Nothing To Envy

Summary of Nothing To Envy

1. 1

   When Darkness Becomes Your Only Privacy

   

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   What does it mean to fall in love in a country where the lights never turn on? North Korea from space looks like a black void-not because it's undeveloped, but because it has regressed from modernity back into darkness. This isn't poetic metaphor. It's the lived reality of millions trapped in the world's most secretive nation, where electricity became a luxury after the Soviet Union's collapse in the early 1990s pulled the plug on subsidized fuel. The skeletal power lines still hang overhead like monuments to a functional past, reminders to older citizens who remember when their country actually outshone South Korea in development. Yet this darkness offers something precious in a surveillance state: invisibility. When adults retire early without power for televisions or lights, teenagers can slip out unnoticed. For Mi-ran and Jun-sang, two young people whose relationship violated North Korea's rigid social hierarchy, night became their sanctuary. They would meet after sunset and walk to an abandoned hot springs resort where ginkgo trees shed yellow leaves like delicate fans. Under brilliantly unpolluted stars, they could talk for hours-a love story that satellite analysts studying nuclear facilities would never detect. In this bleak country where millions starved, there was also love, friendship, and the universal human longing for connection, all flourishing in spaces carved from absolute darkness.

2. 2

   Blood Determines Everything

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   In North Korea, your grandfather's birthplace-not your character-determines your future. The songbun system divides citizens into fifty-one categories within three classes: core, wavering, and hostile. This classification reaches back generations, dictating where you live, what job you hold, and whom you marry. Mi-ran's father carried a dangerous secret. Born in what became South Korea, he was captured during the Korean War and sent to North Korea's mines. His South Korean origin placed his family at the bottom of the social pyramid. Yet Mi-ran rebelled. When North Korea banned women from riding bicycles as "unsightly and sexually suggestive," eleven-year-old Mi-ran took her family's used bicycle on a grueling three-hour ride to the city. Men cursed her, teenage boys tried to knock her off, but she screamed back and kept pedaling. Jun-sang came from the opposite end-a family of ethnic Koreans from Japan with a freestanding house and appliances most North Koreans couldn't imagine. Yet Japanese Koreans occupied the "hostile class" for having outside connections. When Jun-sang spotted Mi-ran at a movie theater, her spirited impatience captivated him. But pursuing her was dangerous-his parents hoped he'd attend university in Pyongyang and join the Workers' Party to overcome their tainted background. In North Korea, love itself was dangerous.

3. 3

   The Believers and the Breaking Point

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   Song Hee-suk embodied the ideal North Korean citizen-a factory worker and mother of four who never questioned the regime. Born near Chongjin's railroad station where American bombing killed her father, she earned martyr's-child status and fierce anti-American convictions. Her credentials secured marriage to Chang-bo, a Kim Il-sung University graduate destined for journalism. Despite four children and full-time factory work, she maintained relentless dedication-working eight-hour shifts followed by mandatory ideological training, returning home at 10:30 PM before rising before dawn. Kim Il-sung's juche philosophy fused Marxist class struggle with extreme Korean nationalism, appropriating Christian imagery after closing churches. State media portrayed both Kims with supernatural powers-calming storms, causing trees to bloom. Citizens wore mandatory Kim Il-sung lapel pins over their hearts. Every home displayed his portrait on an otherwise bare wall, cleaned with a special cloth and inspected monthly. Yet cracks appeared. Mrs. Song's oldest daughter Oak-hee inherited her mother's appearance but none of her compliance. Chang-bo nearly destroyed the family when he sarcastically questioned a television report. A neighbor reported him, triggering three days of interrogation. His party membership saved him, but the experience crystallized his doubts. As a journalist sanitizing foreign news, he knew the economic "triumphs" were lies. The tragedy of Mrs. Song's faith would become apparent only later, when the system she trusted failed to protect her family from starvation and death.

4. Chapter 4

   When the Great Leader Dies and the Famine Begins

   Kim Il-sung's death in July 1994 triggered mass hysteria. Mrs. Song screamed "How are we going to live?" while neighbors wailed and banged their heads on pavement. Her daughter Oak-hee felt only hunger, earning her husband's rebuke: "You're not human." Only when she heard Kim Jong-il would succeed did Oak-hee cry-thinking, "Now we're really fucked." University student Jun-sang discovered with terror that he felt nothing. Surrounded by sobbing classmates, he realized survival depended on crying convincingly. He forced himself to stare until his eyes burned. Within hours, half a million Chongjin residents streamed toward the city's bronze statue. Spontaneous mourning became obligatory performance. As Kim Il-sung died, so did North Korea's economy. Per capita income plummeted from $2,460 in 1991 to $719 in 1995. When Mi-ran began teaching kindergarten in fall 1994, her students appeared visibly malnourished. Her favorite, six-year-old Hye-ryung, transformed from lively to lethargic, her eyes sunken, hair brittle. Between 1996 and 1998, an estimated 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans died from famine-up to 10 percent of the population. Despite accepting $2.4 billion in food aid, the regime restricted foreign workers and diverted supplies. Most cruelly, as Mrs. Song observed, "simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told" died first-those who wouldn't steal or break rules to survive.

   Chapter 5

   Capitalism's Reluctant Birth

   After losing her mother-in-law, husband, and son in three years, Mrs. Song collapsed into grief and malnourishment. Her daughters nursed her back to health. Returning to her ransacked shack, she made a surprising choice: she started a business. With the socialist food distribution system collapsed, private vendors became essential for survival. People faced a stark choice: risk punishment for "economic crimes" or starve. Mrs. Song decided to make cookies - they required minimal firewood and offered quick meals for hungry people on the move. Working fourteen-hour days with her daughter, she perfected her recipe, earning just enough daily to buy ingredients for the next batch. Thousands of middle-aged women were reinventing free-market economics through necessity. The old farmers' markets exploded with goods. Secret mountainside gardens produced vegetables while collective farms languished. Foreign aid rice appeared in UN and US sacks, diverted from humanitarian shipments. Exotic Chinese imports - shampoos, batteries, colorful clothing - appeared alongside makeshift restaurants. Women dominated this new economy, as men remained trapped in unpaying state jobs. Kim Jong-il tacitly allowed women to work privately, relieving pressure that might otherwise have sparked revolution. As the ajummas whispered: "Men aren't worth as much as the dog that guards the house."

   Chapter 6

   The Awakening and the Escape

   Jun-sang's return visits exposed North Korea's collapse. After graduating, he moved into a private room and, using his grandfather's money, bought a Sony television with a hidden antenna. Late at night, he listened to South Korean broadcasts at barely audible volume, learning shocking truths: two million had starved, America was providing aid, and 200,000 were imprisoned in camps. Hearing Kim Jong-il's actual voice-old, tinny, distinctly human-shattered the Dear Leader's mystique. During a 1998 train delay, Jun-sang watched a starving seven-year-old boy singing "We Have Nothing to Envy." This pushed him "over the edge" into complete disbelief. At mandatory lectures, he recognized his fellow students' blank expressions likely masked the same doubt. Yet no one could speak openly-resistance meant punishment for three generations. Returning home for winter break, Jun-sang learned Mi-ran and her family had disappeared, rumored to have fled to South Korea. He realized with bitter regret that while he'd been indecisive, she had proven braver. Mi-ran's October 1998 defection was rare-only 923 North Koreans had fled south since the Korean War. A year after her father's death, her family decided to defect separately to avoid suspicion. Following her guide through a cornfield in darkness, Mi-ran climbed a retaining wall and waded through freezing water. On the Chinese side, feeling utterly alone, she heard her brother calling "Nuna" from the trees. Taking his hand, she left North Korea forever. Mrs. Song's journey came through her daughter Oak-hee, who had escaped to South Korea. In August 2002, Mrs. Song boarded an Asiana Airlines flight from Dalian to Incheon, disguised in capri jeans and sneakers, certain she was making the right decision.

   Chapter 7

   Finding Light After Darkness

   North Korean defectors struggle in South Korea, lacking prized qualities like height, fair skin, wealth, education credentials, and English fluency. Despite reunification rhetoric, many South Koreans view them with ambivalance - reminded of their own impoverished past. Mrs. Song was disoriented stepping off the plane into Incheon's massive airport. After requesting asylum from a janitor, she endured a month of interrogation - which she later recalled as the first real vacation of her life. She transformed into a confident woman with a housekeeping job and her own apartment, living frugally enough to travel throughout South Korea, China, and Poland. Mi-ran's father's South Korean heritage, once a liability in North Korea, became her family's greatest asset after defection. She achieved the Korean dream - handsome husband, baby boy, graduate degree, apartment - yet guilt haunted her over sisters arrested after her defection and sent to labor camps. Jun-sang reconnected with Mi-ran nearly a year after arriving, astounded to learn she was married. Their bittersweet meeting revealed how instant communication in modern South Korea lacked the romantic intensity of their secret North Korean courtship. Despite their prosperity, all defectors carry the weight of what they left behind - family members imprisoned, memories of those who starved, and the guilt of surviving. Their stories restore the humanity that totalitarianism tries to erase.

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