Musings: Nothing to Envy - Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Gosh, I love my followers.  Without you guys, I'd never have heard about Barbara Demick's excellent book Nothing to Envy:  Ordinary Lives in North Korea, and my life would have been the lesser for it.

Earlier this year, I read Guy DeLisle's Pyongyang and didn't really enjoy it because DeLisle came off as an angry and frustrated tour guide to take us through the country.  Almost everyone in the comments of that post mentioned Demick's book, and so when I saw it on my visit to Powell's Books in Portland, OR, I didn't think twice about getting it.

And while I still think that DeLisle was harsh in his assessment of the North Korean people, I can understand now where his frustration and anger stem from, especially when you learn about the number of North Koreans that have died of starvation over the past decade or two.

Barbara Demick worked in Seoul for the LA Times as a reporter and while she was there, she interviewed many North Korean defectors.  What she learned was truly chilling and sad.

In some ways, you almost want to laugh at the things you hear about North Korea and their almost cultish way of life.  The belief that the Grand Marshall Kim Il-sung was born under an auspicious double rainbow near a sacred mountain when almost everyone knows that he was born somewhere completely different.  That when he died, a thousand birds descended to take his body straight to heaven.  That he led fantastically successful military maneuvers against enemies and won every battle against overwhelming odds.  That he is an agricultural/astrophysics/military/operations/government genius.  It's ludicrous on so many levels, and perhaps it would be funny if the North Koreans had a way to prove him wrong, to understand that there are other sides to the story, other opinions.  But they don't.  And so anyone who doesn't quite fit in, who doesn't believe heart and soul in the Communist regime, feels completely isolated and terrified of being turned in.  And they so often are.  North Korea has work camps and spies and police and military enough to make anyone think twice about rising up against those in power.

Demick presents all of these facts in her book, but unlike DeLisle, she has obvious sympathy for the people whose stories she shares.  And the people are wonderful, too.  We meet people who were born defiant and never fit into the North Korean way of life.  We meet people who fully bought into Kim Il-sung's doctrines until their own lives fell completely apart.  And their stories are so moving and so personal that it's impossible not to become deeply absorbed in this book.  Demick shows us a population of highly inventive, determined people who want to live their best life.  They are downtrodden, hungry, and disillusioned, but they also bounce back from so many setbacks.  Reading their stories here really humanizes North Koreans and makes it clear that, just like the rest of the world, they have individual hopes and dreams that they want to accomplish, too.  A beautiful book with a lot of heart.