Nothing to Envy Study Guide

Barbara Demick grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and graduated from Yale University and the Bagehot Fellowship in economic and business journalism at Columbia University. From 1993–1997, she lived in Eastern Europe, where she served as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer and wrote extensively about the war in Bosnia and its aftermath. In 2001, after a stint in the Middle East, Demick became the Los Angeles Times’s first bureau chief in South Korea, where she wrote about North Korea and interviewed refugees fleeing the regime for China and South Korea. Her books Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood and Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea are drawn from her reportage on both regions. Known for her imaginative, novelistic expansions of her interviewees’ testimonials, Demick’s work has been nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

The bulk of Nothing to Envy charts the lead-up to and the fallout from the North Korean famine, known in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (D.P.R.K.) as the “Arduous March.” A period of mass starvation that lasted from about 1994–1999, the famine stemmed from factors related to North Korea’s rocky, mountainous terrain and lack of arable lands, economic mismanagement, and a series of floods and droughts which the North Korean regime’s centrally planned system failed to respond to with any urgency or flexibility. Demick meticulously outlines how North Korea’s floundering economic relationships with the Soviet Union—which had collapsed in the early 1990s—and China meant that the country, heavily reliant on foreign aid and imports, could not sustain itself economically by the mid-1990s. As food disappeared and jobs—through which D.P.R.K. citizens received their weekly meal ration tickets—dried up, the North Korean regime instituted austerity measures such as the “Eat Two Meals a Day” campaign and proliferated propaganda campaigns branding the famine as an “Arduous March” mirroring one of the Great Leader Kim Il-sung’s “arduous” battles against Japanese forces in World War II. Somewhere between 240,000 and 3.5 million Koreans lost their lives as a result of the famine. Because of the secretive nature of the regime, exact numbers are unknown, but a 2011 U.S. Census Bureau report estimates the number of excess deaths in the country throughout the 1990s to be between 500,000 and 600,000. North Korea, according to many reports, still suffers from widespread food insecurity to this day.

The North Korean regime is notoriously hostile toward journalists and uses the showcase capital of Pyongyang to distract visitors to the country from the poverty and famine found in more rural areas of the country. But many writers and journalists have nevertheless managed to write books exploring the ins and outs of North Korean society, using interviews with defectors and refugees to help paint a picture of what life is really like inside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Sandra Fahy’s Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea, like Never Caught, draws on interviews with refugees who escaped North Korea at the height of the famine, painting a portrait of an insular nation deep in crisis and the ways in which citizens cope, socially and psychologically, with the duress of hunger and starvation. Bradley K. Martin’s Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty and Victor Cha’s The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future are more academic studies of the dynastic politics of North Korea, exploring the ins and outs of the regime that exerts total control over the lives of over 25 million citizens. Many refugees who have fled North Korea have written memoirs of their lives there—The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeon-seo Lee and In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park are just two firsthand accounts of life inside North Korea—and life after escaping its borders.