'Nothing to Envy': A searing history of everyday life in North Korea

"Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea"

by Barbara Demick

Spiegel & Grau, 314 pp., $25

Mi-ran and Jun-sang dated for three years before they held hands, another six before Jun-sang worked up the courage to brush his lips lightly against Mi-ran's cheek. The society they lived in was beyond puritanical.

Their star-crossed romance, as Barbara Demick describes it in "Nothing to Envy," her superbly reported account of life in North Korea, deserves a special place in the annals of backwardness.

"At the time I left North Korea," Mi-ran later recalled, "I was 26 years old and a schoolteacher, but I didn't know how babies were conceived."

Jun-sang was enlightened when a university classmate slipped him a booklet for Chinese schoolchildren. "How was he to have known that women menstruated? It explained a lot."

Their ignorance about sex, droll as it is, points to a situation far darker: the complete lack of information about the world into which the North Korean dictators Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, plunged their subjects.

To justify a bloated military (the fourth-largest in the world) and a ruinous nuclear-weapons program, they have "kept hysteria at a high level, ginning up incessant reports of imminent invasion by the imperialist warmongers," Demick writes.

"Kim Jong Il didn't care if he bankrupted the rest of the country," one defector told Demick. "He saw the missiles and nuclear weapons as the only way to maintain power."

As long as the Soviet Union and China propped up the dictatorship with loans and "friendship" prices on imports, North Korea remained prosperous enough. Until the mid-1970s, in fact, it outperformed South Korea.

But the collapse of the Soviet empire and the rise of Chinese capitalism devastated its economy. Mines and factories shut down. Electrical power all but disappeared. Soon people were out foraging for the food the government once provided.

"By 1998," Demick reports, "an estimated 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans had died as a result of the famine, as much as 10 percent of the population." Mi-ran, the innocent young lover, learned "how to walk around a dead body on the street without paying much notice."

Because the country is all but closed to the media, Demick, who moved to Seoul to write for the Los Angeles Times and spent the next five years there, did her reporting with the aid of about 100 defectors. She got to know six of them especially well; their stories provide the backbone of the book.

It may be hard to fully take in such memories of extreme deprivation as a doctor's tales of operating without anesthetic ("acupuncture would be used for simpler surgeries, such as appendectomies"), of advising mothers desperate to feed their children, "If you use grass or bark, you have to grind it up very fine, then cook it a very long time so it is soft and easy to eat."

As one of Demick's sources told her bitterly, the "simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told — they were the first to die of starvation." It didn't take long for the rest of this duty-obsessed society to break down.

To stay alive required the kind of cunning it took to survive the concentration camps — a parallel Demick draws explicitly when she cites Primo Levi's observation that Auschwitz survivors never wanted to meet again because they'd all done something they were ashamed of.

A major source of guilt for Demick's defectors is the brutal reprisals — typically, life sentences in the North Korean gulag — their families suffered after their defections.

Though Demick's subtitle proclaims that she is writing about "Ordinary Lives in North Korea," her main characters are extraordinary by definition: They got out. Their escapes are, in each case, riveting, and they provide a few small rays of hope against the futureless desolation of North Korea.