The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

Mongnan reached under the fence and pulled out two radishes, crisp and cold, which we ate on the spot. Then we began digging the wild ginger that grew there. All the old ladies in camp got placed on grave detail—they buried the bodies where they fell, just deep enough that the rain wouldn’t seep them out. And you could always tell ginger plants whose tap root had penetrated a corpse: the blooms were large, iridescent yellow, and it was hard to jerk loose a plant whose roots had hooked a rib below.

They drove alongside the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery. The Songun guard with their golden rifles had gone home for the day and in the long shadows cast by the bronze headstones moved occasional men and women. 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?

“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.”

It wasn’t luck that nobodies lived in army barracks while somebodies lived in homes on the tops of mountains.

There were people who came into your life and cost you everything. Comrade Buc’s wife was right about that. It had felt pretty shitty being one of those people. He had been the person who took. He’d been the one who was taken. And he’d been the one left behind. Next he would find out what it was like to be all three at once.