The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

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.

The two of them crossed the tide line and came to a small square. Here were benches and a little plaza, a shuttered tea stand. There seemed to be no statue, and they could not tell what the square glorified. The trees were full with plums, so ripe the skins broke and juice ran in their hands. It seemed impossible, a thing not to be trusted.

Jun Do’s men would vie to be the ones to slip out and wander South Korea for a while. They’d come back with stories of machines that handed out money and people who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never looked. He knew the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he wanted no part of it—he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing.

Not that he envied those who rowed in the daylight. The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked through during the day. At night, they were things you looked into. You looked into the stars, you looked into dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps. No one ever stared at the tip of a cigarette in the daylight hours, and with the sun in the sky, who would ever post a “watch”? At night on the Junma, there was acuity, quietude, pause. There was a look in the crew members’ eyes that was both faraway and inward.

On the horizon was a carrier group from the American fleet, ships so large they didn’t look as if they could move, let alone float. It looked like an island chain, so fixed and ancient as to have its own people and language and gods.

The wind was loud in their ears. It made their cigarettes flare. There wasn’t another light on the water, and the horizon line separated the absolute black of the water from the milk dark of the star-choked sky.

The kid sounded new to whatever heavy thinking was going on in his brain.

“To me,” Jun Do said, “what everybody gets wrong about ghosts is the notion that they’re dead. In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range.”

And then the idea of a portrait, of any person, placed over your heart, forever, seemed irresistible. How was it that we didn’t walk around with every person who mattered tattooed on us forever?

He looked upon the sea some more. The black waves would rise and clap, and in the troughs between them, you could imagine anything was out there.

Jun Do would stare toward the northerly horizon, then he would force himself not to stare. They listened to planes and ships and the strange echoes that came from the curve of the earth.

It was nothing short of belonging, a feeling that wasn’t particularly profound or intense, it was just the best he tended to get. He’d spent most of his life since trying to be alone, but there were moments aboard the Junma where he felt a part, and that came with a satisfaction that wasn’t located inside, but among.

The Captain studied the card. He reached for a hand, and they helped him up. There was that wild light in his eyes. “And then one of us,” he said, “without regard for his own safety, jumped into the shark-filled sea to save the Second Mate. This crewman suffered ferocious bite wounds, but he didn’t care because he only thought about saving the Second Mate, a hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But it was too late—half eaten, the Second Mate slipped below the waves. His last words were of praise for the Dear Leader, and it was only in the nick of time that we pulled the other crew member, bleeding and half dead, back aboard the Junma.” Things suddenly got quiet. The Captain told the Machinist to start the winch. “We’ll need a fresh shark,” he said. The Captain came to Jun Do and cupped the back of his neck, pulling him close in a tender way until they were almost forehead to forehead. No one had ever done that to Jun Do before, and it felt like there was no one else in the world. The Captain said, “It’s not just because you’re the one who put all the stupid ideas in the Second Mate’s head. Or that you’re the one with the actress tattooed on your chest instead of a real woman, at home depending on you. It’s not because you’re the one who’s had military training in pain. It’s because no one ever taught you about family and sacrifice and doing whatever it takes to protect your own.” The Captain’s eyes were open and calm and so close to Jun Do’s that it felt they...

“I’m certifying you,” the old man said. “Your story checks out.” Jun Do turned to him. “What story are you talking about?” “What story?” the old man asked. “You’re a hero now.” The old man offered Jun Do a cigarette, but Jun Do couldn’t take it. “But the facts,” Jun Do said. “They don’t add up. Where are the answers?” “There’s no such thing as facts. In my world, all the answers you need to know come from here.” He pointed at himself, and Jun Do couldn’t tell if the old man indicated his heart, his gut, or his balls. “But where are they?” Jun Do asked. He could see the girl rower shooting flares his way, he could feel the Mate’s cold cheek as the sharks pulled him under. “Will we ever find them?”

“Where we are from,” he said, “stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.” Here, Dr. Song took a sip of juice, and the finger he lifted trembled slightly. “But in America, people’s stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters. Perhaps they will believe your story and perhaps not, but you, Jun Do, they will believe you.”

“Korea,” Dr. Song said, “is a land of mountains. Gunshots bring swift responses from the canyon walls. Here, the bang goes off into the distance, never to return.” Jun Do agreed. It was a truly lonesome thing to have such a commotion be swallowed by the landscape, to have the sound of fire make no echo.

At one point the dogs noticed something moving in a distant bush. They stood at attention, bristling. Walking past, the Senator said, “Hunt,” and at the command, the dogs raced off to flush a group of small birds that ran quickly through the brush. When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

How to explain his country to her, he wondered. How to explain that leaving its confines to sail upon the Sea of Japan—that was being free. Or that as a boy, sneaking from the smelter floor for an hour to run with other boys in the slag heaps, even though there were guards everywhere, because there were guards everywhere—that was the purest freedom. How to make someone understand that the scorch-water they made from the rice burned to the bottom of the pot tasted better than any Texas lemonade?

Most people walking around—they don’t think about being alive. But when your uncle was about to enter an enemy tunnel, I bet he was thinking about nothing but that. And when he made it out, he probably felt more alive than we’ll ever feel, the most alive in the world, and that until the next tunnel, nothing could touch him, he was invincible. You ask him if he felt more alive here or over there.”

In the growing dark, these ghostly figures, keeping low and moving quickly, were gathering all the flowers from the graves. “Always they are stealing flowers,” Sun Moon remarked as they passed by. “It sickens me. My great-uncle is in there, you know. Do you know what that says to our ancestors, how it must insult them?” Ga asked her, “Why do you think they steal the flowers?” “Yes, that’s the question, isn’t it? Who would do that? What’s happening to our country?” He stole a brief glance, to confirm her disbelief. Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?

He told me that there was a path set out for us. On it we had to do everything the signs commanded and heed all the announcements along the way. Even if we walked this path side by side, he said, we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands.

But my father was still walking me down that path. My father said to me, “I denounce this boy for having a blue tongue.” We laughed. I pointed at my father. “This citizen eats mustard.” I had recently tried mustard root for the first time, and the look on my face made my parents laugh. Everything mustard was now funny to me. My father addressed an invisible authority in the air. “This boy has counterrevolutionary thoughts about mustard. He should be sent to a mustard-seed farm to correct his mustardy thinking.” “This dad eats pickle ice with mustard poop,” I said. “That was a good one. Now take my hand,” he told me. I put my small hand in his, and then his mouth became sharp with hate. He shouted, “I denounce this citizen as an imperialist puppet who should be remanded to stand trial for crimes against the state.” His face was red, venomous. “I have witnessed him spew capitalist diatribes in an effort to poison our minds with his traitorous filth.” The old men turned from their game to observe us. I was terrified, on the verge of crying. My father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If your mother ever must say something like that to me, in order to protect the two of you, know that inside, she and I are holding hands. And if someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.” He reached out and ruffled my hair.

“My poor little orphan,” she said. “An orphan’s father is twice as important. Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.”

In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself—Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs—you let go of all the others, each person you’d once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary. Sun Moon appeared to him now like this, not as a woman, vital and beautiful, making an instrument speak her sorrow, but as the flicker of someone once known, a photo of a person long gone.

When the Dear Leader wanted you to lose more, he gave you more to lose.

In this village, I would have a name, and people would call me by it. When the candle went out, she would speak to me, telling me to sleep very, very deeply, and as the electricity stropped itself sharper in my mind, I listened for her voice, calling a name that would soon be mine.