What I've learned from Nothing to Envy thus far

First of all, Barbara Demick can write her ass off. Which is good because otherwise this book would be too bleak to finish (the one chapter about the famine-Wandering Swallows-oh my God I wish I hadn't read page 164.) It's interesting to compare between her and Sonia Shah, who wrote the book I just finished, The Fever, about malaria. Both well researched and interesting topics. Demick is clearly the better writer though and elevates the material literary fiction levels. It's interesting to complement non-fiction by saying it reads like fiction but I've noticed I'm not the only one who makes that comparison. That's why Capote invented the genre of literary non-fiction after all.

The book was written in 2010 but mainly deals with the famine of the 90's. All of the main characters, who all defected to South Korea, are from Chongjin. Demick picked it first to focus on one part of the country in detail. And also because Pyongyang is a city reserved for party faithful and showcase North Koreans (one character says her neighbors were kicked out of the capital because their son has dwarfism.) Pyongyang is also likely to be the only city in the DPRK that Westerners have seen, and few at that-excepting some border towns where South Koreans are allowed in more peaceful times to flow in and out of a bit easier. Hyundai plays an interesting role in that, btw.

Journalists are highly respected because they are the party mouthpieces. This also puts them in the unique position of actually seeing some of the unexpurgated news from the outside, which they can't of course report. But they have to filter it to report only the bad stories from the rest of the world. Doctors are respected but, at the time of the novel at least, not that well paid and expected to gather their own medicinal herbs in the springtime. As in, they take a month or more off to harvest herbs from the countryside. As the economic crisis turned into an energy crisis and the lights went off in the whole country, the factories weren't able to produce drugs and these herbs became more important.


When Kim Il-Song died in July, 1994, the famine was already starting. People stood in mourning lines sometimes two or three times in a row to get the rice cakes they were handing out. There are videos on YouTube of the hysteria. Some of it was genuine and some of it was just due to the psychological nature of hysteria being contagious. But it was also apparent that the inminban (the neighborhood Party spies) were watching to make sure people were mourning sufficiently. The people Demick interviewed described how it became a contest to see who could look the most grief-stricken. One defector who was a kindergarten teacher said she thought one of her students was approaching hysteria and then realized she was spitting on her hands and wiping her face because her mother had told her she was a bad person if she didn't cry.





North Korea is fucked up, yo. When is someone going to pull a Romanov style assassination on that family?

They also reconfigured the calendars a few years after Kim-Il Song's death. Now they use some jive shit called the Juche Calendar. Year 1 is the year 1912 when Kim-Il Song was born. The Gregorian calendar is still used for dates prior to 1912. No wonder South Korea is not ecstatic about the notion of re-unification. How many orders of magnitude worse would this be than the German re-unification?

However, South Korea does have a policy that all North Koreans are South Korean citizens so if you defect, you are a South Korean de facto. However, China doesn't want refugees flooding over their border (and apparently they have been known to catch them and send them back to certain death if found) so you can't defect to China and then request asylum at a South Korean embassy. The Chinese border is of course easier to cross than the DMZ.

Speaking of Juche (the seriously misguided North Korean notion of superiority and self-reliance), some scientist there invented a fabric called Vinalon which is also called the Juche fiber. Like everything in the DPRK, it is shabby and suicidally depressing. It's some cheap shiny fabric that doesn't hold color well so most of the time you will see it in black or gray. If you live above the 38th parallel, you probably have a wardrobe-full of this stiff, uncomfortable, dreary cloth. How comfortable could pants or sheets made from anthracite coal and limestone be?

(apparently in Europe you can buy pet towels made from it.)

During the famine, it was reported that Kim Jong-Il was eating meals of simple potatoes. This isn't true. He has notoriously gourmet tastes and was eating imported lobster and shit. Meanwhile, his subjects were literally combing thru animal shit trying to find some undigested plant material. Nice.

What was good about the famine is that it presented people who were able to survive it with unprecedented freedom to move about a country where normally travel permits are required to go anywhere. This in a country where you had to have a permit to travel and had to inform the local inminban where they were staying. You needed a permit to stay in a motel (and woe betide the single woman travelling alone.) It kind of reminded me of my favorite book that I read for my contemporary Arab literature class, The Story of Zahra by Hanan Al-Shaykh. The Lebanese Civil War brought similar freedom to Zahra, a young unattractive woman from a repressive family in Beirut. There can be moments of exhilarating liberty in the utter collapse of society.

Finally, as long as I'm speaking of shit--North Korea was short of fertilizer in the 90's (maybe they still are) so it was every family's job to collect "night soil" and bring it to a collection center for credits. Night soil is human shit someone had to collect from the toilet that they used to fertilize the crops. How does everyone not have cholera? Anyways, yeah. Gross. I liked how Mrs. Song's daughter got around it though. She would go to the collection center and steal a bucket (because, as the author reasoned, who would guard a warehouse full of buckets of poo?) and then present it for the food credit.