37 pages • 1 hour read
Barbara DemickNothing to Envy
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Two Beer Bottles for Your IV”
Dr. Kim Ji-eun is introduced in greater detail. At the time of Kim Il-sung’s death, she is twenty-eight and the youngest doctor at the hospital where she works. Her father was an ethnicKorean living in China who immigrated to escape Mao’s Great Leap Forward. As a doctor, she works a twelve-hour day, is exposed to high levels of radiation, donates her own blood and skin grafts, and scavenges for medicinal herbs. She is divorced, and her husband has custody, as is traditional. To survive the famine, she accepts gifts from patients. Upon Kim Il-sung’s death, she is stunned. Meanwhile, her depressed father loses his will to live, and alternates between praising the regime and predicting its total collapse. One of his last acts is to give her a letter that lists her Chinese relatives, telling her these relatives will help.As Kim Jong-il comes to power, she notices that many of her juvenile patients exhibit “wasting,” a condition in which “the starved body eats away at its own muscle tissue” (113). As a new doctor, the children’s deaths affect her painfully: new leadership has not improved conditions in the hospital or the nation.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Accordion and the Blackboard”
As the famine escalates, Mi-ran is teaching a kindergarten outside Chongjin that serves miners’ children. She plays the accordion, leading six-year olds who are so small they look three or four through a song that contains the lyrics “we have nothing to envy in the world” (119). Many of the lesson plans indoctrinate children against Americans, Christians, and the Japanese. On a mission to acquire materials to build a schoolroom in honor of the new leader, Kim Jong-il, Mi-ran boldly takes a detour to visit Jun-sang, during which he puts his arm around her—the most physical intimacy they have shared in their courtship. On her journey, she sees dilapidation, and a man who has starved to death. She worries about her own students, who are also clearly starving to death. Many fall asleep in class, and in three years, “enrollment in the kindergarten [drops] from fifty students to fifteen” (131). Mi-ran and Jun-sang discuss conditions in their country obliquely, and Mi-ran feels deep guilt that she is unable to help her young students.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Good Die First”
This chapter continues to detail the extreme inventiveness of North Koreans in the face of famine, from eating pine bark to eating the undigested corn in animal excrements. Many die of common ailments, especially the young and the old. In addition, the most innocent—those who don’t want to steal or lie—are more vulnerable. Up to 10% of the population dies. With the garment factory closed, Mrs. Song first attempts to sell and make tofu; when this scheme fails, she sells the family’s apartment to fund a venture in rice trading. However, in a painful train wreck, Mrs. Song loses much of the rice. She and Chang-bo move to a smaller apartment still. There, Chang-bo slowly dies of starvation. Her estranged son Nam-oak comes to live with her, and dies of pneumonia that could have been easily treated by penicillin. The worst of the famine comes to an end; as Mrs. Song speculates, “not necessarily because anything had improved, but…because there were fewer mouths to feed” (146).
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
These chapters detail the escalation of the famine after the death of Kim Il-sung. In particular, it demonstrates the effect that chronic hunger and widespread deaths have on even the most patriotic North Koreans. Dr. Kim and Mrs. Song were both fervent believers who frowned on any impropriety, but both find themselves turning to black market ventures in order to feed themselves. This comes with considerable shame, especially because they are still unsuccessful at saving those closest to them: Dr. Kim loses her father, and Mrs. Song loses her husband and her only son. Dr. Kim’s father in fact seems to waver in his devotion at the end of his life, providing his daughter with the names of Chinese relatives in the hopes that she can seek “help.” This demonstrates that many North Koreans no longer believe that there is “nothing to envy” in the rest of the world, as the child’s song goes.
The inclusion of the lyrics to this song—also the source for the title of the book—is deeply ironic, nestled within a narrative of extreme famine. The happy song, sung by starving children, cannot be taken at its word as Mi-ran’s students die around her. Demick’s inclusion of it in this section of the book highlights the hypocrisy of a regime that enforces absolute lawfulness on the part of its citizens when it cannot guarantee them basic access to food, work, and housing any longer.
Mi-ran and Dr. Kim’s stories are particularly important here. While the chapter title “The Good Die First” suggests that the most moral, upstanding North Koreans diefirst in the famine, the inclusion of two narratives by caregivers highlights the ways in which the famine tested those who saw their lives’ work as helping others. The two women both see the pain of their charges, and are profoundly affected for the rest of their lives by their helplessness. Their positions lend credibility to their testimonies as well as poignancy to their stories. With the foreknowledge that these two women will later defect, the reader is likely to see the events in these chapters as the direct impetuous for their loss of faith in North Korea.
