Misery and death: The lot of N. Koreans

Ordinary Lives in North Korea
By Barbara Demick

Spiegel & Grau. 314 pp. $26

Reviewed by Frank Langfitt

In 1997, I traveled to Dandong, a Chinese city just across the Yalu River from North Korea, to try to get some sense of the famine gripping the Stalinist nation. North Korea is sealed off from most of the outside world. American journalists are rarely granted visas and all visits are carefully monitored, so I had to rely on the accounts of Chinese truckers who drove into the country to trade food for scrap metal.

One trucker had a gash on his forehead from his latest trip. He told me a teenage boy had hit him with a rock as a crowd leapt on his truck, cut through inch-thick ropes, and made off with 30 bags of flour. Other Chinese traders described children so weak they didn't have the strength to climb onto the trucks to steal.

The famine was brought on by several factors, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea's main benefactor, and a wildly inefficient socialist economy. By 1998, 600,000 to two million North Koreans had died of starvation.

But those were just numbers from economists. What was daily life really like for North Koreans? I had no idea.

Now, thanks to Barbara Demick, we all do.

Demick, a former Los Angeles Times correspondent in Seoul, spent seven years interviewing defectors who lived in the North Korean city of Chongjin at the height of the famine. Relying on their remarkably detailed recollections, she has crafted an oral history of a single city in the darkest days of one of the world's worst regimes.

Now, a confession.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea sat on my shelf for several weeks before I cracked it. I was hesitant to commit to what I was certain would be an unrelentingly bleak narrative. Indeed, Demick details slow–motion starvation and the North Korean regime's reflexive cruelty toward its own people.

But the book is much more than that, at times a page-turner, at others an intimate study in totalitarian psychology. Demick, also a former Inquirer reporter, takes us inside the minds of her subjects, rendering them as complex, often compelling characters - not the brainwashed parodies we see marching in unison in TV reports.