The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

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 darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn’t matter what they were about. It didn’t matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.

“But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.”

How to tell the Second Mate that the only way to shake your ghosts was to find them, and that the only place Jun Do could do that was right here.

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

“You know what you are?” she said. “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.”

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

Dr. Song had said that what mattered in North Korea was not the man but his story—what did it mean, then, when his story was nothing, just a suggestion of a life?

your acting shows people that good can come from suffering, that it can be noble. That’s better than the truth.” “Which is?” “That there’s no point to it. It’s just a thing that sometimes has to be done and even if thirty thousand suffer with you, you suffer alone.”

“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.”

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.

“What happened?” Buc asked him. “I told her the truth about something,” Ga answered. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” Buc said. “It’s bad for people’s health.”

“Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”

“A name isn’t a person,” Ga said. “Don’t ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they’re always with you because they’re a part of you.”

Ga thought about reminding the Dear Leader that they lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them. He considered sharing how there was only one penalty, the ultimate one, for questioning reality, how a citizen could fall into great jeopardy for simply noticing that realities had changed. Even a warden wouldn’t risk that.

Mind you, Senator, your prison system is the envy of the world—state-of-the-art confinement, total surveillance, three million inmates strong! Yet you use it for no social good. The imprisoned citizen in no way motivates the free.