Book #13: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

I feel almost embarrassed to admit how little I know about North Korea. I knew that Kim Jong-il died a few years ago and his son, Kim Jong-un, succeeded him as the dictator of the country. And I knew that it was a Communist country and that there's been a bit of discussion about their nuclear weapons. But really, I had no idea what the conditions were like in the country. I'd somehow missed out on information about North Koreans not having enough food and living in a totalitarian regime. This book was a good introduction to someone like me about the lives of ordinary people in North Korea (like the subtitle says). Demick worked as a reporter covering all of Korea, but journalists are not allowed to go to across the border and talk to regular people there. So in order to find out what it was really like there, she interviewed and got to know several North Korean defectors from the same area of Chongjin, who were living in South Korea. She basically interweaves their stories about their lives growing up, living through the terrible famines in North Korea in the 1990s, and their individual decisions to defect from the country.

Reading these people's stories makes it seem unbelievable that these sorts of things are still going on TODAY. (This book was only published in 2010.) In some ways it sounds like stories you read about Germany just before WWII, where people are carted away in the middle of the night for prison camps, and as horrible as those stories are, there's the distance provided by the seventy-plus years that have passed since then. It seems like, "Well, at least this stuff is over and won't happen because we are more civilized and won't let it happen again." Well--obviously not. It was heart-wrenching to read about the children starving to death and the terrible circumstances people are forced to live in, when there is food to spare in much of the world, but it's being kept from them because of their government and its policies. (Of course, I know there are starving people everywhere, but it just seems so terrible that there was practically no food in the whole country for years and years.) Despite how sad it was, I was very glad to have read it to have learned more about it and be (a lot) more aware of another part of the world. I felt like the book was very well-written too; it was easy to follow the stories and keep them straight, and easy to care about the people she was writing about.