First post: The Orphan Master's Son

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel, Adam Johnson

http://www.amazon.com/The-Orphan-Masters-Son-Pulitzer/dp/0812982622

"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."

Fast facts

• 445 pages
• Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (among other notable awards)
• Johnson grew up in Arizona and didn't step foot in North Korea until three years after he started research for Orphan Master
• This is one of my favorite books - ever
• Yes, the book features:
• An ejaculating ox
• Stoning
• Bloodletting
• Kidnapping
• Starvation
• Tattoo removal with a knife
• No, I won't pause to think too long about how I may be voyeuristic/sadistic for loving it
• Have I mentioned, it's also a love story?  Think Casablanca

Bottom line

If you have the stomach for (horrific) adventures, including torture and killing as a matter of course, the pay-off is worth it.  I promise that despite all the gore, the exploits of protagonist Jun Do are fascinating, humorous, sometimes uplifting, and surprisingly beautiful.

No interest in or prior knowledge of North Korea is required, but once you're finished, you'll feel like an expert on what it's like to live under the oppressive egomania of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. The author's white bread name and some terrific (and funny) encounters with Texan diplomats in the book are the only real clues that Johnson isn't from Korea.

All-in-all, I'm still upset that I've finished the book, and though the dark subject matter was difficult to read in long spurts, I had trouble putting it down.  Johnson is ambitious and terrific, and anything else he's written or will write is a must-read for me.

What you can expect - long-winded plot summary

Orphan Master is split into two parts chronicling parallel lives.  In the first part, "The Biography of Jun Do," we meet our hero, the John Doe Everyman of North Korea, an orphan (who swears he's not an orphan,) in the countryside of Chongjin. 

Some chapters are structured as propaganda announcements over the omnipresent loudspeakers installed in every home.  These announcements paint a picture of idyllic life in the country, and give hints of the narrative to come.  The opening announcement features:

• North Korean recipe contests
• Tales of American atrocities
• Reporting on the defection of an Olympic American rower to North Korean shores
• A description of military Commander Ga and his golden belt award
• Praise for the national actress and Ga's wife, the beautiful and talented Sun Moon
• Baseless rumors of Japanese kidnappings involving an opera singer

When we meet Jun Do, he's at an orphanage called Long Tomorrows, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father, the Orphan Master, who is heartbroken because Jun Do's mother, a singer, was kidnapped and taken to the city.  The stigmatized orphans, all named after important "martyrs of the revolution," work in fields and in factories and are forced to memorize Juche speeches on Kim Il-Sung's political theory.

The region is flooded and Jun Do, quickly losing what passes in the book as childhood, becomes familiar with death, as orphans are snatched into the current or fall into paint vats in the factories.  He observes the famine known as the Arduous March, and at age 14, becomes a tunnel soldier.  The skills he learns in the tunnels, primarily the ability to fight in the dark, become influential throughout his misadventures.

As though "zero light combat" were not terrible enough, an individual called Officer So appears to take Jun Do away from the tunnels.  Together with Gil, their translator, they take a boat to the Japanese coast.  Their mission?  Practice kidnappings of random Japanese citizens who have the misfortune to be alone on the beach, in preparation for their big catch: an opera singer named Rumina, with whom a Korean official has developed an obsession.

• Aside: It is hard, at this point in the novel, to decide whether Jun Do is simply an object of pity, for whom acts of evil are a means to survival, or whether he is meant as an anti-hero.  Regardless, he feels remorse for the lives that he ruins, and a western reader can only wonder how they would ever survive in a place like North Korea - would I have made these difficult choices?  Would I have faced culture shock and fear of the unknown and fear of the Dear Leader's reprisal for defecting?

After a stint in language school, our protagonist begins a "listening post" aboard the Junma, a fishing vessel, where he listens to foreign communications over a transmission device and tries to assimilate with the fishermen, each of whom bears an image of a faraway wife tattooed on his chest.  The crew's run-in with an array of Nikes lost at sea, and with an American ship, are memorable and fraught with tension.

Jun Do's language skills and heroism aboard the Junma earn him a spot on a diplomatic mission to Texas: my favorite part of the book, and too good to spoil.  The entertainment of the culture clash with stereotypically brash Texans is much needed, given Jun Do's next stop at a prison camp that can only be described as a concentration camp on steroids.  It is here that we are told that the orphan known as Jun Do disappeared, and the first section of the novel ends abruptly.

In the second part, "The Confessions of Commander Ga," we find that our hero seems to have pulled off an impossible feat, impersonating the legendary martial arts champion military commander, living in the commander's home on a hill with his movie starlet wife and children, and rubbing elbows with the Dear Leader himself. 

Ga's journey is narrated in part by a nameless first-person narrator who works in Division 42, essentially a state-operated torture chamber in the heart of Pyongyang.  Though this narrator is a torturer himself by any definition, he composes biographies of his victims, which makes him believe that he is morally superior to the Pubyok, a group of old-school torturers who care less about their subjects' stories than about breaking their bodies in creative, terrible ways.  The narrator, too, is an object of pity, living on the top story of a high-rise with his elderly parents, who live in abject fear of him, spout propaganda, and (possibly) pretend blindness to avoid being truthful with their own son.

This second part of the novel is extraordinary and fast-paced, and it offers a spirit of hope and a love story that make all the terrors Jun Do experiences somehow less depressing.  Ga's interactions with Sun Moon and her children are poignant, and a testament to finding joy even in a dark place.

All done?  Food for thought

• How much of Johnson's vivid story was realistic?  How much could be tracked to true events in North Korea? 
• Blood-letting - really?
• If you became too sick, medical personnel would drain you of several units of blood till you died
• Labor camps - how common?
• The common knowledge/assumption was that if you defected, your family would be sent to labor camps
• But this was also hero treatment - Jun Do was sent to a camp, the Captain was sent to a camp, Pubyoks were sent to a camp, all begging the question why - simply because the government has no use for you? 
• How much of the population is in these camps? For example, when the first-person narrator stays out past curfew and is picked up by a bus on a work detail - how often does this happen?
• "Retirement" communities - where did grandma go?
• Elderly people were sent to retirement communities on the beach that, as Jun Do discovered, simply didn't exist
• Why doesn't Jun Do defect?
• He seems to be offered countless opportunities -
• At the end of a tunnel, as a soldier, when we know he has the opportunity to get out?
• When he wanders the streets of Japan with Gil, unsupervised?
• "In this whole stupid country, the only thing that made sense to me were the Korean ladies on their knees cleaning the feet of the Japanese."
• When Americans of USS Fortitude board the Junma?
• On the life raft with the Second Mate?
• During his trip to Texas?
• After Prison 33?
• And the kicker - with Sun Moon and the kids at the end of the novel?
• Role of women
• It's treated as common knowledge that women who are too pretty, particularly in the countryside, are kidnapped and forced to become officers' wives or into other forms of slavery.
• What ever happened to the Second Mate's widow?
• Sun Moon as heroine
• Her tenacity has brought her fame, along with a life under the Dear Leader's control
• Yet she's reliant on the Dear Leader for her role in North Korean society and film, as well as on Jun Do for her escape
• Mongnan as a mother figure
• Of far greater help than the Captain as father figure, she gives Jun Do true survival skills in the camp.  Meanwhile, like the Orphan Master, the Captain's instinct is to throw Jun Do under the bus
• The Rower
• Like Jun Do, she has killed, although her role in the death of the other rower is unclear.  And yet, like Jun Do, she becomes someone to root for.
• Is she a symbol for America?  She is responsible for keeping Jun Do full of hope on the Junma, and she becomes the vehicle for Sun Moon's escape
• Role of sex in a repressed society
• The real Commander Ga's homosexuality is a recurring theme
• Sad irony is that he is renowned for "purging the army of homosexuals"
• He has no outlet for self-expression other than cruelty to others, but is this supposed to make him a target for pity?
• The Division 42 narrator describes feeling sexual attraction for one of his victims through basic animal scent. 
• The reader is made to wonder whether the narrator has ever had a sexual experience in this repressive/oppressive society
• But again, like Commander Ga, is the narrator's sexual repression a mechanism by which the reader is manipulated into feeling pity for this torturer?
• Jun Do and Sun Moon only consummate their relationship when they're less than 24 hours away from experiencing freedom - largely, it seems, because no one can let their guard down long enough to trust anyone else