The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam
Johnson, 2012
Won
the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2013
The
Orphan Master’s Son took
me over a year to get around to reading, mainly because the premise expressed
on the dust jacket seemed so strange and foreign: “The
Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters,
dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious
dictatorship, North Korea.” North Korea
has been a mystery to many of us due to how closed off from the rest of the
world it is. And I have heard very
little about the lives people lead in the country other than how the people
often go without sufficient food while the government spends large sums on the
military and defenses. Maybe I wasn’t
sure I wanted to learn more about all of this, so I put off reading Johnson’s
Pulitzer-winning novel. And to be
honest, I have not enjoyed or felt rewarded for having read many of the recent
winners of the prize for fiction. However,
I admit that I got caught up in this novel and I am sorry I put off reading it
for a year. I have not written a blog
post on any of the more recent Pulitzer winners because of my disappointments with
the works but The Orphan Master’s Son
was, for me, a rewarding read and a book I want to talk about in this
blog. Please bear in mind that I am only
giving my reactions and opinions. Your
take on The Orphan Master’s Son may
be different from mine and I would value hearing your views.
The
Orphan Master’s Son
is the story of Pak Jun Do who was the son of the orphan master at the Long
Tomorrows orphanage in North Korea. Jun
Do’s mother was stolen away by the North Korean government to Pyongyang to be a
singer. That’s all he knows of her. However, the Orphan Master sees his lost
wife’s face in Jun Do and, therefore, takes out his loss and hurt by being
cruel to his son. It is Jun Do’s job to
give a name to each orphan boy, usually taken from the list of honored martyrs
of North Korea. Though he is not an
orphan himself, Jun Do is taken for one his whole life because he is named
after a national hero and he grew up in an orphanage. Orphans are at the lowest level of society and
most of them end up in the army. At age
14 during a severe famine, Jun Do and the other orphans at Long Tomorrows are
trucked to an army base where they are trained to be tunnel fighters. The North Korean army digs tunnels under the
demilitarized zone into South Korea. The
tunnel fighters are trained to sneak into the South and kidnap people and bring
them back to North Korea. Jun Do moves
on from tunnel fighter to be a kidnapper in the Navy. His job is to go by fishing boat to the
shores of Japan, sneak into the country in a small raft, grab an unsuspecting
Japanese citizen, and bring the victim back to North Korea. One of the kidnapped persons was a famous
Japanese opera singer whom a North Korean Minister wanted for his own. Jun Do was particularly good at carrying out
these raids because of his knowledge of taekwondo and his ability to fight in
the dark. After a number of successful
kidnappings, Jun Do is rewarded with schooling to learn English and is then
assigned to a fishing boat where he has the job of monitoring English radio
transmissions and reporting them to the North Korean government.
Kim Jong Il
Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
1994-2011
The story told in The Orphan Master’s Son is strange and hard to believe but it’s also
compelling to read. The events in the
life of Jun Do strike me as rather implausible but the context of these events,
occurring as they do in North Korea, was interesting and informative. Not
knowing much about North Korea, I became fascinated by the story Johnson tells
in this novel. In preparing to write The Orphan Master’s Son, Johnson
travelled to North Korea in 2007 and read numerous testimonies of defectors
from the country. I believe that Johnson
gives a reasonably accurate description of the bizarre dictatorship of the Dear
Leader, Kim Jong Il, over the nation of 23 million North Koreans. This nation is believed by many to be one of
the most backward and repressive countries in the world today. Johnson drives home this point. As I read the novel I kept trying to decide
whether Johnson was giving the reader an expose’ of how things are in North
Korea or a parody of North Korea and the Dear Leader. I thought of how the movie and TV series
“MASH” was a humorous parody, often exaggerated, of how it was for a U.S. Army
medical unit in the Korean War. Yet,
MASH had a ring of truth that made the episodes entertaining, poignant and
educational at the same time. My opinion
is that expose’ and parody both apply to The
Orphan Master’s Son. I see parody in
how truth is handled in Kim Jong Il’s regime.
While the citizens are taught over loudspeakers in their homes and
places of work that North Korea is the greatest, most democratic nation on
earth where there is no hunger, the citizens are also warned over the
loudspeaker to not start snaring song birds and gathering acorns until the
proper seasons for these activities. A
central point in The Orphan Master’s Son is
that the people are kept in the dark about how life is outside of North
Korea. For example, a central female
character in the story, Sun Moon, asks a captured American woman about the evil
imperialistic country she comes from: “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?....What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew,
what is taught at your child-rearing collectives?....How does a society without
a fatherly leader work?...How can a
citizen know what is best without a benevolent hand to shepherd her?” Keeping the people so ignorant about the
outside world and what North Korea is lacking compared to other countries is an
effective way to maintain power and control.
Ultimately, I think The Orphan Master’s Son is a story about love. Jun Do didn’t have the love of a mother or
father, for that matter. People in North
Korea were taught to not seek and cultivate familial love but rather to feel
the love of the Dear Leader and the State.
Under the surface, however, Jun Do longs for love. Though he has never had a wife or even a
girlfriend, he has the face of North Korea’s major female movie star, Sun Moon,
tattooed on his chest while he is working on a fishing boat. He has to do this so he will appear to be a
fisherman since they all have their wives’ faces on their chests and Jun Do
doesn’t want to be taken for a spy if their boat is captured by the U. S. Navy. In a hard-to-believe plot twist, Jun Do is
sent to Texas on a mission to recover a piece of Japanese radiation-detecting
equipment that the U. S. has taken away from North Korea. This is where the novel starts getting even
more unbelievable rather than being a serious look at life in North Korea. The mission fails and Jun Do gets thrown into
a prison mine after returning to his homeland.
He manages to survive the terrible conditions and harsh treatment and
eventually escapes. Jun Do ends up being
the replacement husband of Sun Moon and finally finds love. The movie Casablanca and the actions of Rick
serve as a model for Jun Do in how to make the ultimate sacrifice for his loved
one and, in the process, play a good trick on the Dear Leader. What an inventive, unique story- much better than
a MASH episode.
I have tried to not give away too much of The Orphan Master’s Son but I hope that my thoughts might create an
interest in reading Johnson’s award-winning novel. I learned a number of things about North
Korea and Kim Jong Il but I was also entertained and touched by the story of The Orphan Master’s Son. As to the accuracy of the descriptions
Johnson gives of the Dear Leader and conditions in North Korea, I have become
more convinced of this since reading a February 17, 2014 piece by John Heilprin
of the Associated Press which reports that a United Nations panel has sent a
formal warning to North Korea’s current leader, Kim Jong Un, son of Kim Jong Il, that he may be
held to answer for continuing crimes against civilians of that nation. These crimes include mass starvation,
executions, torture and rape. The U.N.
investigation also found that North Korea is guilty of lifelong indoctrination
of its citizens, political prison camps, and state-run abductions of North
Koreans, Japanese and other nationals. I’m
impressed that Johnson describes all of the above U.N. findings in The Orphan Master’s Son. What first struck me as hard to believe is
now documented by an U.N. investigation of North Korea. Thanks to Adam Johnson for bringing to us
this look at life under the Dear Leader.
