Envy

While talking about different shades of gray, my recent bedtime reading is Nothing to Envy – Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick.

Yes, a place without black and white.

I must say this paperback is the best book I read in the past twelve months. But, ironically, it is also amazingly simple. The entire content could be summarized into one sentence: Everything George Orwell described in Nineteen Eighty-Four does happen in real life.

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A usual excuse people use to explain the tragedy of North Korea in the past ten or fifteen years is the country locates in a much more deserted area than its brother in the south.

But, that argument hardly holds water. The rotten empire of capitalism harbors twice as many people as his communism brother. Yes, as compared to Pyongyang and its surrounding, there is more land suitable for agricultural use south to the 38th parallel – but not quite twice as much. The two countries share roughly the same sea area for fishing, and the land under the feet of Kim Yong-Un has arguably more mines and ores of heavy and precious metals.

It got to be a problem of the system.