The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known real-life figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Adam Johnson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Johnson, Adam.

  The orphan master’s son : a novel / Adam Johnson.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64399-9

  1. Korea (North)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3610.O3O76 2011

  813′.6—dc22 2011013410

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Lynn Buckley

  v3.1_r1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  THE BIOGRAPHY OF JUN DO

  PART TWO

  THE CONFESSIONS

  OF COMMANDER GA

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  CITIZENS, gather ’round your loudspeakers, for we bring important updates! In your kitchens, in your offices, on your factory floors—wherever your loudspeaker is located, turn up the volume!

  In local news, our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il was seen offering on-the-spot guidance to the engineers deepening the Taedong River channel. While the Dear Leader lectured to the dredge operators, many doves were seen to spontaneously flock above him, hovering to provide our Reverend General some much needed shade on a hot day. Also to report is a request from Pyongyang’s Minister of Public Safety, who asks that while pigeon-snaring season is in full swing, trip wires and snatch loops be placed out of the reach of our youngest comrades. And don’t forget, citizens: the ban on stargazing is still in effect.

  Later in the broadcast, we’ll reveal the winning recipe for this month’s cooking contest. Hundreds of recipes were entered, but only one can be declared the best way to prepare—Pumpkin Rind Soup! But first comes grave news from the East Sea, where American aggressors flirt with acts of all-out war after stopping and looting a North Korean fishing vessel. Once again, the Yankees have violated Korean waters to steal the precious contents of a sovereign ship, all the while accusing us of everything from banditry to kidnapping to cruelty to sharks. First off, it is the Americans and their puppets who are the pirates of the sea. Secondly, did an American woman not recently row around the entire world to defect to our great nation, a worker’s paradise where citizens want for nothing? That alone should be proof enough that these persistent accusations of kidnapping are ludicrous.

  But cruelty to sharks? This charge must be addressed. Known as the fisherman’s friend, the shark has an ancient camaraderie with the Korean people. In the year 1592, did sharks not offer fish from their own mouths to help sustain Admiral Yi’s sailors during the siege of Okpo Harbor? Have sharks not developed cancer-preventing powers in order to help their human friends live longer and healthier? Does our own Commander Ga, winner of the Golden Belt, not have a soothing bowl of shark-fin soup before each triumphant taekwondo match? And citizens, did you not see with your own eyes a movie entitled A True Daughter of the Country, right here in Pyongyang’s own Moranbong Theater? Then certainly you remember the scene in which our national actress Sun Moon capsized in Inchon Bay while trying to prevent the American sneak attack. It was a scary moment for all of us as the sharks began to circle her, helpless amid the waves. But did the sharks not recognize Sun Moon’s Korean modesty? Did they not smell the hot blood of her patriotism and lift her upon their fins to carry her safely to shore, where she could join the raging battle to repel the imperialist invaders?

  By these deeds alone, citizens, you must know that the rumors swirling around Pyongyang—that Commander Ga and Sun Moon are anything less than utterly in love—are baseless lies! Baseless as the boarding of our innocent fishing vessels by foreign powers, baseless as the outlandish allegations of kidnapping leveled at us by the Japanese. Do the Japanese think we forget it is they who once enslaved our husbands and made comfort women of our wives? Baseless to think that any woman loves her husband more than Sun Moon. Did the citizens not behold how Sun Moon bestowed the Golden Belt upon her new husband, her cheeks flushed with modesty and love? Were you not assembled in Kim Il Sung Square to witness it firsthand?

  What are you going to believe, citizens? Rumors and lies, or your very own eyes?

  But let us return to the rest of today’s programming, which includes a rebroadcast of Kim Il Sung’s glorious speech of April Fifteenth, Juche 71, and a public-service announcement from the Minister of Procurement Comrade Buc on the topic of prolonging the life of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. But first, citizens, a treat: it is our pleasure to announce that Pyongyang has a new opera singer. The Dear Leader has dubbed her the Lovely Visitor. And here she is, to sing for your patriotic pleasure the arias from Sea of Blood. So return to your industrial lathes and vinalon looms, citizens, and double your output quotas as you listen to this Lovely Visitor sing the story of the greatest nation in the world, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea!

  JUN DO’S mother was a singer. That was all Jun Do’s father, the Orphan Master, would say about her. The Orphan Master kept a photograph of a woman in his small room at Long Tomorrows. She was quite lovely—eyes large and sideways looking, lips pursed with an unspoken word. Since beautiful women in the provinces get shipped to Pyongyang, that’s certainly what had happened to his mother. The real proof of this was the Orphan Master himself. At night, he’d drink, and from the barracks, the orphans would hear him weeping and lamenting, striking half-heard bargains with the woman in the photograph. Only Jun Do was allowed to comfort him, to finally take the bottle from his hands.

  As the oldest boy at Long Tomorrows, Jun Do had responsibilities—portioning the food, assigning bunks, renaming the new boys from the list of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution. Even so, the Orphan Master was serious about showing no favoritism to his son, the only boy at Long Tomorrows who wasn’t an orphan. When the rabbit warren was dirty, it was Jun Do who spent the night locked in it. When boys wet their bunks, it was Jun Do who chipped the frozen piss off the floor. Jun Do didn’t brag to the other boys that he was the son of the Orphan Master, rather than some kid dropped off by parents on their way to a 9-27 camp. If someone wanted to figure it out, it was pretty obvious—Jun Do had been there before all of them, and the reason he’d never been adopted was because his father would never let someone take his only son. And it made sense that after his mother was stolen to Pyongyang, his father had applied for the one position that would allow him to both earn a living and watch over his son.

  The surest evidence that the woman in the photo was Jun Do’s mother was the unrelenting way the Orphan Master singled him out for punishment. It could only mean that in Jun Do’s face, the Orphan Master saw the woman in the picture, a daily reminder of the eternal hurt he felt from losing her. Only a father in that kind of pain could take a boy’s shoes in winter. Only a true father, flesh and bone, could burn a son with the smoking end of a coal shovel.

  Occasionally, a factory would adopt a group of kids, and in the spring, men
with Chinese accents would come to make their picks. Other than that, anyone who could feed the boys and provide a bottle for the Orphan Master could have them for the day. In summer they filled sandbags and in winter they used metal bars to break sheets of ice from the docks. On the machining floors, for bowls of cold chap chai, they would shovel the coils of oily metal that sprayed from the industrial lathes. The railyard fed them best, though, spicy yukejang. One time, shoveling out boxcars, they swept up a powder that looked like salt. It wasn’t until they started sweating that they turned red, their hands and faces, their teeth. The train had been filled with chemicals for the paint factory. For weeks, they were red.

  And then in the year Juche 85, the floods came. Three weeks of rain, yet the loudspeakers said nothing of terraces collapsing, earth dams giving, villages cascading into one another. The Army was busy trying to save the Sungli 58 factory from the rising water, so the Long Tomorrows boys were given ropes and long-handled gaffs to try to snare people from the Chongjin River before they were washed into the harbor. The water was a roil of timber, petroleum tanks, and latrine barrels. A tractor tire turned in the water, a Soviet refrigerator. They heard the deep booms of boxcars tumbling along the river bottom. The canopy of a troop carrier spun past, a screaming family clinging to it. Then a young woman rose from the water, mouth wide but silent, and the orphan called Bo Song gaffed her arm—right away he was jerked into the current. Bo Song had come to the orphanage a frail boy, and when they discovered he had no hearing, Jun Do gave him the name Un Bo Song, after the 37th Martyr of the Revolution, who’d famously put mud in his ears so he couldn’t hear the bullets as he charged the Japanese.

  Still, the boys shouted “Bo Song, Bo Song” as they ran the riverbanks, racing beside the patch of river where Bo Song should have been. They ran past the outfall pipes of the Unification Steelworks and along the muddy berms of the Ryongsong’s leach ponds, but Bo Song was never seen again. The boys stopped at the harbor, its dark waters ropy with corpses, thousands of them in the throes of the waves, looking like curds of sticky millet that start to flop and toss when the pan heats.

  Though they didn’t know it, this was the beginning of the famine—first went the power, then the train service. When the shock-work whistles stopped blowing, Jun Do knew it was bad. One day the fishing fleet went out and didn’t come back. With winter came blackfinger and the old people went to sleep. These were just the first months, long before the bark-eaters. The loudspeakers called the famine an Arduous March, but that voice was piped in from Pyongyang. Jun Do had never heard anyone in Chongjin call it that. What was happening to them didn’t need a name—it was everything, every fingernail you chewed and swallowed, every lift of an eyelid, every trip to the latrine where you tried to shit out wads of balled sawdust. When all hope was gone, the Orphan Master burned the bunks, the boys sleeping around a pot stove that glowed on their last night. In the morning, he flagged down a Soviet Tsir, the military truck they called “the crow” because of its black canvas canopy on the back. There were only a dozen boys left, a perfect fit in the back of the crow. All orphans are destined for the Army eventually. But this was how Jun Do, at fourteen, became a tunnel soldier, trained in the art of zero-light combat.

  And that’s where Officer So found him, eight years later. The old man actually came underground to get a look at Jun Do, who’d spent an overnighter with his team inside a tunnel that went ten kilometers under the DMZ, almost to the suburbs of Seoul. When exiting a tunnel, they’d always walk out backward, to let their eyes adjust, and he almost ran into Officer So, whose shoulders and big rib cage spoke of a person who’d come of age in the good times, before the Chollima campaigns.

  “Are you Pak Jun Do?” he asked.

  When Jun Do turned, a circle of light glowed behind the man’s close-cropped white hair. The skin on his face was darker than his scalp or jaw, making it look like the man had just shaved off a beard and thick, wild hair. “That’s me,” Jun Do said.

  “That’s a Martyr’s name,” Officer So said. “Is this an orphan detail?”

  Jun Do nodded his head. “It is,” he said. “But I’m not an orphan.”

  Officer So’s eyes fell upon the red taekwondo badge on Jun Do’s chest.

  “Fair enough,” Officer So said and tossed him a sack.

  In it were blue jeans, a yellow shirt with a polo pony, and shoes called Nikes that Jun Do recognized from long ago, when the orphanage was used to welcome ferry-loads of Koreans who had been lured back from Japan with promises of Party jobs and apartments in Pyongyang. The orphans would wave welcome banners and sing Party songs so that the Japanese Koreans would descend the gangway, despite the horrible state of Chongjin and the crows that were waiting to transport them all to kwan li so labor camps. It was like yesterday, watching those perfect boys with their new sneakers, finally coming home.

  Jun Do held up the yellow shirt. “What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.

  “It’s your new uniform,” Officer So said. “You don’t get seasick, do you?”

  He didn’t. They took a train to the eastern port of Cholhwang, where Officer So commandeered a fishing boat, the crew so frightened of their military guests that they wore their Kim Il Sung pins all the way across the sea to the coast of Japan. Upon the water, Jun Do saw small fish with wings and late morning fog so thick it took the words from your mouth. There were no loudspeakers blaring all day, and all the fishermen had portraits of their wives tattooed on their chests. The sea was spontaneous in a way he’d never seen before—it kept your body uncertain as to how you’d lean next, and yet you could become comfortable with that. The wind in the rigging seemed in communication with the waves shouldering the hull, and lying atop the wheelhouse under the stars at night, it seemed to Jun Do that this was a place a man could close his eyes and exhale.

  Officer So had also brought along a man named Gil as their translator. Gil read Japanese novels on the deck and listened to headphones attached to a small cassette player. Only once did Jun Do try to speak to Gil, approaching him to ask what he was listening to. But before Jun Do could open his mouth, Gil stopped the player and said the word “Opera.”

  They were going to get someone—someone on a beach—and bring that someone home with them. That’s all Officer So would say about their trip.

  On the second day, darkness falling, they could see the distant lights of a town, but the Captain would take the boat no closer.

  “This is Japan,” he said. “I don’t have charts for these waters.”

  “I’ll tell you how close we get,” Officer So said to the Captain, and with a fisherman sounding for the bottom, they made for the shore.

  Jun Do got dressed, cinching the belt to keep the stiff jeans on.

  “Are these the clothes of the last guy you kidnapped?” Jun Do asked.

  Officer So said, “I haven’t kidnapped anyone in years.”

  Jun Do felt his face muscles tighten, a sense of dread running through him.

  “Relax,” Officer So said. “I’ve done this a hundred times.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Well, twenty-seven times.”

  Officer So had brought a little skiff along, and when they were close to the shore, he directed the fishermen to lower it. To the west, the sun was setting over North Korea, and it was cooling now, the wind shifting direction. The skiff was tiny, Jun Do thought, barely big enough for one person, let alone three and a struggling kidnap victim. With a pair of binoculars and a thermos, Officer So climbed down into the skiff. Gil followed. When Jun Do took his place next to Gil, black water lapped over the sides, and right away his shoes soaked through. He debated revealing that he couldn’t swim.

  Gil kept trying to get Jun Do to repeat phrases in Japanese. Good evening—Konban wa. Excuse me, I am lost—Chotto sumimasen, michi ni mayoimashita. Can you help me find my cat?—Watashi no neko ga maigo ni narimashita?

  Officer So pointed their nose toward shore, the old man pushing the outboard mo
tor, a tired Soviet Vpresna, way too hard. Turning north and running with the coast, the boat would lean shoreward as a swell lifted, then rock back toward open water as the wave set it down again.

  Gil took the binoculars, but instead of training them on the beach, he studied the tall buildings, the way the downtown neon came to life.

  “I tell you,” Gil said. “There was no Arduous March in this place.”

  Jun Do and Officer So exchanged a look.

  Officer So said to Gil, “Tell him what ‘how are you’ was again.”

  “Ogenki desu ka,” Gil said.

  “Ogenki desu ka,” Jun Do repeated. “Ogenki desu ka.”

  “Say it like ‘How are you, my fellow citizen?’ Ogenki desu ka,” Officer So said. “Not like how are you, I’m about to pluck you off this fucking beach.”

  Jun Do asked, “Is that what you call it, plucking?”

  “A long time ago, that’s what we called it.” He put on a fake smile. “Just say it nice.”

  Jun Do said, “Why not send Gil? He’s the one who speaks Japanese.”

  Officer So returned his eyes to the water. “You know why you’re here.”

  Gil asked, “Why’s he here?”

  Officer So said, “Because he fights in the dark.”

  Gil turned to Jun Do. “You mean that’s what you do, that’s your career?” he asked.

  “I lead an incursion team,” Jun Do said. “Mostly we run in the dark, but yeah, there’s fighting, too.”

  Gil said, “I thought my job was fucked up.”

  “What was your job?” Jun Do asked.

  “Before I went to language school?” Gil asked. “Land mines.”

  “What, like defusing them?”

  “I wish,” Gil said.

  They closed within a couple hundred meters of shore, then trolled along the beaches of Kagoshima Prefecture. The more the light faded, the more intricately Jun Do could see it reflected in the architecture of each wave that rolled them.