I just finished Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I bought this precisely because I wanted a non-sensational account of life in North Korea. I didn’t want to read about nuclear weapons or labor camps.
In many respects, the handful of people Demick interviews do lead normal lives. They go to jobs they don’t necessarily like; the parents worry about their kids’ educations; and the kids struggle against the pressures of school, hormones, and parental expectations.
However, the differences are much more stark and unforgettable.
Most of the people interviewed ended up in Seoul by a string of chance events. They all loved North Korea, and had no long-planted seed to defect. But at the same time, almost all of them learned within minutes of crossing the Tumen River into China how different their lives would be.
When Dr. Kim defected into China, she came upon a bowl of rice sitting on the ground. She couldn’t believe it because “she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice.” Then she heard the dog and realized that “dogs in China ate better than doctors in Korea.”
All of those interviewed lived through the famine of the 90′s that likely killed between 1.0 to 3.0 million people.
Everyone in the book dealt with starvation, and those that lived were ridden with guilt over what they had done to survive. Mi-ran, a schoolteacher, was never able to erase the images of her starving students and the reasons why she didn’t share her food with them. Mrs. Song, a doting wife & mother, never forgave herself for her son’s death (this on the heels of her husband’s death the previous year and her mother-in-law’s death two years prior).
Mi-ran later discovered that that the two sisters who remained in North Korea were snatched in the middle in the night and taken to labor camps because she had defected. And several of the mothers were never able to see their children again.
It goes on and on. And these are the lives of the “ordinary lives” in North Korea.
I highly recommend this book.
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