What [Mi-ran] didn’t realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.
Nothing to Envy follows the lives of “ordinary” (i.e., suffering, i.e. everyone not Kim Jong-Il) North Koreans. The title comes from a North Korean propaganda song. When it comes to patriotic songs in the hermit kingdom, what’s featured of it in the book seems fairly tame when it comes to xenophobia. Others, not so much:
One of the songs taught in music class was “Shoot the Yankee Bastards”:
Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.
The author does a fine job in setting up the most horrifying aspects of life in a country whose ruler proclaims that his people live in paradise, a paradise in which they must grind treebark until it’s edible just to have a meal that day. The enforced belief in this place is that they are not unlucky — quite the opposite, they are taught that they are the luckiest people in the world:
In the years before her defection, [Mi-ran] had worked as a kindergarten teacher in a mining town. In South Korea she was working toward a graduate degree in education. It was a serious conversation, at times grim. The food on our table went uneaten as she described watching her five- and six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.
There were a few moments, here and there, which it seems the author is dramatizing. Hard to say, since she is apparently taking these stories from people who have defected, and was not present most (if anything) that happened.
A minor issue with an otherwise fine book. I would have been interested in a longer exploration of the problems North Korean refugees face when integrating to the South, as well as the attitudes South Koreans have towards them.
Highly recommended. 4/5 stars.
