Throughout Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick describes the constant surveillance and monitoring that defines daily life in North Korea. State police and citizen watch groups, or inminban, monitor how citizens react to propaganda broadcasts and what families talk about in the privacy of their homes, creating an environment in which free speech is a deadly liability, even amongst family members. This kind of domineering surveillance, Demick argues, breeds deep distrust among people, destroying their personal relationships as well as society more broadly.
Demick first explores how the atmosphere of hyper-vigilance and informing on others is the product of a totalitarian regime that has, for decades, punished anyone who speaks out against its leaders. “Spying on one’s countrymen is something of a national pastime [in North Korea,]” Barbara Demick writes. Ordinary citizens who report on anti-regime sentiments to their superiors at work or in the inminban, or citizen’s watch, often stand to bolster their own reputations or social standings through spying and snitching—as a result, surveillance and betrayal are constantly incentivized. In a society in which one’s songbun, or social status, is more or less fixed at birth and determined by the actions of generations past, there is little hope for social mobility—but in proving loyalty to the regime by informing on others, one might be able to amass some good faith and even change one’s fate. This poses a practical problem for the formation of authentic, truthful connections or any kind of fundamental trust between neighbors or family members. Because of the constant threat of being turned in for any questioning of the regime, it is impossible, Demick argues, for any truthful relationships to form. Even in households of tight-knit families who live five to a room, what is said in private is not privileged information—neighbors could hear through the paper-thin walls of the “harmonica” style row housing, or a member of the family, desperate and starving, might already be seeking a path to a greater social position by snitching on their kin. Demick uses the example of a North Korean man, Chang-bo, seeing a report on state television about a factory making plentiful amounts of rubber boots. When Chang-bo sarcastically asked where his children’s boots were, if there were so many to be had, one of their neighbors reported him to the Ministry for the Protection of State Security, or the political police—Chang-bo was arrested, beaten, and interrogated for three days.
Demick goes on to investigate how the long-term effects of living in a surveillance state erodes not just practical but emotional points of connection, leading to an individual’s inability to form or maintain secure, trusting, bonded relationships—even with those closest to them. To do this, Demick uses the example of Mi-ran and Jun-sang—two young lovers from very different families who nonetheless found themselves drawn to one another at a young age. Mi-ran and Jun-sang would meet up after dark and take long walks through the pitch-black countryside each night. It took them three years to hold hands, and over six years to share a kiss on the cheek. Their relationship was marked by the directive to maintain utter chastity and purity, instilled in young people by the Korean government (a directive, Demick suggests, ultimately meant to keep young people from procreating early and thus bringing more mouths to feed into the country). Though Mi-ran and Jun-sang had reasons for keeping the physical aspects of their relationship on hold, their capacity for emotional connection, Demick suggests, was stymied by the atmosphere of surveillance and snitching within the regime. Mi-ran and Jun-sang both began questioning the regime privately during their separate educations at different colleges. While Mi-ran studied to be a teacher and Jun-sang attended an elite university in Pyongyang in the mid-1990s, at the height of the famine, they separately found ways to consume outside media and illegal foreign broadcasts—and even began considering escape. Neither, however, told the other about their feelings or suspicions in the lengthy letters they sent back and forth—how could they, when the mail service regularly read and intercepted letters searching for anti-regime sentiment? As a result, Mi-ran fled in secret with her family, leaving Jun-sang behind—hurt, confused, and in disbelief that he and Mi-ran missed the chance to connect over their shared suspicions and run away together.
Years later, when Demick interviews Mi-ran and Jun-sang—both of whom defected successfully to South Korea—side-by-side, it is clear that they harbor a sense of uncertainty about the other. They were never able to be fully honest with each other as young lovers for fear that the other would turn them in. Demick implies that this engrained sense of distrust has impacted both Mi-ran and Jun-sang in their independent, adult lives in South Korea as well: they still have difficulty being fully honest with one another, though they are free to speak their minds at last.
By showing how an atmosphere in which surveilling, snitching, and spying on one’s friends, neighbors, and family members is incentivized erodes the fabric of society, Demick suggests that there is no hope for reform, revolution, or true solidarity in North Korea. Though the DPRK claims to be built on communal living and solidarity, Demick exposes the ways in which the regime’s desperate bids for total control has turned its people against each other, profoundly and permanently eroding the basic trust necessary to build a functioning society.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Surveillance, Trust, and Relationships ThemeTracker
Surveillance, Trust, and Relationships Quotes in Nothing to Envy
Jun-sang had been […] the person in whom [Mi-ran] confided. […] But she had nonetheless withheld from him the biggest secret of her life. She never told him how disgusted she was with North Korea, how she didn't believe the propaganda she passed on to her pupils. Above all, she never told him that her family was hatching a plan to defect. Not that she didn't trust him, but in North Korea, you could never be too careful. If he told somebody who told somebody . . . well, you never knew—there were spies everywhere. Neighbors denounced neighbors, friends denounced friends. Even lovers denounced each other.
The red letters leap out of the gray landscape with urgency. They march across the fields, preside over the granite cliffs of the mountains, punctuate the main roads like mileage markers, and dance on top of railroad stations and other public buildings.
LONG LIVE KIM IL-SUNG.
KIM JONG-IL, SUN OF THE 21ST CENTURY.
LET’S LIVE OUR OWN WAY.
WE WILL DO AS THE PARTY TELLS US.
WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD.
Yet for all their wealth, the Japanese Koreans occupied a lowly position in the North Korean hierarchy. No matter that they were avowed Communists who gave up comfortable lives in Japan, they were lumped in with the hostile class. The regime couldn't trust anyone with money who wasn't a member of the Workers' Party. They were among the few North Koreans permitted to have contact with the outside, and that in itself made them unreliable; the strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.
North Korea invites parody. We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years' every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung's divinity Who could possibly resist?
"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.
"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.”
Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive. North Koreans were always told theirs was the proudest country in the world, but the rest of the world considered it a pathetic, bankrupt regime. Jun-sang knew people were starving. He knew that people were dragged off to labor camps; but he had never before heard these figures. Surely South Korean news reports were exaggerated, just like North Korean propaganda?
He reminded himself: You don’t talk politics as long as you live in North Korea. Not with your best friend, not with your teachers or your parents, and certainly not with your girlfriend. Jun-sang never discussed his feelings about the regime with Mi-ran. He didn't tell her he was watching South Korean television, and reading pamphlets about capitalism. He certainly did not tell her that he had begun to harbor fantasies of defecting.
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.
Dr. Kim was incredulous. Her entire life, her behavior had been impeccable. […] She was always the first to volunteer for extra work and to attend extra ideological sessions. Her father had come from China and still had relatives there, but Dr. Kim had never met or corresponded with them.
It had to be a mistake, she told herself.
Eventually the truth sank in. Comrade-Secretary Chung was stringing her along, exploiting her hard work and talent with absolutely no intention of letting her join the party. Even worse, Dr. Kim began to suspect that she was indeed under surveillance.
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.
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.
I have found that, over time, the North Korean defectors I know in South Korea become more reticent. They worry about spies within the defector community who might try to blackmail them. They fear that speaking on the human rights circuit or giving interviews to journalists will result in retaliation. One can leave but never completely escape the terror that is North Korea.
