The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

the ban on stargazing is still in effect.

lying atop the wheelhouse under the stars at night,

“I’m just wondering what got into them, to just take off and paddle around the world?” “Wouldn’t you, if you could?” “That’s my point, you can’t. Who could pull it off—all those waves and ice, in that tiny boat? Someone should have stopped them. Someone should have taken that stupid idea out of their heads.”

The girl who rowed during the day had the horizon of where she came from, and when she turned to look, the horizon of where she was headed. But the girl who rowed in the dark had only the splash and pull of each stroke and the belief that they’d all add up to get her home.

“You’re a survivor who has nothing to live for.”

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.”

that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

“John Doe? Isn’t that the name you give a missing person?” “It’s Pak Jun Do,” Jun Do said, then he pronounced it slowly. “Jhun Doh.”

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?

The library is a sacred place to us. No visitors are allowed, and once a book is closed, it never gets opened. Oh, sure, sometimes the boys from Propaganda will nose around for a feel-good story to play to the citizens over the loudspeakers, but we’re story takers, not storytellers.

“The ox snorted—its eyes were wide and uncertain, and it swung its head from side to side as if looking for something.

“Do you feel for the man hungry enough to steal?” Commander Ga asked as they drove by. “Or for the men who must hunt him down?” “Isn’t it the bird who suffers?” Sun Moon asked.

And here was Pak Jun Do, who took his own life in a test of loyalty to our leaders.

He hadn’t known what he’d feel when he finally faced this martyr, but Ga’s only thought was, I’m not you. I’m my own man.

Ga thought of how difficult it was to come to see the lies you told yourself, the ones that allowed you to function and move forward. To really do it, you needed someone’s help.

“Children,” Sun Moon said, “I told you, your father’s just on a long mission.” “That’s not true,” Commander Ga said. “But I’ll tell you the whole story soon.” Quietly, through her teeth, Sun Moon said, “Don’t you take their innocence.”

“I’m an actress,” she said. “The truth is all that matters to me.”

Both our names were essentially unknown—there was nothing by which friends and family could call us, there was no word to which our deepest selves could respond.

It seemed the only stories the children knew of had come from the loudspeaker.

“I’m not the woman in the song,” she said. “I’m not an actress or a singer or a flower. I’m just a woman. Do you want to know this woman?

Everything was singular—the gleam of a metal armature, the violent green of a fly’s eye. There was only the thing itself, without connection or context, as if everything in your mind had become unlinked to everything else. Blue and leather and chair, I couldn’t put them together.

There was no such thing as abandonment, there were only people in impossible positions, people who had a best hope, or maybe only a sole hope. When the graver danger awaited, it wasn’t abandoning, it was saving.

Your loyalties must lie with the regime first and your family second, which makes an orphan of everyone to some degree, and the Kim regime the true orphan master.

People in Pyongyang tend not to defect and therefore don’t bring their stories to the outside world, so how they live is a greater mystery.

that most of the shocking aspects in my book are sourced from the real world: the loudspeakers, the gulags, the famine, the kidnappings.

Much of the propaganda, especially the funnier lines, I pulled straight from the pages of Pyongyang’s Rodong Sinmun Workers’ Party newspaper.

I felt I actually had to tone down much of the real darkness of North Korea, as in the kwan li so gulags, the reports of which were so harrowing—forced abortions, amputations, communal executions—that I invented the blood harvesting as a less savage stand-in, one that was simple and visceral, for the ways that the Kim regime stole

Aren’t our lives a collision of the comic and the uncertain and the terrifying and the mundane?

Trauma narratives

are hallmarked by fragmentation, broken chronology, changing perspectives, shifts in tone, and absented moments. I