The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary? If Koreans spoke this way, maybe they’d make more sense to Jun Do. Maybe he’d understand why some people accepted their fates while others didn’t. He might know why people sometimes scoured all the orphanages looking for one particular child when any child would do, when there were perfectly good children everywhere. He’d know why all the fishermen on the Junma had their wives’ portraits tattooed on their chests, while he was a man who wore headphones in the dark of a fish hold on a boat that was twenty-seven days at sea a month.

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”?

Why be safe, why survive if you’re going to gut fish for fifty years?”

“To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero.”

“When he wants you to lose more, he gives you more to lose.”