The Orphan Master's Son

by Adam Johnson

  Over his smart jumpsuit, the Dear Leader wore an apron. On his forehead, he sported a green visor, while a rag was draped over his shoulder. He came from behind the bar with his arms extended. “Sun Moon,” he called. “What can I serve you?”

  Their embrace was filled with the zest of socialist comradeship.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He told her, “You’re supposed to say, ‘The usual.’ ”

  “The usual,” she said.

  Here he poured for them modest snifters of North Korean cognac, which is known for its medicinal properties.

  Looking more closely, the Dear Leader saw that there was sadness in her eyes.

  “What’s got you down?” he asked her. “Tell me the story—I’ll give it a happy ending.”

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m just practicing for my new movie role.”

  “But this movie is a happy one,” he reminded her. “Your character’s undisciplined husband is replaced with a highly efficient one—soon all the farmers have increased their yields. Something else must be bothering you. Is it a matter of the heart?”

  “I only have room in my heart for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” she said.

  The Dear Leader smiled. “That’s my Sun Moon,” he said. “That’s the girl I miss. Come, look, I have a present for you.”

  From behind the bar, the Dear Leader produced an American musical instrument.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “It’s called a gui-tar. It’s used to perform American rural music. It’s said to be especially popular in Texas,” he told her. “It’s also the instrument of choice for playing ‘the blues,’ which is a form of American music that chronicles the pain caused by poor decision making.”

  Sun Moon ran her delicate fingers across the strings of the guitar. It produced a muted groan, as if a vibrant gayageum had been wrapped in a blanket and doused with a bucket of water. “The Americans have much to be sad about,” she said, plucking another string. “But listen to it. I can make no song with this.”

  “But you must, you must,” said the Dear Leader. “Please make it perform for me.”

  She strummed. “I regret that my heart …” she sang, “… is not as big as my love …”

  “That’s it,” he said.

  She strummed. “For the most democratic nation …” she went on, “… the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “Now less birdlike. Sing with the heat of your blood.”

  On the bar, she placed the guitar flat on its back, the way a proper stringed instrument is played. She tried to finger the strings so that different notes might sound.

  “The Yankees are happy,” she sang and strummed hard. “The Yankees are sad.”

  The Dear Leader beat the rhythm on the bar top with his fist.

  “Our nation doesn’t see the difference,” she belted. “Satisfaction’s all we’ve ever had.”

  Together, they laughed. “I miss all this,” he said. “Remember how we used to speak of movie scripts late into the night? How we professed our love of country and embraced reunification?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But all that changed.”

  “Did it? I used to wonder if,” the Dear Leader said, “if something happened to your husband on one of his many dangerous missions, if we’d become friends again. Of course your husband is alive and well and your marriage is better than ever, I’m sure. But if something had happened to your husband, if he’d been lost on one of his many heroic missions for our nation, would I have been right to think that we would become close again, that we would again stay up into the night sharing notions of Juche and Songun scholarship?”

  She pulled her hand from the guitar. “Is something going to happen to my husband? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Is there a dangerous mission you must send him on?”

  “No, no, banish the thought,” said the Dear Leader. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course I could never say for sure. It must be stated that the world is a dangerous place, and the future is known only to high-ranking officials.”

  Sun Moon said, “Your fatherly wisdom always did have the power to soothe my female fears.”

  “It is one of my gifts,” replied the Beneficent Leader Kim Jong Il in all his Glory. “I must make note,” he continued, “that you do call him husband.”

  “I don’t know what else to call him.”

  The Dear Leader nodded. “But you do not answer my question.”

  Sun Moon crossed her arms and turned from the bar. She took two steps, then turned back. “I, too, yearn for our late-night conversations,” she said. “But those days are past, now.”

  “But why?” the Dear Leader asked. “Why must they be past?”

  “Because I hear you have a new confidante now, a new young pupil.”

  “I see someone has been speaking to you, sharing certain things.”

  “When a citizen is given a replacement husband, it is her duty to share certain things with him.”

  “Have you?” the Dear Leader asked. “Have you been sharing with him?”

  “Only high-ranking officials know the future,” she said, and smiled.

  The Dear Leader nodded in appreciation. “See, that’s what I’ve missed. That right there.”

  Sun Moon took a first sip of her drink.

  “So who is this new pupil?” she asked. “Does she appreciate your subtleties, your humor?”

  The Dear Leader leaned forward some, happy to have her engage him again. “She is no you, I can tell you that. She has none of your beauty, your charm, your way with words.”

  Sun Moon feigned being startled. “She has no way with words?”

  “You tease me now,” he said. “You know she speaks only English. She is no Sun Moon, I grant you that, but don’t underestimate her, this American girl. Don’t think my Rower Girl doesn’t have her own special qualities, her own dark energy.”

  Now Sun Moon leaned forward, so that over the bar, the two were close.

  “Answer me this, my Dearest Leader,” she said. “And please, speak from the heart. Can a spoiled American girl handle the grand notions that emanate from a mind as great as yours? Can this girl from a land of corruption and greed comprehend the purity of your wisdom? Is she worthy of you, or should she be sent home so that a real woman can take her place?”

  The Dear Leader reached behind the bar. He produced for Sun Moon a bar of soap, a comb, and a choson-ot that seemed cut from pure gold.

  “That’s what you’re going to tell me,” he said.

  Citizens, observe the hospitality our Dear Leader shows for all peoples of the world, even a subject of the despotic United States. Does the Dear Leader not dispatch our nation’s best woman to give solace and support to this wayward American? And does Sun Moon not find the Girl Rower housed in a beautiful room, fresh and white and brightly lit, with a pretty little window affording a view of a lovely North Korean meadow and the dappled horses that frolic there? This is not dingy China or soiled little South Korea, so do not picture some sort of a prison cell with lamp-blacked walls and rust-colored puddles on the floor. Instead, notice the large white tub fitted with golden lion’s feet and filled with the steaming restorative water of the Taedong.

  Sun Moon approached her. Though the Rower was young, her skin had been marred by the sun and the sea. Still, her spirit seemed strong—perhaps her year as a guest of our great nation had given her life focus and conviction. Undoubtedly, it had provided this American the only chastity she’d ever known. Sun Moon helped her disrobe, holding the Rower’s garments as she removed them. The girl’s shoulders were broad and strong cords were visible in her neck. There was a small, circular scar on the Rower’s upper arm. When Sun Moon touched this, words came from the Rower that Sun Moon couldn’t understand. And yet a look crossed the Girl Rower’s face that reassured Sun Moon that the mark was a sign of something good, if such a wound was possible.

&nb
sp; In the water, the American reclined, and Sun Moon sat at the head of the tub, wetting the Rower’s dark, straight hair one ladle at a time. The last inch of her hair was distressed and needed to come off, but Sun Moon had no scissors. Instead, Sun Moon massaged the soap into her scalp, raising a lather. “So you’re the woman of endurance, of aloneness, the survivor,” Sun Moon said as she rinsed and soaped and rinsed again. “The girl that has captured the attention of all the males. You are a female who struggles, yes, a student of solitude? You must think we know nothing of adversity in our happy little nation of plenty. Perhaps you think I am a doll on a shelf in a hall of yangbans. That my life will be a diet of shrimp and peaches until I retire to the beaches of Wonsan.”

  Sun Moon moved to the foot of the tub, where she began washing the Rower’s long toes and ungainly feet. “My grandmother was a great beauty,” Sun Moon said. “During the occupation, she was singled out to become the comfort woman for Emperor Taisho, the decadent predecessor to Hirohito. The dictator was short and sickly, with thick glasses. She was kept in a fortress by the sea, which the emperor visited at the end of each week. He would ravage her at the bay window, where with binoculars, he could also keep track of his fleet. Such was his need to control her that the evil little man insisted that she act happy.”

  Sun Moon soaped the Rower’s taut ankles and withered calves.

  “When my grandmother attempted to leap from the window, the Emperor tried to cheer her up with a paddle boat shaped like a swan. Then he bought her a mechanical horse that circled a pole on a metal track. When she tried to throw herself on the ocean’s jagged reef, a shark rose. Endure, the shark said. I must dive each day to the bottom of the sea for my dinner—surely you can find a way to survive. When she placed her neck in the gears of the mechanical horse, a finch landed and implored her to keep living. I must fly around the world to find my little seeds—certainly you can last another day. In her room, as she waited for the arrival of the Emperor, she stared at the wall. Gazing at the mortar binding the wall’s stones, she thought, I can hold fast a little longer. The Dear Leader turned her story into a screenplay for me, so I know what my grandmother felt. I have tasted her words and stood waiting by her side for the Japanese dictator’s inevitable arrival.”

  Sun Moon motioned for the Rower to stand, and she washed the girl’s entire body, like a giant child, skin glistening above the gray-skeined water in which she stood. “And the choices my own mother had to make are things about which I can’t even speak. If I am alone in this world, stripped of my siblings, it is because of the decisions she had to make.”

  There were freckles along the Girl Rower’s arms and down her back. Sun Moon had never seen freckles before. Even just a month before, she would have viewed them as flaws marring otherwise even skin. But now the freckles suggested there were other kinds of beauty in the world than simply striving to be made from Pyongyang porcelain. “Perhaps adversity has skipped my generation,” Sun Moon told her. “Maybe it’s true that I don’t know real suffering, that I haven’t stuck my head in mechanical gears or rowed around the world in the dark. Maybe I am untouched by loneliness and sorrow.”

  They were silent as Sun Moon helped the Rower step from the tub, and they didn’t speak as she toweled the American’s body. The choson-ot, utterly golden, was exquisite. Sun Moon pinched the fabric here and there until the dress fell perfectly. Finally, Sun Moon began weaving the Rower’s hair into a single braid. “I do know that my turn at suffering will come,” she said. “Everyone’s does. Mine might be just around the corner. I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you’re given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?”

  Here, Sun Moon realized she had gripped the Girl Rower’s wrists, and her questions had become demands, leveled into the Rower’s wide eyes. “How does a society without a fatherly leader work?” Sun Moon implored. “How can a citizen know what is best without a benevolent hand to shepherd her? Isn’t that endurance, learning how to navigate such a realm alone—isn’t that survival?”

  The Girl Rower took her hands back and gestured toward some unknown distance. Sun Moon had a feeling this woman was asking about the end of the story, of what became of the Emperor’s comfort woman, his private kisaeng. “She waited until she was older, my grandmother,” Sun Moon said. “She waited until she was back in her village and all her children had been grown and married away, and that’s when she unsheathed her long-hidden knife and took her honor back.”

  Whatever was going through the Girl Rower’s mind, the strength of Sun Moon’s words moved her to act. The Rower, too, began speaking with some force, trying to get Sun Moon to understand something vital. The American went to a small table with a lamp and many notebooks. She brought to Sun Moon one of the inspirational works of Kim Jong Il in a clear attempt to help guide Sun Moon to the only wisdom that had a chance of alleviating the actress’s woes. The Rower shook the book and then began speaking fast, a rapid gibberish that was impossible for Sun Moon to make out.

  Citizens—what was this poor American Rower saying? We didn’t need a translator to understand she was despondent at the prospect of leaving North Korea, which had become a second home to her. No one needed an English dictionary to feel her anguish at the idea of being torn from a paradise where food and shelter and medical care were free. Citizens—feel her sadness at having to return to a land where doctors chase pregnant women with ultrasounds. Sense her outrage at being sent back to a crime-laden land of materialism and exclusion, where huge populations languish in jail, sprawl urine-soaked in the streets, or babble incoherently about God on the sweatpants-polished pews of megachurches. Think of the guilt she must feel after learning how the Americans, her own people, devastated this great nation during the imperialists’ sneak-attack war. But despair no more, Rower Girl, even this small taste of North Korean compassion and generosity might see you through the dark days of your return to Uncle Sam’s savagery.

  I WAS tired when I arrived at Division 42. I hadn’t slept well the night before. My dreams were filled with dark snakes whose hissing sounded like the peasants I’d heard doing intercourse. But why snakes? Why would snakes haunt me so, with their accusing eyes and folded fangs? None of the subjects I put in the autopilot ever visited me in my sleep. In the dream, I had Commander Ga’s cell phone, and on it kept flashing pictures of a smiling wife and happy children. Only it was my wife and my children, the family I’ve always felt I should have had—all I had to do was discover their location and make my way through the snakes to them.

  But what did the dream mean? That’s what I couldn’t fathom. If only a book could be written to help the average citizen penetrate and understand a dream’s mysteries. Officially, the government took no position on what occurred while its citizens were asleep, but isn’t something of the dreamer to be found in his dream? And what of the extended open-eyed dream I afforded our subjects when I hooked them up to the autopilot? I’ve sat for hours watching our subjects in this state—the oceany eye sweep, the babyish talk, the groping, the way they were always reaching for something seen with a faraway focus. And then there are the orgasms, which the doctors insist are actually seizures. Either way, something profound takes place inside these people. In the end, all they can remember is the icy mountain peak and the white flower to be found there. Is a destination worth reaching if you can’t recall the journey? I’d say so. Is a new life worth living if you can’t recollect the old one? All the better.


  At work, I discovered a couple of guys from Propaganda sniffing around our library, looking for a good story, one they could use to inspire the people, they said.

  I wasn’t about to let them near our biographies again.

  “We don’t have any good stories,” I told them.

  Man, they were slick, with their gold-rimmed teeth and Chinese cologne.

  “Any story would do,” one said. “Good or bad, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Yeah,” his sidekick added. “We’ll add the inspiration later.”

  Last year they swiped the biography of a lady missionary who’d snuck in from the South with a satchel full of Bibles. We were told to find out who she’d given Bibles to and if more like her walked amongst us. She was the one person the Pubyok couldn’t crack, except for Commander Ga, I suppose. Even when I hooked her up to the autopilot, she had the strangest smile on her face. She had a thick set of spectacles that magnified her eyes as they pleasantly roamed the room. Even when the autopilot was in its peak cycle, she hummed a Jesus song and beheld the last room she’d ever see as if it were filled with goodness, as if in the eyes of Jesus all places were created equal and with her own eyes she saw that this was so and thought it good.

  When the Propaganda boys got done with her story, though, she was a monstrous capitalist spy bent on kidnapping loyal children of the Party to work as slaves in a Bible factory in Seoul. My parents were addicted to the story. Every night I had to listen to their summary of the loudspeaker’s latest installment.

  “Go write your own tales of North Korean triumph,” I told the boys from Propaganda.

  “But we require real stories,” one told me.

  “Don’t forget,” the other added. “These stories are not yours—they’re the property of the people.”

  “How’d you like me to take your biographies?” I asked them, and they didn’t miss the implied threat.