time by wading through the icy water. He reached...
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Hyuck began traveling back and forth across the river with North Korean pottery, jewelry, paintings, and...
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Chapter 12
When Kim Hyuck was arrested just after his 16th birthday, a fleet of undercover police from the Bowibu,...
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At the camp, Hyuck and about 1,500 other prisoners worked from sunrise to sunset, laboring in lumberyards, farmlands, a...
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Chapter 19
...circumstances in South Korea—their problems, she states, often trail them across the border. When Kim Hyuck was released from labor camp in the summer of 2000, he resolved to cross the...
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After Chinese police began monitoring the church, the leader of the missionary team told Hyuck he needed to move on. The leader gave Hyuck some money and asked him to...
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In September of 2001, Hyuck and others from his group flew from Mongolia to South Korea. His period of interrogation...
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Chapter 20
...in Incheon who helped defectors out through Mongolia. He took the same route as Kim Hyuck, arriving in South Korea in October of 2004.
(full context)
Epilogue
...and runs a small business; he is married to a woman who also defected. Kim Hyuck obtained his master’s degree and began work on a Ph.D. in North Korean affairs; he...
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Demick believes that Hyuck is the most public-facing member of the group because he has no living family. Many...
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