The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  Inside, I’m assaulted by the evening propaganda broadcasts coming over the apartment’s hardwired loudspeaker. There’s one in every apartment and factory floor in Pyongyang, everywhere but where I work, as it was deemed the loudspeakers would give our subjects too much orienting information, like date and time, too much normalcy. When subjects come to us, they need to learn that the world of before no longer exists.

  I cook my parents dinner. When they taste the food, they praise Kim Jong Il for its flavor, and when I ask after their day, they say it certainly wasn’t as hard as the day of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, who carries the fate of a people on his back. Their eyesight failed at the same time, and they have become paranoid that there might be someone around they can’t perceive, ready to report them for anything they say. They listen to the loudspeaker all day, hail me as citizen! when I get home, and are careful to never reveal a personal feeling, lest it get them denounced by a stranger they can’t quite lay their eyes on. That’s why our biographies are important—instead of keeping things from your government by living a life of secrecy, they’re a model of how to share everything. I like to think I’m part of a different tomorrow in that regard.

  I finish my bowl on the balcony. I look down upon the rooftops of smaller buildings, which have all been covered with grass as part of the Grass into Meat Campaign. All the goats on the roof across the street are bleating because dusk is when the eagle owls come down from the mountains to hunt. Yes, I thought, Ga’s would be quite a story to tell: an unknown man impersonates a famous one. He is now in possession of Sun Moon. He is now close to the Dear Leader. And when an American delegation comes to Pyongyang, this unknown man uses the distraction to slay the beautiful woman, at his own peril. He doesn’t even try to get away with it. Now that’s a biography.

  I’ve attempted to write my own, just as a means of better understanding the subjects I ask to do so. The result is a catalog more banal than anything that comes from the guests of Division 42. My biography was filled with a thousand insignificances—the way the city fountains only turn on the couple of times a year when the capital has a foreign visitor, or how, despite the fact that cell phones are illegal and I’ve never seen a single person using one, the city’s main cellular tower is in my neighborhood, just across the Pottong Bridge, a grand tower painted green and trimmed in fake branches. Or the time I came home to find an entire platoon of KPA soldiers sitting on the sidewalk outside Glory of Mount Paektu, sharpening their bayonets on the cement curb. Was it a message to me, to someone? A coincidence?

  As an experiment, the biography was a failure—where was the me in it, where was I?—and of course it was hard to get past the feeling that if I finished it, something bad would happen to me. The real truth was that I couldn’t stand the pronoun “I.” Even at home, in the privacy of my own notepad, I have difficulty writing that word.

  As I sipped the cucumber juice at the bottom of my rice bowl, I watched the last light play like a flickering fire on the walls of a housing block across the river. We write our subject biographies in the third person, to maintain our objectivity. It might be easier if I wrote my own biography that way, as though the story wasn’t about me but about an intrepid interrogator. But then I’d have to use my name, which is against the rules. And what’s the point of telling a personal story if you’re only referred to as “The Interrogator”? Who wants to read a book called The Biographer? No, you want to read a book with someone’s name on it. You want to read a book called The Man Who Killed Sun Moon.

  In the distance, the light reflecting off the water flashed and danced against the housing block, and I had a sudden idea.

  “I forgot something at work,” I told my parents and then locked them in.

  I took the subway across town, back to Division 42, but it was too late—the power went out when we were deep in the tunnel. By the light of matchbooks, we all poured out of the electric train cars and filed along the dark tracks to the Rakwan station, where the escalator was now a ramp of stairs, to climb the hundred meters to the surface. It was full dark when I made it to the street, and the sensation of emerging from one darkness to another was one I didn’t like—it felt like I was in Commander Ga’s dream, with flashes of black and buses cruising like sharks in the dark. I almost let myself imagine there was an American car out there, moving just beyond my perception, following me.

  When I woke Commander Ga, his fingers were transcribing his dream again, but this time in a slow and slurred manner. We North Koreans do know how to make a world-class sedative.

  “When you said you met Sun Moon,” I said, “you mentioned she was on the side of a building, right?”

  Commander Ga only nodded.

  “They were projecting a movie on the wall of a building, yes? So you first met her through a film.”

  “A film,” Commander Ga said.

  “And they picked the infirmary because its walls were white, which means you were outside when you saw the movie. And the snow was heavy because you were high in the mountains.”

  Commander Ga closed his eyes.

  “And the burning ships, this was her movie Tyrants Asunder?”

  Commander Ga was fading, but I wasn’t going to stop.

  “And the people moaning in the infirmary, they were moaning because this was a prison, wasn’t it?” I asked him. “You were a prisoner, weren’t you?”

  I didn’t need an answer. And of course, what better place to meet the real Commander Ga, the Minister of Prison Mines, than in a prison mine? So he’d met them both there, husband and wife.

  I pulled Commander Ga’s sheets high enough to cover his tattoo. I was already starting to think of him as Commander Ga. When we finally discovered his real identity, it was going to be a shame, for Q-Kee was right—they’d shoot him in the street. You don’t kill a minister and then escape from prison and then kill the minister’s family and still get to become a peasant in a rural farm collective. I studied the man before me. “What did the real Commander Ga do to you?” I asked him. His hands raised above the sheets and he began typing on his stomach. “What could the Minister have done that was so bad you killed him and then went after his wife and kids?”

  As he typed, I stared at his eyes, and his pupils weren’t moving behind the lids. He wasn’t transcribing what he saw in his dream. Perhaps it was what he heard that he’d been trained to record. “Good night, Commander Ga,” I said, and watched as his hands typed four words, and then paused, waiting for more.

  I took a sedative myself and then left Commander Ga to sleep through the night. Ideally, the sedative wouldn’t take effect until after I’d made it across town. If things worked out just right, it would kick in after the twenty-second flight of stairs.

  COMMANDER GA tried to forget about the interrogator, though Ga could smell the cucumber on his breath long after the man had swallowed his pill and walked out the door. Speaking of Sun Moon had put fresh images of her in Ga’s mind, and that’s what Ga cared about. He could practically see the movie they’d been talking about. A True Daughter of the Country. That was the name of the movie, not Tyrants Asunder. Sun Moon had played a woman from the southern island of Cheju who leaves her family and journeys north to battle the imperialists at Inchon. Cheju, he learned, was famous for its women abalone divers, and the movie opens with three sisters on a raft. Opaque waves capped with pumice-colored foam lift and drop the women. A wave the color of charcoal rolls into the frame, blotting the women from view until it passes, while brutal clouds scrape the volcanic shore. The oldest sister is Sun Moon. She splashes water on her limbs, to prepare herself for the cold, and adjusts her mask as her sisters speak of village gossip. Then Sun Moon hefts a rock, breathes deeply, and rolls backward off the raft into water so dark it should be night. The sisters switch their talk to the war and their sick mother and their fears that Sun Moon will abandon them. They lie back on the raft in a moment filmed from the mast above, and the sisters speak of village life again, of their neighbors’ crushes
and spats, but they have gone somber and it is clear that what they are not talking about is the war and how, if they do not go to it, it will come to them.

  He’d watched this movie with the others, projected onto the side of the prison infirmary, the only building that was painted white. It was Kim Jong Il’s birthday, February 16, their one day off work a year. The inmates sat on upended pieces of firewood that they’d beaten free of ice, and this was his first look at her, a woman luminous with beauty who plunges into darkness and simply won’t seem to return. The sisters speak on and on, the waves build and break, the patients in the infirmary weakly moan as their blood-collection bags fill, and still Sun Moon will not surface. He wrings his hands at the loss of her, all the prisoners do, and even though she eventually surfaces, they all know that for the rest of the movie she will have that power over them.

  It was that night, he now remembered, that Mongnan saved his life for the second time. It was very cold, the coldest he’d ever been, for work was what kept them warm all day, and watching a movie in the snow had allowed his body temperature to dangerously fall.

  Mongnan appeared at his bunk, touching his chest and his feet to gauge his aliveness.

  “Come,” she said. “We must move quickly.”

  His limbs barely functioned as he followed the old woman. Others in their bunks stirred as they passed, but none sat up, as there was so little time for sleep. Together, they raced for a corner of the prison yard that was normally brightly lit and watched by a two-man guard tower. “The bulb to the main searchlight has burned out,” Mongnan whispered to him as they ran. “It will take them a while to get another, but we must be quick.” In the dark, they crouched, picking up all the moths that had fallen dead before the lamp had died. “Fill your mouth,” she said. “Your stomach doesn’t care.” He did as he was told and soon he was chewing a wad of them—their furry abdomens drying his mouth, despite the goop that burst from them and a sharp aspirin taste from some chemical on their wings. His stomach hadn’t been filled since Texas. He and Mongnan fled in the dark with handfuls of moths—wings slightly singed but ready to keep them alive another week.

  GOOD MORNING, CITIZENS! In your housing blocks, on your factory floors, gather ’round your loudspeakers for today’s news: the North Korean table-tennis team has just defeated its Somali counterpart in straight sets! Also, President Robert Mugabe sends his well wishes on this, the anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party of Korea. Don’t forget, it is improper to sit on the escalators leading into the subways. The Minister of Defense reminds us that the deepest subways in the world are for your civil-defense safety, should the Americans sneak-attack again. No sitting! And kelp-harvesting season will soon be upon us! Time to sterilize your jars and cans. And, finally, it is once again our privilege to crown the year’s Best North Korean Story. Last year’s tale of sorrow at the hands of South Korean missionaries was a one-hundred-percent success. This year’s promises to be even more grand—it is a true story of love and sorrow, of faith and endurance, and of the Dear Leader’s unending dedication to even the lowliest citizen of this great nation. Sadly, there is tragedy. Yet there is redemption, too! And taekwondo! Stay close to your loudspeakers, citizens, for each daily installment.

  THE NEXT MORNING, my head was foggy from the sedative. Still, I raced to Division 42, where we checked on Commander Ga. As is the law of beatings, the real hurt came the day after. Rather ingeniously, he had stitched up the cut over his eye, but by what means he’d improvised a needle and thread we couldn’t tell. We would have to discover his method so that we could ask him about it.

  We took Commander Ga to the cafeteria, a place we thought would seem less threatening. Most people believe that harm won’t come to them in a public space. We had the interns fetch Ga some breakfast. Jujack fixed a bowl of bi bim bop, while Q-Kee heated a kettle for cha. None of us liked the name “Q-Kee.” It went against the professionalism we were trying to project at Division 42, something sorely missing with Pubyok wandering around in forty-year-old suits from Hamhung and bulgogi-stained ties. But since the new opera diva started going by her initials, all the young women were doing it. Pyongyang can be so trendy that way. Q-Kee countered our complaints with the fact that we wouldn’t reveal our names, and she was unmoved when we explained that the policy was a holdover from the war, when subjects were seen as possible spies rather than citizens who had lost their revolutionary zeal and gone astray. She didn’t buy it, and neither did we. How could you build a reputation in an environment where the only people who got names were the interns and the sad old retirees who clamber in to relive the glory days?

  While Commander Ga ate his breakfast, Q-Kee engaged him in some small talk.

  “Which kwans do you think have a shot at the Golden Belt this year?” she asked.

  Commander Ga simply wolfed his food. We’d never met someone who’d made it out of a mining prison before, but one look at how he ate told us all we needed to know about the conditions at Prison 33. Imagine stepping from a place like that into Commander Ga’s beautiful house on Mount Taesong. His view of Pyongyang is suddenly yours, his famed rice-wine collection is suddenly yours, and then there is his wife.

  Q-Kee tried again. “One of the girls in the fifty-five-kilo division just qualified using the dwi chagi ga,” she said. This was Ga’s signature move. He’d personally modified the dwi chagi so that now its execution required turning your back to the opponent to lure him in. Ga either knew nothing of taekwondo or he didn’t take the bait. Of course this wasn’t the real Commander Ga, so he should have no real knowledge of Golden Belt—level martial arts. The questioning was a necessary step in determining the degree to which he actually believed he was Commander Ga.

  Ga horsed down the last swallow, wiped his mouth, and pushed the bowl away.

  “You’ll never find them,” he said to us. “I don’t care what happens to me, so don’t bother trying to make me tell you.”

  His voice was stern, and interrogators aren’t used to being spoken to that way. Some of the Pubyok at another table caught wind of this tone and came over.

  Commander Ga pulled the teapot to him. Instead of pouring a cup, he opened the pot and removed the steaming teabag. This he placed on the cut over his eye. He squinted at the pain, and tears of hot tea ran down his cheek. “You said you wanted my story,” he told us. “I’ll give it to you, everything but the fates of the woman and her kids. But first, I need something.”

  One of the Pubyok pulled off a shoe and advanced upon Ga.

  “Stop,” I called. “Let him finish.”

  The Pubyok hesitated, shoe high.

  Ga paid this threat no mind. Was this a result of his pain training? Was he accustomed to beatings? Some people simply feel better after a beating—beatings are often good cures for guilt and self-loathing. Was he suffering from these?

  In a calmer voice, we told the Pubyok, “He’s ours. Sarge gave his word.”

  The Pubyok backed down, but they joined us at our table, four of them, with their teapot. Of course they drink pu-erh, and they stink of it all day long.

  “What is this thing you need?” we asked him.

  Commander Ga said, “I need the answer to a question.”

  The Pubyok were beside themselves. Never in their lives had they heard such talk from a subject. The team looked my way. “Sir,” Q-Kee said. “This is the wrong road to go down.”

  Jujack said, “With all due respect, sir. We should give this guy a sniff of the towering white flower.”

  I put my hand up. “Enough,” I said. “Our subject will tell us how he first met Commander Ga, and when he is finished we will answer one question, any question he wishes.”

  The old-timers looked on with seething disbelief. They leaned on their hard, ropy forearms, their knotted hands and bent fingers and misgrown fingernails squeezed tight with restraint.

  Commander Ga said, “I met Commander Ga twice. The first time was in the spring—I heard he would be visiting the
prison on the eve of his arrival.”

  “Start there,” we told him.

  “Shortly after I entered Prison 33,” he said, “Mongnan started a rumor that one of the new inmates was an undercover agent from the Ministry of Prison Mines, sent there to catch guards who were killing inmates for fun and thus lowering the production quotas. It worked, I suppose—they said fewer inmates were maimed for the sport of it. But the guards thumping on you—when winter came, that was the least of your worries.”

  “What did the guards call you?” we asked him.

  “There are no names,” he said. “I made it through winter, but afterward I was different. I can’t make you understand what the winter was like, what that did to me. When the thaw came, I didn’t care about anything. I would leer at the guards like they were orphans. I kept acting out at self-criticism sessions. Instead of confessing that I could have pushed one more ore cart or mined an extra ton, I would berate my hands for not listening to my mouth or blame my right foot for not following my left. Winter had changed me—I was someone else now. The cold, there are no words for it.”

  “For the love of Juche,” the old Pubyok said. He still had his shoe on the table. “If we were interrogating this idiot, there’d already be a funeral team on its way to retrieve that glorious, glorious actress and her poor tots.”

  “This isn’t even Commander Ga,” we reminded him.

  “Then why are we listening to him whimper about prison?” He turned to Commander Ga. “You think those mountains are cold? Imagine them with Yankee snipers and B-29 strikes. Imagine those hills without a camp cook to serve you hot cabbage soup every day. Imagine there’s no comfortable infirmary cot where they painlessly put you out of your misery.”