“Nothing to Envy” is a novel written by Barbara Demick in which the author interviews real people who had defected from North Korea and shares their personal stories and experiences. In the first two chapters, Demick shares the story of two young teenagers who lived in the strict country of North Korea during the late 1980’s. I learned that during this time in North Korea, love and relationships were not romanticized or even talked about. While reading these first two chapters of “Nothing to Envy”, I also quickly realized that I actually never really knew much about North Korea. I knew they were very strict to their people and quite tucked away from the rest of the world, but to read about a real life story about someone who actually lived and escaped from North Korea was very interesting. I noticed that this novel was not just going to be a basic educational novel about a distant country, but a novel that shares deep emotion from real people.
“If I wanted answers to my questions, it was clear I wasn’t going to get them inside North Korea. I had to talk to people who had left- defectors.” (Nothing to Envy, Pg. 8)
There is also some background information about the history of North Korea provided in the first two chapters. The author shares important information about North Korea’s political history when there was a war that was occurring at the time. This helps us to understand what the setting was at the time and the events that occurred, leading to why the defectors left and what the people of North Korea experienced many decades ago.
“Mi-ran’s father never discussed what happened to him in captivity. One would expect that conditions for him were no better than for other POW’s held by the communists. Huh Jae-suk, a fellow POW who later escaped, wrote in his memoir that the men were housed in squalid camps where they were not permitted to bathe or brush their teeth. Their hair became infested with lice; untreated wounds swarmed with maggots. They were fed one meal of rice and saltwater a day” (Nothing to Envy, Pg. 24)
To learn about just the outside layer of what went down during this war is not enough. To read and learn about the real life experiences and torture that these people had to suffer through is tragic. I can not even imagine having to live like this. Later on in chapter two, the author continues to provide background history about North Korea speaking of the time social rankings began to be put into place by North Korea’s leader at the time, Kim Il-sung. It is quite shocking to read about how North Korea’s leader began to classify every single person living there.
“Kim Il-sung then turned his attention to ordinary people. In 1958, he ordered up an elaborate project to classify all North Koreans by their political reliability, ambitiously seeking to reorganize an entire human population.” (Nothing to Envy, Pg. 26)
Just in these first two chapters of this novel, the author reels the reader in by providing a dark introduction of how the people of North Korea lived and the unspeakable experienced they went through. It was a very informational yet sentimental beginning of the novel by sharing the story of two young teenagers and how they experienced love during in a very strict and chaotic country.
