PW profiles Barbara Demick

There are certain logistical hurdles for those who would write about life in North Korea. For starters, few foreigners are allowed in. And once there, visitors are herded from approved site to approved site, never able to chat with unsanctioned locals—in part to preserve the regime's platform that life elsewhere is infinitely worse than in North Korea.

Barbara Demick covered Eastern Europe and the Middle East for the Philadelphia Inquirer before joining the Los Angeles Times in 2001 as the paper's first bureau chief in Seoul. She has managed to breach the wall through a few chaperoned visits and scores of painstaking interviews in China and South Korea with a wide cast of refugees from North Korea, the only major country whose government bars access to the Internet, and whose economic collapse has left the country without sufficient food, heat or even electricity (nighttime satellite photos show nothing but darkness between the glows of South Korea and the Chinese mainland).

There has been a raft of books in recent years about North Korea, but there has been relatively little published about what it's like to actually live there—a prime focus of Demick's award-winning journalism and her new book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (Speigel & Grau, Dec.).

“My point in doing this book was not to write another political book about the rogue regime or why you should fear a North Korean missile,” Demick says from Beijing, where she is now the Times's bureau chief. Instead, she wanted to answer the question, “What is it like to live [under] the world's most totalitarian regime? I was always a fan of these dystopian books like 1984 and Brave New World. But this is the real thing. There is no country like this.... We just have no idea what it's like to live there.”

Demick tells the story through one place—Chongjin, a northeastern port city—and through the eyes of those who had left. That meant intercepting them as they slipped into China and tracking others down in exile in South Korea. The inherent problem with defectors' stories is that they have a reason to paint a skewed vision of what they had left behind. Demick decided that “by taking defectors from the same town, I could cross-check” and weed out the exaggerations. A classic journalistic approach, this echoes how she reported for her first book, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Andrews McMeel, 1996), in which she told the story of the 1992—1996 siege of Sarajevo by focusing on the residents of one street.

For Nothing to Envy, Demick kept track of six refugees from Chongjin as they moved on, usually into new lives in South Korea. Over five years she was able to glean details of what they had gone through, painting a portrait of life in Chongjin through their memories. What Demick found was an affirmation that contemporary life in North Korea draws directly out of the darkest days of Stalinism, from the policy-induced famine that is believed to have killed anywhere from 600,000 to two million people, to executions of the politically suspect and the summary exile to prison camps for off-the-cuff criticisms of the regime.

Demick says one of the biggest shocks refugees receive once out of North Korea is the realization that their lives had been part of a massive lie. North Koreans from infancy are subject to relentless propaganda about the “greatness” of Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994, and his reclusive son, Kim Jong-il. And that life elsewhere is much worse.

Each refugee has a “moment of epiphany,” she says. “One woman, a doctor, crosses the river border with China and sneaks into a fenced farm courtyard where she sees a bowl on the floor with a little rice and some scraps of meat. The dog starts barking at her and she realizes, 'Dogs in China eat better than doctors in North Korea,' ” Demick says. “Everything she has been told is untrue.”