Nothing to Envy
Since it is December, I should probably review some more season-appropriate books, or books I would suggest for gift giving, but with the timing of everything else going on in the world, I bought Barbara Demick's National Book Award-nominate Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Ms. Demick is currently the LA Times' Beijing Bureau Chief, though she spent several years previously in the paper's Seoul bureau.
While in Seoul, she had the opportunity to interview many defectors from North Korea, as well as travel to North Korea herself several times. For the book she specifically focused on her interviews with defectors from Chongjin, an industrial city in the northern part of the country. Just from this one city alone she was able to meet defectors from such a wide range of backgrounds--a model worker, a free-thinker, a patriotic physician, and others--that she is able to present the myriad of paths, both likely and unlikely, that led these people out of North Korea to uncertain defection.
So often I had to remind myself in reading this that this book is a work of non-fiction. Even after reading so much about North Korea before, I found myself wanting to doubt some of the peoples' stories. It just all seems so made-up. No, I am not saying that Demick or her interviewees fabricated any part of it, but that I sometimes found it necessary to say to myself that this really happened. These are not merely characters in a book. These are real people who really lived, and starved, and risked everything to escape the absolutely unreal circumstances into which they were born.
There is, of course, quite a bit in the book that is predictable because we've all read the news. The famine and the massive starvation are pivotal events, as well as the death of Kim Il-sung. Through the eyes of the defectors we see a lot of people die. Old people, young people, children. We see people do a lot of things, sometimes resourceful and sometimes shameful, to get food for themselves and their surviving family members.
The book still held several surprises for me, things I had not previously read about North Korea or I hadn't been able to contextualize to understand. That North Korea still has a caste system, which I would expect to be anathema to communism. Demick describes it as a collision of traditional Korean castes as laid out by Confucious and Stalinism. One woman in the book, Min-ran, is the daughter of a former South Korean soldier that after the war was never repatriated; her family is among the lowest castes. Her secret boyfriend comes from a family that willingly repatriated from the Korean community in Japan. His caste then is slightly higher, one of the reasons their relationship is doomed in North Korea. Not only are teenagers generally prohibited from dating, but her "tainted blood" could ruin his chances to get into the top universities.
The Japanese Koreans also surprised me. After the end of World War II and the subsequent Korean Conflict, many ethnic Koreans elected to leave Japan for North Korea, not the South. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but according to Demick, one of the main motivations was that at the time (1950s and 1960s) North Korea appeared to be less hostile and more prosperous than South Korea. Some of these families were eduated and fairly well-off, and even in North Korea they were permitted to maintain some degree of affluence and semi-regular contact with their families in Japan. Their families in Japan could send them yen, and could even visit them in North Korea via a ferry that was regularly operated. Even though this segment of the population was constantly under suspicion, their caste was higher than Min-ran's.
The other surprise I will share here would be the relationship between North Korea and the PRC. It's much more complicated than we Americans like to simplify it. In their own propaganda, North Korea denigrates China, fabricating contemporary famines because China has abandoned communism for consumerism. In so many ways this isn't true, of course. The first part is obvious to even the most previously patriotic of Demick's defectors once she sneaks into China and sees that the scraps left out for a dog is more (and higher quality) than she has eaten in any given day in years. On the other hand, China supports the current North Korean regime, if only to maintain stability in the region and prevent defectors from pouring across the border.
This book is an important and timely read. Don't ask for it for Christmas, because even after the defections it is not an uplifting, happy-ever-after reading either, and you might resent the giver. Get it for yourself, even at the library, to get a deeper understanding of today's Korean peninsula.
(Post-script: In the past few months there's been a rash of visits to North Korea by foreign journalists and bloggers. Those visits were certainly staged, but their pictures, text, and video remain must-sees. Both NPR's Louisa Lim and al Jazeera's Melissa Chan were there in October for the presentation of Kim Jong-un, and (formerly of the Wall Street Journal) Sky Canaves was there only a few weeks ago)
While in Seoul, she had the opportunity to interview many defectors from North Korea, as well as travel to North Korea herself several times. For the book she specifically focused on her interviews with defectors from Chongjin, an industrial city in the northern part of the country. Just from this one city alone she was able to meet defectors from such a wide range of backgrounds--a model worker, a free-thinker, a patriotic physician, and others--that she is able to present the myriad of paths, both likely and unlikely, that led these people out of North Korea to uncertain defection.
So often I had to remind myself in reading this that this book is a work of non-fiction. Even after reading so much about North Korea before, I found myself wanting to doubt some of the peoples' stories. It just all seems so made-up. No, I am not saying that Demick or her interviewees fabricated any part of it, but that I sometimes found it necessary to say to myself that this really happened. These are not merely characters in a book. These are real people who really lived, and starved, and risked everything to escape the absolutely unreal circumstances into which they were born.
There is, of course, quite a bit in the book that is predictable because we've all read the news. The famine and the massive starvation are pivotal events, as well as the death of Kim Il-sung. Through the eyes of the defectors we see a lot of people die. Old people, young people, children. We see people do a lot of things, sometimes resourceful and sometimes shameful, to get food for themselves and their surviving family members.
The book still held several surprises for me, things I had not previously read about North Korea or I hadn't been able to contextualize to understand. That North Korea still has a caste system, which I would expect to be anathema to communism. Demick describes it as a collision of traditional Korean castes as laid out by Confucious and Stalinism. One woman in the book, Min-ran, is the daughter of a former South Korean soldier that after the war was never repatriated; her family is among the lowest castes. Her secret boyfriend comes from a family that willingly repatriated from the Korean community in Japan. His caste then is slightly higher, one of the reasons their relationship is doomed in North Korea. Not only are teenagers generally prohibited from dating, but her "tainted blood" could ruin his chances to get into the top universities.
The Japanese Koreans also surprised me. After the end of World War II and the subsequent Korean Conflict, many ethnic Koreans elected to leave Japan for North Korea, not the South. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but according to Demick, one of the main motivations was that at the time (1950s and 1960s) North Korea appeared to be less hostile and more prosperous than South Korea. Some of these families were eduated and fairly well-off, and even in North Korea they were permitted to maintain some degree of affluence and semi-regular contact with their families in Japan. Their families in Japan could send them yen, and could even visit them in North Korea via a ferry that was regularly operated. Even though this segment of the population was constantly under suspicion, their caste was higher than Min-ran's.
The other surprise I will share here would be the relationship between North Korea and the PRC. It's much more complicated than we Americans like to simplify it. In their own propaganda, North Korea denigrates China, fabricating contemporary famines because China has abandoned communism for consumerism. In so many ways this isn't true, of course. The first part is obvious to even the most previously patriotic of Demick's defectors once she sneaks into China and sees that the scraps left out for a dog is more (and higher quality) than she has eaten in any given day in years. On the other hand, China supports the current North Korean regime, if only to maintain stability in the region and prevent defectors from pouring across the border.
This book is an important and timely read. Don't ask for it for Christmas, because even after the defections it is not an uplifting, happy-ever-after reading either, and you might resent the giver. Get it for yourself, even at the library, to get a deeper understanding of today's Korean peninsula.
(Post-script: In the past few months there's been a rash of visits to North Korea by foreign journalists and bloggers. Those visits were certainly staged, but their pictures, text, and video remain must-sees. Both NPR's Louisa Lim and al Jazeera's Melissa Chan were there in October for the presentation of Kim Jong-un, and (formerly of the Wall Street Journal) Sky Canaves was there only a few weeks ago)
Comments