Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

Enough with the happy crap. Let's go to North Korea.

I don't know how I stumbled upon this book, or why I chose to download it. It took me several weeks to read, and I concurrently finished 3 other books because I frequently needed to switch this one out.  It is worth noting that I've never had much interest in North Korea. I have a complicated and strange relationship with South Korea, and it was just too far a reach to even consider having an opinion about the northern half of the peninsula.  As a child, I didn't even know what S. Korea was, or where. I knew nothing about its people and could not recognize its language until I was a college graduate. I never knew S. Korea called itself Hanguk, that its language was Hangul, and that the north and south were once the same country. They might as well have been the Dakotas.

My first assignment in the Army was at Camp Laguardia, Uijongbu, Republic of Korea. I had freely chosen that assignment for myself, but as my departure date drew closer I grew increasingly terrified. I called every officer I thought might have a smidge of clout. I begged the branch to reassign me to Ft. Hood with my fiancé. Two weeks after our wedding, with two overstuffed duffel bags and a stomach full of fear, I boarded a plane for Kimpo International Airport, in the heart of Seoul. I envisioned Korea as a black, empty place.  I unleashed a lifetime of suppressed anxiety about a country that had not wanted me.  

When the plane landed, everything changed. The sun was shining. People were busy, happy, and wealthy. The city was shiny and modern.  Little at a time, I began to reclaim my inner Korean, or at least my fully Americanized version of her. This small little blog cannot contain the descriptions of returning to my birth country. There is not enough literary talent on this side of the world to express the range, the depth, the complexities of thought and emotion. Suffice it to say, the experience was staggering.

This is all to say that I have given everything to South Korea. I really had nothing left for North Korea.  Until now.

N. Korea was, and remains, basically a prison.  It is an entire nation imprisoned by the ideology of pure socialism and absolute power.  The regime is so oppressive that a N. Korean citizen could be executed for joking about their dictator's height.  Nothing to Envy is a peek into the lives of typical N. Koreans in the past fifty years.  It neatly narrates the downward spiral of a regime, and the awakening of an ideologue nation.

It is hard to imagine a country so closed off,  isolated, and completely self-absorbed.  It is incomprehensible that N. Koreans would have adored their "Great Marshall" so unwaveringly and swallowed their bitter fate so unflinchingly.  But through the personal narratives given in this book, we begin to see.  We witness how the regime so cleverly envelops each citizen in a shroud of indoctrination, distrust, uncertainty, impotence, and fear.  Kim Il Sung's particular brand of totalitarianism run so deep that the penance of one citizen must be repaid by the next three blood generations.  When fear for one's own life is not convincing enough, the regime threatens the whole house.

The very real, detailed descriptions of famine and survival depict tragedy at the least, and downright evil at the worst.  I never would have realized that N. Korea and Nazi Germany had so much in common, if the tales weren’t right there in undeniable black and white.

But you know what really surprised me?  My reaction to the section on reunification.  The way my eyes would start to burn, my throat close up a little, and the air would suck out of me.  I want reunification for the Koreas, for my first country.  I just want some part of Korea to seem whole, because for me everything there is broken.  The lives of mothers and children, whole families, governments, two entire nations of brokenness.  Even those defectors who manage to reintegrate into S. Korean society never find a wholeness – their hearts are divided across two halves of the same whole.  Maybe it’s a little presumptuous, but I know what that feels like.  Perhaps that is the fate of the Koreas, and of Koreans – to always be a half.  To be living incongruity.


Official Nothing to Envy website

See?  I made it through an entire blog post about Korea without one single mention of the A-word.

Life from Scratch

Well let’s start with something fluffy and sweet, shall we? 

For some very unique – and sadly, also not so unique – personal reasons, I have found myself recently wondering if I was depressed.  Or heading there.  Or if not depressed, then at least looking across the water at depressed and wondering if I should swim across.  I should not!

What I should do is put down the heavy stuff, find a free Kindle download (note, no longer available for free) of approximately 200 pages in length about a young, newly divorced New-Yorker who can’t boil an egg.  And watch her concurrently cook and find her voice.  Yeah, that’s what I consider fluffy and sweet.

So I downloaded Life from Scratch and set aside my war-torn reading list about human suffering.  Grabbed a glass of wine or three, and dove in.

This Rachel Goldman, I should not have trusted her from the beginning.  After sweating all day at the beach with the kids, and in my wine-induced haze, I started to believe her.  I thought she was sincere and honorable, I felt a little bit of a connection with her, and then *poof* she turned out to be a work of fiction.  Which I would have known if I had bothered to notice the author’s name is Melissa Ford.

Something Rachelthefictionalcharacter said struck a chord with me:  she is very good at getting excited about starting things and terrible at completing them.  Well.  There’s me in a nutshell.  Such a timely reminder of my single most frustrating quality, as I have only just yesterday withdrawn from my master’s program… after finishing 3 credit hours.  In reality, the program wasn’t aligned with my long-term goals, brought me no short-term satisfaction, and detracted from my ability to parent and work at my best.  It was like a little academic noose, squeezing slightly tighter as each lecture and deadline slipped.

Her observations on relationships were good and true, although not at all profound.  It was a familiar story of two people in love, failing to communicate, and then not understanding why their love fell apart.  It is what I pray doesn’t happen to my family, and what we work each day to prevent.  Children can make this so much easier or disturbingly more difficult.  It’s too easy to stop communicating about the things that brought you together and focus mainly on the things that are keeping you together – specifically, the kids.  And then one day you realize you are merely alone together.  You stop discovering yourself because you are completely devoted in service to the family.  Your life becomes a prison because you won’t stand for the freedom you deserve.  You lose your identity.  You become afraid.

We know these things already, but they always bears repeating.

The main character of this book, Rachelthefictionalcharacter, actually blogs.  She is stupefying popular, winning awards and getting hundreds of comments.  The blogs samples throughout the book weren’t particularly delightful if you ask me.  But look at the depressing shit I write… what do I know.  What I do know is that we bloggers love to hear the sound of our own voices.  We love our thoughts.  So much so that we must memorialize them in blog posts and then distribute to the far reaches of the internet.  We think we are clever, original, fascinating, funny, and miserable.  We are all the same.

I wonder if there is any coincidence between the fact that I finished this book on a Saturday, resigned my master’s program on a Sunday, and cranked up this blog on a Monday.  My favorite thing about this book, the thing that ties me to it and impels me onward:  the Longfellow quote.  “All things must change to something new, to something strange.”

And so it goes.

Welcome to my brain

I belong to two book clubs, one about being an adoptee and one about being an adoptive parent.  I read professional materials, both to increase my technical knowledge and to improve my organizational leadership skills.  I am a military veteran with a spouse working in a combat zone, so I read to stay educated about our wars and heroes.  I am passionate about human rights, parenting, travel, health, and my faith, so books are a natural way to extend and fulfill those passions.

What I am saying is that I love to read.  It’s nothing revolutionary.  My intention is that, by journaling my way through books, I will become a more purposeful reader.  My experience and expectation is that these hours spent inside of books translate into a richer, more meaningful life outside of them.  Reading for leisure is okay.  Reading with purpose is better.

What can you expect from this blog?  These will not be reviews.  They will be interpretations, impressions, and applications of the concepts I glean from the books.  The plotline may be about one thing, the theme about something else, and my practical interpretation a whole other thing entirely.  Isn’t that the way it usually goes?  There will always be traces of me, my family, and my life experience in my responses.  You might even recognize yourself here. 

There is no set schedule.  I’m not aiming for a strict book per week.  Some weeks will be more, some less, although I anticipate this journal will unfurl on approximately a weekly or biweekly basis.  Some books require hefty responses while other warrant hardly a passing mention.  Furthermore, this blog might last 6 months, or 6 years.  It will run its course and when the course is satisfactorily run, I will compose a lovely goodbye message and move on.

So if you’ve stopped by, thank you.   If you choose to stick around, welcome.  And if you could, indulge me in a comment now and then.  *wink*