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

Barbara Demick is a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. She was stationed in South Korea in 2001, and again in 2004, to cover news for both North and South Korea. Frustrated with being unable to communicate with North Korean citizens when she travelled there in 2005, she resorted instead to extensive interviews with former North Koreans who had managed to escape to South Korea. The book tells the stories of six of these refugees, from about 1994 to 2009, covering the period of the famine, which began in the early 1990’s and was most intense through 1997 and 1998, when up to or more than 2 million people perished. These six refugees lived in the northern city of Chongjin, on the coast of the sea of Japan. They have different backgrounds and aspirations, some hoping to rise through the Party, others slowly becoming disillusioned with the repression they experience.

What is most numbing about the book is how the people in North Korea really know nothing about the outside world, not even what life is like in South Korea or China, their neighbors. While we have heard of their cultural isolation, the details of their experiences truly illuminate their condition. One woman is smuggled into China, left to make her way alone to the nearest village. She sees food in a dish outside of a house, for the dog, and realizes that all these rumors of the “well-fed” Chinese are true, since no such food is placed outside in North Korea. A common escape route to South Korea is by way of China, and one of the dangers facing the refugees is that their emaciated figures immediately stand out in Chinese society, making it hard to stay hidden. People survive the famine by any means, and many do not. In the Chongjin train station, where many people congregated, each day cleaning staff went through the crowd identifying those who had died, and taking them off in carts for burial. One woman’s story stands out…how her husband had taken to his bed, legs swollen from starvation, and began talking incessantly to her of food and restaurants. They hadn’t eaten in 3 days, and there were no restaurants. She runs through the town frantically asking people for some food, acquiring some noodles, only to return and find him dead, past caring about anything to eat.

Eating With The Enemy: How I Waged Peace With North Korea From My BBQ Shack in Hackensack / by Robert Egan and Kurt Pitzer

"I just called them up." (p. 12)

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Robert Egan began life unextraordinarily enough. Raised in a "mobbed-up" working class part of northern New Jersey, he dropped out of high school in the mid-1970's, spent a few years working construction, building roofs and getting by with various odd jobs. One thing which had always interested him was war, the Vietnam War especially (Egan had intended to sign up as soon as he was old enough, but the war ended before then) and the detainment of American POW's after the war was over. After hanging out at a few local POW/MIA gatherings, in which participants staged protests, and perceiving that very little was actually being done, Egan decided to get in touch with those responsible for still detaining hostages. So, one day, he called the Vietnamese delegates at the UN (Vietnam had no direct diplomatic relations with the US at the time) and began an informal relationship.

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The Vietnamese, thinking him a plant by the American secret service, reciprocated Egan's outreach and modestly accommodated his unsolicited, non-tactical approach (Egan kept quiet about the POW's for a time). Before long, the two parties were on genuinely friendly terms, several of the delegates even frequenting Egan's newly opened Bar-B-Que stand in Hackensack where the relationship gradually built into something of a purely deformalized spot for discrete political talks. The following years went smoothly between Egan and his friendly patrons, and one day, in the early nineties, he was introduced to several North Korean officials who were in a mood to improve their country's relations with the US. An obliging Egan was soon introduced to the country's UN ambassador, Han Song Ryol, and over the next few years the two would remain in close contact, exchanging information and steadily relaying it to their requisite parties--Egan (now an informant for the FBI) to the Americans and Han to the North Koreans.

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Things remained on a virtuously casual basis with Egan actually chaperoning the visiting North Korean athetes during the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, and being inolved on a uniquely intimate level with the controversial nation until the government politely intervened, putting a stop to the friendship between "Pyongyong Bobby" Egan and Han. This story is as implausible, inconceivable and thoroughly unconventional as it gets. And yet it's all true. And it's more than just a really, really wierd story. Egan's ability to engage in foreign policy at a grass roots level and establish communication with an enemy nation is a remarkable fable on the effectiveness one individual can have. (B EGAN)