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
At noon on December 19th, 2011, the North Korean regime broadcasted a news bulletin: Kim Jong-il was dead of heart failure. The government and the people, Demick writes, followed the precise “choreography” of Kim Il-sung’s death down to the tiniest detail: a 10-day mourning period ensued once again; once again, people took to the streets to wail and scream. Kim Jong-un, an unlikely choice to ascend to the status of Great Leader as Kim Jong-il’s third son, became the world’s youngest head of state. Demick notes that in her continuing interviews with refugees, many expressed ambivalence or anger toward Kim Jong-il, whom they blamed for the famine, but felt optimism about Kim Jong-un’s ability to open up North Korea and change things for the better.
By demonstrating how the mourning rites in the wake of Kim Jong-il’s death were simply hollow repetitions of the same rights that took place following his father’s, Demick calls her reader’s attention back to Jun-sang’s earlier realization after he heard a young kochebi swap out Kim Il-sung’s name for Kim Jong-il’s in the patriotic song he sang for tips: the regime’s propaganda machine swirls on and on indiscriminately. Whoever is in charge doesn’t really matter—the regime demands undiscerning, unthinking fealty from its citizens merely to keep them under control.
Themes
Kim Jong-un looked, for a time, like a new kind of leader: he and his wife appeared in public together often, and he seemed open to economic reform. Within a year of his ascendance to power, however, Kim Jong-un began launching satellites and missiles and conducting underground nuclear tests. U.N. sanctions came down swiftly; in response, North Korea ripped up the 1953 armistice and threatened strikes against the United States. The U.S. bolstered its military presence in the Pacific, while China supported the U.N. sanctions.
Though Kim Jung-un presented a front of innovation and progress that to many seemed positive, he quickly revealed that the innovations his regime planned to make were not social or economic but related primarily to military offensives and threats against other nations. Where Kim Jong-un seemed, for a time, as if he would open up the country in new ways, in the end, the first few years of his regime turned out to center around isolating North Korea even more deeply and striving, at all costs, to prove its self-reliance and exceptionalism.
Themes
Kim Jong-un’s strange behavior grew more erratic over the years. In December 2013, he had his uncle, the second-most-powerful man in the country, executed; by the end of the year, five of the seven men who had dominated his father’s regime were dead, too. Kim Jong-un focused on hosting American basketball player Dennis Rodman and rebuilding amusement parks in Pyongyang. He also oversaw a cyberattack on Sony Pictures’s studio network in retaliation for the studio’s production The Interview, a comedy centering around a pair of journalists, played by Seth Rogen and James Franco, who infiltrate North Korea and assassinate Kim Jong-un.
Here, Demick emphasizes that Kim Jong-un’s actions alternate between the genuinely grotesque and the patently absurd. Any threat to his regime or any slight to the cult of personality he is clearly trying to inspire, like his father and grandfather before him, is punished gravely. This indicates that Kim Jong-un, like his predecessors, is completely obsessed with keeping the propaganda machine within North Korea spinning in his favor—even as the country’s weaknesses and human rights violations are continually exposed on the world stage.
Themes
Though Kim Jong-un’s antics since his rise to power have often been strange or ludicrous, North Korea’s technological and nuclear capabilities are, Demick admits, frightening. North Korea, she says, has begun to show a “faint economic pulse”—in 2012 and 2013, its economy grew by tiny percentages. North Koreans are allowed to have mobile phones, now, though service is only available through one state-approved provider, and though phones can’t make calls outside the country or connect to the internet. Kim Jong-un seems to be making an effort, Demick observes, to “pry open the economy without loosening the regime’s grip.”
Kim Jong-un’s rule has seen small advancements that hint at growing economic and nuclear futures—yet Kim is still unwilling to allow his people any freedoms that will risk his regime’s total control over the flow of information coming into and departing from North Korea. He wants the clout of being recognized as a world leader to be reckoned with, yet he will not extend basic human rights to his people.
Themes
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North Korea seems to be trying to attract tourists by making changes to the showcase capital of Pyongyang and conducting renovations in cities like Chongjin—yet Demick suggests that for most North Koreans, nothing is really changing. She recalls some strange memories from her 2005 trip to Pyongyang: after she and her fellow journalists left the hotel in which they were staying, a U.N. representative also staying there followed up with Demick to tell her that as soon as the press left, the lights went out and stayed out. Demick also recalls seeing kochebi wandering along country roads just outside Pyongyang, searching for food and shelter. After interviewing recent defectors as late as 2012 and 2013, she writes, she believes Kim Jong-un is squandering his people’s hopes and goodwill by doing frivolous things like building up theme parks in the midst of an ongoing food shortage.
Though North Korea, under Kim Jong-un, is working hard to affect prosperity, levity, and the capacity for leisure, Demick and other North Korea watchers such as journalist and foreign aid representatives know the truth: things are still scarce and rotten on the inside. Whether Kim Jong-un’s frivolity will create enough anger among the amasses to create a tipping point remains to be seen—but it is clear that his focus on creating a stable front has left the starving and financially unstable majority of the population profoundly in the lurch.
Themes
Demick’s most recent interviewees also tell her that cash bribes, violent crime, and drug addiction—specifically methamphetamine addiction—are all on the rise. People are still hungry, and more and more citizens are homeless. One new interviewee told Demick that she estimates hardly any North Koreans actually feel any belief in or loyalty to the regime anymore; “It is belief in life,” she told Demick, that keeps North Korea’s people going. Demick is uncertain of how much longer the situation in North Korea will hold—it has defied countless predictions about how long the regime would last over the years. Many of Demick’s interviewees, such as Jun-sang, have expressed great despair over North Korea’s unbelievable, inconceivable staying power.
Learning that the regime is, at least in the eyes of the people, declining in legitimacy and importance is a double-edged sword for Demick. She knows that if the regime’s grip on its people and its ability to control them through propaganda both begin to lessen, there is hope for the future—yet the lack of uprising, revolution, or meaningful political resistance to the regime suggests that there is some indefinable quality which keeps the fabric of North Korea’s authoritarian rulership intact.
Themes
Demick provides an update on the lives of her original interviewees. Mrs. Song and Oak-hee have brought all the younger members of their family—Oak-hee was even able to get her daughter out. Kim Ji-eun has her medical exams and become certified as a doctor in South Korea; she, too, was able to get her child out of North Korea. Mi-ran lives in a trendy, upscale neighborhood and has begun to learn English; she often volunteers at a reorientation center for newly arrived North Koreans just north of Seoul. Jun-sang lives a quiet life in North Korea 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 has testified publicly before the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea.
By providing information about the lives of the six defectors whose live comprise the story of Nothing to Envy, Demick shows how the past continues to follow these individuals even as they grow, succeed, and put down roots in new communities. By showing how the interviewees purposefully remain connected to their pasts—by toiling to rescue their families, marrying other defectors, helping new refugees, or sharing their stories with the world—Demick shows how difficult it is for all of them to escape the pasts from which they’ve run.
Themes
Demick believes that Hyuck is the most public-facing member of the group because he has no living family. Many other defectors in South Korea, Demick writes, eventually become shy and reticent; they worry about being blackmailed by spies or facing government retaliation against their families back home should they speak out. Though these individuals have left North Korea, Demick states, they still cannot completely escape its terrors.
This passage, which constitutes the book’s final lines, contain Demick’s overarching thesis after years and years of research on the lives of North Korean refugees. She does not deny the power the regime continues to have over refugees even after they’ve defected—and she suggests that there is no easy way to leave behind the guilt, pain, trauma, and fear that years of life under an authoritarian regime create within a person.
Themes
