Free Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

she had visited on a school trip. She remembered seeing tigers, elephants, bears, and a wolf when she’d gone as a child, but now there were only a few birds left. Mrs. Song never went back.
    The complications began when Mrs. Song’s children reached adolescence. The most difficult of the four was her oldest daughter. Oak-hee was the spitting image of Mrs. Song—she was built compact and round, buxom and pretty. But on Oak-hee the same plump lips were fixed in a petulant pout. Her personality was all sharp edges. Instead of her mother’s forgiving nature, she had a keen sense of outrage and seemed permanently aggrieved. As the oldest daughter of a working mother absent from the house from dawn until late at night, Oak-hee had to assume much of the housework, and she didn’t do it cheerfully. Oak-hee wasn’t a martyr like her mother. She couldn’t tolerate the small stupidities that made life so grueling. It wasn’t that she was lazy so much as rebellious. She refused to do anything she thought pointless.
    She complained about the “volunteer work” that North Korean teenagers were expected to perform out of their patriotic duty. Starting at the age of twelve, kids were mobilized in battalions and sent out to the countryside for rice planting and transplanting and weeding. She dreaded springtime, when she had to hoist buckets of soil and spray pesticides that stung her eyes. While the other kids were cheerfully singing “Let Us Safeguard Socialism” as they marched, Oak-hee glowered in silence.
    The absolute worst was when it came to collecting “night soil” from the toilets in the apartment building. North Korea was chronically short of chemical fertilizer and needed to use human excrement since there were few farm animals. Each family had to provide a bucketful each week, delivered to a warehouse miles away. In exchange, you were given a chit certifying that you’d done your duty and that chit would later be traded for food. This foul-smelling chore was usually assigned to the older children, so Oak-hee set herconsiderable imagination to finding a short cut. Actually, it turned out to be easy to cheat. The warehouse where the full buckets were submitted was not guarded (after all, who wanted to steal a bucket of shit?). Oak-hee figured out that she could sneak in, grab a full bucket, and then submit it as her own and collect her chit.
    Oak-hee cheerfully boasted about the ruse when she got home. Mrs. Song was furious over the deception. She’d always known that Oak-hee was the most clever of her four children—she could read by the age of three and impressed their relatives by memorizing long passages from Kim Il-sung’s writings. But the incident with the night soil confirmed her mother’s fears that Oak-hee was an individualist who lacked the collective spirit. How was she to survive in a society where everybody was supposed to march in step?
    After Oak-hee finished high school, Mrs. Song’s husband used his connections to get her a job with a construction company’s propaganda department. Oak-hee had to write up reports about work teams that were exceeding their quotas and the remarkable progress that the company was making building roads. The company had its own sound truck, actually a broken-down army van with slogans plastered on its side (“Let us model the whole society on the
juche
idea”). As the truck cruised by construction sites, Oak-hee would take the microphone and read her reports, broadcasting the achievements of the company through screechy loudspeakers. It was a fun job that didn’t require any heavy lifting and, like any position in the propaganda department, carried some prestige.
    Mrs. Song and her husband sought to further secure Oak-hee’s future by finding her a suitable husband in the Workers’ Party. Mrs. Song hoped to find someone just like her own husband, so she instructed Chang-bo to look around for a younger version of himself. While he was taking a train to Musan on