Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy explores the famine that struck North Korea in the mid-1990s, taking the lives of anywhere between 240,000 and 3.5 million people. As Demick interviews defectors about their experiences struggling to survive what the North Korean government termed the Arduous March, she paints a picture of physical, social, and mental starvation. By presenting painful and stark descriptions of a country wasting away, Demick ultimately argues that scarcity and starvation can force people to do unthinkable things—and endure indescribable pain—out of the sheer will to survive.
Throughout the book, Demick highlights several instances in which her interviewees recall doing or enduring horrible things in order to survive, illustrating how unthinkable circumstances can inspire unspeakable acts. Kim Hyuck, one of Demick’s interviewees, was known as a child as one of the uncountable kochebi, or wandering swallows—the name given to children who, at the height of the famine in the mid-1990s, took to the streets to beg, barter, and steal food when their families or the state orphanages in which they were housed were unable to provide for them any longer. Hyuck first stole from a stranger when he was just 10 years old—he was arrested, but as soon as he was released, he went back to stealing from orchards, pilfering snacks from people at train stations, and even killing animals to survive. Hyuck recalls an incident in which he and a friend drowned a dog before skinning and barbequing it. Though dog meat, Demick notes, is part of the traditional Korean diet, Hyuck “felt bad” about the brutal way in which the animal was caught and killed. Even after joining a street gang of other kochebi for protection, Hyuck recalls falling asleep each night full of fear that another child would steal from him while he slept—or that a cannibal would come along, kidnap him, and eat him. In 1997, Hyuck began crossing the Tumen river illegally into China, bringing goods to sell back and forth across the border and risking arrest, torture, and even death in so doing. Hyuck was eventually arrested in about 1998 and placed in a labor camp, where, for over 20 months, he watched men starve and die in between hard labor shifts each day. In relaying Kim Hyuck’s story, Demick emphasizes how even young children are exposed to desperation, cruelty, and fear under the North Korean regime. The scramble for food occupies the kochebis’ entire lives as malnourishment warps their bodies and fear disrupts their development. Unthinkable actions become ordinary at a very young age. In including Hyuck’s tale, Demick shows how starvation and scarcity push people to the brink and, indeed, numb them to what it means to witness or to commit an atrocity against another living, breathing thing.
Demcick uses the story of Mrs. Song—a dedicated factory worker who was loyal to the regime—to illustrate how scarcity and starvation often force people to confront unbearable choices. In 1995, Demick reports, Mrs. Song had been forced to sell all of her and her husband Chang-bo’s possessions in order to make enough money to buy food on the black market. The factory was closed, and Mrs. Song was no longer receiving ration tickets in exchange for her work. After selling their valuables, Mrs. Song and her husband had no choice but to illegally sell their apartment for the equivalent of $3,000 and move into a tiny shack. Chang-bo died within months, while Mrs. Song was out foraging in the hills for weeds and barks to turn into soup. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Song’s son, Nam-oak, contracted pneumonia during a cold winter. Mrs. Song rushed to the hospital to obtain medicine for her son. A doctor wrote her a penicillin prescription—which she sold for 50 won in order to buy corn. Nam-oak died months later in the same manner Chang-bo did—alone and starving while Mrs. Song scrounged for food. Mrs. Song doesn’t commit any crimes against her family—rather, she does everything she can with every waking moment she has to ensure their survival—but she still loses many of them one by one, even as she makes impossible decisions in hopes of saving them. In highlighting the desperation Mrs. Song exhibited to obtain scraps of food for her family—and, most notably, the choices she had to make between food and medication, and between staying at home with her sick loved ones and abandoning them in hopes of finding food for them—Demick shows how scarcity and starvation can force one to choose between two horrible, impossible outcomes.
Sometimes, Demick shows, simply turning a blind eye to the suffering associated with starvation and scarcity in order to survive can feel like a great atrocity in and of itself. Kim Ji-eun, a doctor who treated starving children at the height of the famine, watched helplessly as many of her young patients died in front of her. Mi-ran, who worked as a teacher, witnessed her kindergarten class’s enrollment drop from 50 students to 15 in just over three years. In sharing their stories, Demick shows how both of these women remain haunted by the indifference they showed at the height of the famine, not recognizing that that indifference was an “acquired survival skill.” Learning to “stop caring” and to suppress “any impulse to share food,” Demick suggests, is, to these women, as evil as actively taking food away from someone. Demick, however, reports on these instances with compassion, suggesting that the women’s desperation to survive was natural and unavoidable—yet still an example of the great, unimaginable lengths to which a starving person will go in order to survive another day.
Demick illustrates the horrors of starvation in painstaking detail throughout Nothing to Envy, but she never seeks to invoke melodrama. Instead, she uses graphic descriptions of scarcity and starvation to impress upon readers just how deep and painful the decisions starvation forces people to make truly are.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Scarcity, Starvation, and Desperation ThemeTracker
Scarcity, Starvation, and Desperation Quotes in Nothing to Envy
The propaganda machine launched a new campaign, playing up Korean pride by recalling a largely apocryphal fable from 1938-39 in which Kim Il-sung commanded a small band of anti-Japanese guerrillas "fighting against thousands of enemies in 20 degrees below zero, braving through a heavy snowfall and starvation." […] The Arduous March, as they called it, would later become a metaphor for the famine. […] Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty. Billboards went up in Pyongyang touting the new slogan, "Let's Ear Two Meals a Day." North Korean television ran a documentary about a man whose stomach burst, it was claimed, from eating too much rice.
"How are we going to live? What are we going to do without our marshal?" The words came tumbling out.
[Chang-bo] didn't react. He sat pale and motionless, staring into space. Mrs. Song couldn't keep still. She was pumped up with adrenaline. She rushed down the staircase and out into the courtyard of the building. Many of her neighbors had done the same. They were on their knees, banging their heads on the pavement. Their wails cut through the air like sirens.
Now, surrounded by sobbing students, Jun-sang wondered: If everybody else felt such genuine love for Kim Il-sung and he did nor, how would he possibly fit in? […] He was alone, completely alone in his indifference. He always thought he had close friends at the university, but now he realized he didn't know them at all. […]
This revelation was quickly followed by another, equally momentous: his entire future depended on his ability to cry. Not just his career and his membership in the Workers' Party, his very survival was at stake. It was a matter of life and death. Jun-sang was terrified.
As [Dr. Kim] did her rounds, walking through the pediatric ward, the children would follow her with their eyes. Even when her back was turned, she could feel their eyes staring at her white gown, wondering if she could relieve their pain and soon realizing that she could not.
"They would look at me with accusing eyes. Even four-year-olds knew they were dying and that I wasn't doing anything to help them," Dr. Kim told me years later. “All I was capable of doing was to cry with their mothers over their bodies afterward.”
Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world.
Our house is within the embrace of the Workers' Party.
We are all brothers and sisters.
Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet children do not need to be afraid,
Our father is here.
We have nothing to envy in this world.
It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring. In time, Mi-ran would learn how to walk around a dead body on the street without paying much notice. She could pass a five-year-old on the verge of death without feeling obliged to help. If she wasn't going to share her food with her favorite pupil, she certainly wasn't going to help a perfect stranger.
Even with his weight loss, Nam-oak was too heavy for Mrs. Song to carry to the hospital-there were no ambulances working by now-so she went herself and explained his condition. A doctor wrote her a prescription for penicillin, but when she got to the market she found it cost 50 won—the same price as a kilo of corn.
She chose the corn.
Nam-oak died in March 1998, alone in the shack.
ln 1997 a few aid officials were allowed entry to Chongjin, with even greater restrictions than in Pyongyang. An aid worker […] wrote in a journal that she was not allowed to leave the Chonmason Hotel. […] The agency pulled out soon afterward, reporting that it could not verify that aid was getting to the intended recipients. […] While big ships laden with donated grains from the U.N. World Food Programme started docking at Chongjin's port in 1998, the relief was offloaded into trucks by the military and driven away. […] Much of it ended up in military stockpiles or sold on the black market.
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."
"The food problem is creating anarchy," Kim Jong-il complained in a December 1996 speech delivered at Kim Il-sung University. […] As well as any of the world's strongmen, he understood perfectly the cliché that an absolutist regime needs absolute power. Everything good in life was to be bequeathed by the government. He couldn't tolerate people going off to gather their own food or buying rice with their own money. "Telling people to solve the food problem on their own only increases the number of farmers' markets and peddlers. In addition, this creates egoism among people, and the base of the party's class may come to collapse.”
Jun-sang knew the song by heart from his childhood, except the lyrics had been updated. In the verse "Our father, Kim Il-sung," the child substituted the name of Kim Jong-il. It was beyond reason that this small child should be singing a paean to the father who protected him when his circumstances so clearly belied the song. There he was on the platform, soaking wet, filthy, no doubt hungry.
Mi-ran told herself they were going just for a short trip to make the telephone call, but in her heart, she knew she might never come back. […] After they were gone, they would be denounced as traitors. "She received an education through the benevolence of the party and she betrayed the fatherland," she could almost hear the party secretary saying. She didn't want her guilt to rub off on Jun-sang. After she was gone […] he could find himself a suitable wife, join the Workers' Party, and spend the rest of his life in Pyongyang as a scientist.
He'll forgive me, he'll understand, she told herself. It's in his best interest.
What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark.
Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
She thought of Chang-bo especially when she was eating. How that man loved to eat! He would have so enjoyed the sausage. […] Then her thoughts drifted to her son. Her memories were so tinged with guilt and shame that she couldn't even speak about him. So strong, so handsome—such a tragedy to have lost him at twenty-five. How much life he had missed. How much they had all missed, herself too, her daughters, locked away in North Korea, working themselves to death. For what? We will do as the party tells us. We will die for the general. We have nothing to envy. We will go our own way. She had believed it all and wasted her life. Or maybe not.
“When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry,” Mrs. Song apologized one night as we sat around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in broth and dipped in a sesame sauce. "I can't help thinking of his last words, 'Let's go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.’"
Deep down, however, Mi-ran was the same person who had occupied the lowest rung of North Korean society, the poor, female progeny of tainted blood. She had been shaped by a thorough indoctrination and then suffered the pain of betrayal; she'd spent years in fear of speaking her mind, of harboring illicit thoughts. She had steeled herself to walk by the bodies of the dead without breaking stride. She had learned to eat her lunch, down to the last kernel of corn or grain of rice, without pausing to grieve for the children she taught who would soon die of starvation. She was racked with guilt.
