Olivia: Most love stories start with light. A glance across a crowded, well-lit room. But what if the most profound romance could only exist in total darkness? What if a nationwide blackout was the only thing that gave two people the freedom to fall in love? Jackson: That is a fascinating question. It sounds like a premise for a dystopian sci-fi film, but you’re telling me this is real life? A world where darkness is a refuge? Olivia: It’s not only real, it’s one of the central, heartbreaking paradoxes in the book we’re diving into today: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. Jackson: And Demick is the real deal. She's not just an author; she was the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Seoul. She spent seven years interviewing over 100 defectors to piece these stories together, which is why the book won the Samuel Johnson Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It's journalism as epic storytelling. Olivia: Exactly. She focuses on the city of Chongjin, an industrial wasteland closed to foreigners, to get a true picture of life, not the Potemkin village of Pyongyang. And that's where we meet our first character, a woman who believed in the system with all her heart, right up until it left her to starve.

Olivia: Her name is Mrs. Song, and if the North Korean regime could have designed a model citizen, it would be her. She was born on the very day World War II ended. Her father died a martyr in the Korean War, bombed by the Americans. She married a devoted party member, a journalist. Her entire life was structured by the state, and she was grateful for it. She once told the author, "I lived only for Marshal Kim Il-sung and for the fatherland. I never had a thought otherwise." Jackson: That level of devotion is hard for us to even comprehend. It’s a complete fusion of personal identity and state ideology. So what happens when the state you’ve dedicated your life to starts to fail you in the most basic way possible? Olivia: It happens slowly, then all at once. Mrs. Song works at the Chosun Clothing factory. One day, the fabric shipments stop. The country is running out of coal, out of electricity. The factory can’t produce anything. So, to keep them busy, the managers send the women out on "special projects." Jackson: Let me guess, these aren't exciting new ventures. Olivia: Not exactly. They were sent to scavenge for scrap metal on the beach or, and I’m not making this up, to collect dog feces to be used as fertilizer. All while singing patriotic songs like, "Even if the road is harsh, we’ll protect the party." Jackson: Wow. The cognitive dissonance there is staggering. Singing praises to the party while collecting dog poop because the state has collapsed. But the breaking point must have come from the factory manager, right? A party man himself. Olivia: It did. In a quiet, hushed moment, the manager, a man she deeply respected as a devout Communist, pulls her aside. He tells her and the other women, "You ajumma... should think about finding some other way to bring food home for your families." He was, in essence, giving them permission to break the law and enter the black market. He was admitting the state could no longer provide. Jackson: That’s the first crack in the dam. It’s not an official announcement, but a whispered confession of failure from within the system itself. But the real test is at home, with the food rations. Olivia: Yes, the public distribution system. This was the cornerstone of the social contract. The state feeds you. But then the rations start to shrink. The bi-weekly bag of rice becomes corn. Then the corn portion gets smaller. Then cooking oil disappears. The state media, meanwhile, launches a new propaganda campaign with billboards that read: "Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day." Jackson: Hold on. They turned starvation into a patriotic slogan? That is next-level gaslighting. It’s not a crisis, it’s a new, noble way of life. Olivia: It was the only way to frame it. But slogans don't fill bellies. Mrs. Song’s husband, the loyal journalist, gets sick. It's his appendix, but the hospital has no medicine, no functioning equipment. He dies. Then, her son gets sick. He’s malnourished, weak. He dies too. She is left with nothing, her home robbed of its last possessions. Jackson: This is where I struggle. She's a 'true believer,' but she's watching her own family die. How does she reconcile that? Does her faith finally crack, or does it just bend until it’s unrecognizable? Olivia: It shatters. But what replaces it isn't political anger, not at first. It's the primal instinct to survive. After her son’s death, she’s suicidal. But her daughter convinces her to live. And to live, she needs to eat. So, Mrs. Song, the model citizen who despised the "dirty" world of private selling, starts a business. She bakes cookies. Jackson: A cookie business. It sounds so small, so domestic. But in that context, it’s a revolution. Olivia: It’s a total rejection of her entire life’s belief system. She has to borrow money, build a makeshift oven, and stand in the freezing cold at the market, haggling over a few won. She becomes one of the ajummas, the middle-aged women who, out of sheer necessity, built North Korea's grassroots capitalism from the ground up. The men were tied to their defunct state jobs, but the women were the ones who went out and saved their families. Jackson: So her cookie business isn't just a business. It's the death of her ideology. Every cookie she sells is a small vote against the system she dedicated her life to. It’s a story of survival, but it’s also the story of an entire country’s belief system turning to dust.

Jackson: It's fascinating how the collapse of the state forced people like Mrs. Song into this new, terrifying form of capitalism. But the book shows that the decay of the system also created... unexpected spaces. You started with a love story in the dark. Let's go there. Olivia: Yes, let's talk about Mi-ran and Jun-sang. Their story is the perfect illustration of how life, and love, finds a way. They meet as teenagers. Jun-sang is brilliant, from a relatively good family, destined for a top university in Pyongyang. Mi-ran is a sweet, intelligent girl, but she has a huge liability in North Korea: her songbun, or social class, is tainted. Jackson: What does 'tainted' mean in this context? Olivia: Her father was a South Korean soldier captured during the Korean War. He was a POW who was never returned. In the eyes of the North Korean state, that makes his entire family politically unreliable. They are part of the 'hostile class.' A relationship between Jun-sang and Mi-ran would be career suicide for him. His family would never approve. Jackson: So it’s a completely forbidden love, like Romeo and Juliet but with a totalitarian state as the disapproving family. How do they even manage to see each other? Olivia: This is where the paradox comes in. The 1990s economic collapse means constant power outages. The entire country is plunged into darkness every night. There are no restaurants, no movie theaters, no lights on the street. For the state, it's a sign of failure. For Mi-ran and Jun-sang, it's a gift. Jackson: The darkness gives them privacy. Olivia: Complete privacy. The state's surveillance infrastructure, in a way, runs on electricity. When the lights go out, the prying eyes of neighbors and informants are less effective. So they would meet in the dark, behind a wall near her house, and just walk for hours under the stars. For three years, their entire relationship existed in these stolen moments of darkness. It took them that long just to hold hands. Jackson: Wow. So the darkness is both literal and metaphorical. It's a physical space for their love, but they're also 'in the dark' about the outside world. And Jun-sang is the one who starts to find the light switch. Olivia: Exactly. He gets into a prestigious university in Pyongyang, and there, he gets access to things unimaginable in Chongjin. The university library has a restricted section with translated Western books. He reads Gone with the Wind, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He even gets his hands on a Dale Carnegie book. Jackson: How to Win Friends and Influence People in North Korea? That must have been mind-blowing. The whole premise of that book is individual agency, something the regime tries to stamp out. Olivia: It was. But the real earthquake was technology. He gets a Sony television, a gift from his grandparents who live in Japan. He figures out how to bypass the government-mandated channel lock and builds a makeshift antenna. And late at night, huddled in his room, he watches South Korean television. Jackson: And he sees it all. The wealth, the freedom, the news that isn't propaganda. Olivia: He sees commercials for products he can't imagine. He hears news reports about the famine in his own country, confirming the horrors he’s seen on his trips home. And most jarringly, he hears Kim Jong-il's actual voice for the first time—a high-pitched, unremarkable voice. Not the booming, godlike voice of the propaganda films. The Dear Leader is just a man. Jackson: That’s the moment the god dies. But here’s the tragic part, isn't it? He has this earth-shattering knowledge, this light, but he can't share it with Mi-ran. Olivia: He can't. It's too dangerous for her. If he were caught, his life would be over, but if she were caught with that knowledge, given her family's background, she and her entire family could be sent to a prison camp. The very thing that opens his eyes creates a new, invisible wall between them. Jackson: Which ultimately leads to her defection. The detail about her burning his letters before she escapes to China... that's devastating. She's not just erasing their history; she's performing a surgical operation to save him from her own escape. She's sacrificing their love for his liberty, to borrow that poem Jun-sang recites. Olivia: It’s an act of ultimate love in a system that perverts the very meaning of the word. She crosses the Tumen River into China, not knowing if she'll ever see him again, hoping he'll understand, but having no way to ever know for sure.

Jackson: So when you put these stories together—Mrs. Song's shattered faith and Mi-ran and Jun-sang's impossible love—what's the big picture? It feels like more than just a critique of North Korea. Olivia: It is. I think what Barbara Demick shows so brilliantly is that a totalitarian state's greatest lie is that it can control the human heart. The regime promised a world with 'nothing to envy,' but it couldn't stop a mother's instinct to sell cookies to survive, and it couldn't stop two teenagers from falling in love in the dark. Jackson: And it couldn't stop the flow of information. A smuggled TV, a forbidden book... these were the real weapons that dismantled their worldviews, far more than any external threat. The state built walls, but curiosity and love found the cracks. Olivia: Precisely. The system didn't collapse from a single blow. It unraveled thread by thread, in millions of private, desperate, and courageous moments. It’s a powerful reminder that even in the most oppressive darkness, people will always search for light, and for each other. Jackson: That's such a powerful thought. This book really sticks with you. We'd love to hear what resonated most with our listeners. Find us on our social channels and share the one story or detail from our discussion that you can't stop thinking about. Olivia: We're always curious to hear your perspectives. Jackson: This is Aibrary, signing off.