Privacy

In Nothing To Envy, Barbara Demick presents privacy as a sacred and rare commodity in North Korea. She does this by examining Mi-ran’s relationship with Jun-sang, Mi-ran’s father’s relationship with his own family, and Chang-bo’s relationship with his daughter, demonstrating how little room the regime allows for inner life and yet how creative North Koreans often are to recover that sense of privacy for themselves.

In regard to Mi-ran and Jun-sang’s clandestine relationship, Demick says that, as the electricity goes out each night in North Korea, the darkness “confers measures of privacy and freedom as hard to come by… as electricity. Wrapped in a magic cloak of invisibility, you can do what you like without worrying about the prying eyes of parents, neighbors, or secret police” (5). She notes that it is thanks to this electricity shortage that a relationship like this one can...