The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

Where do I start? Stunning, harrowing read. Visceral and emotionally draining. A must read for anyone who is interested in learning something new about the most insulated and isolated state in the world. My heart aches at the thought of millions who still live in that country.

Before I start, I would like to tell you my North Korean encounter story.

I know a Korean-American man who visited North Korea as an American citizen in 1990 (before the great famine of 1995). As an aspiring writer, I wanted to talk to him about the experience. He said Pyongyang had the cleanest, emptiest streets he had ever seen. He said none of the restaurants was open for business. Whenever he asked about a particular restaurant, his minders (two men) told him that it was closed on that specific day of the week. His children asked for souvenirs, any souvenirs, but the man came back with nothing. He said there was simply nothing to buy.

He came from a family of six brothers and three of his brothers still lived in North Korea, so it was his dearest wish to see them all. His eldest and second eldest brothers had died, and he was the third brother. When he went to North Korea, he was able to his fourth and sixth brother, but couldn’t see his fifth brother. When he went to visit his brothers’ homes, he could smell the fresh wallpaper paste and all the furniture was new. Everyone associated with his brothers’ families had days off from work, and they came to see him. 

One day, one of his brother’s bosses came to visit, and he brought something the North Koreans hadn’t eaten for a while, a chicken. This Korean-American man said that people were going after the chicken before it was cooked, and they asked why he wasn’t eating the chicken. When this Korean-American man told them that he could have chicken anytime, and he wanted them to have it, they all thought he was just repeating the American propaganda stories. A few believed him, and told him in secret, that it was a living hell. But private moments were very limited. His two minders slept in the same room with him, and they wouldn’t leave him alone with anyone. The Korean-American man said the lack of privacy was quite irritating.

The North Koreans drove the Korean-American man in a Mercedes, and when Korean-American man begged to see his fifth brother who was interned in a gulag system by the northern border, one of his minders told him that he and his family would be sent to the same gulag if he tried to do anything like that (he told the Korean-American man this when the other minder wasn’t present). The North Korean minders told the Korean-American man to spend all the American dollars he took with him, and told him that for $500, a family of five could buy all the white rice that the family needed for a year.

The children of his fourth and sixth brothers were not allowed to attend high school or college because they were from a tainted family whose members chose to escape the communist regime during the Korean War. The fifth brother was considered a traitor to the state, and maybe he couldn’t see his brother because his brother had died already. Who knows… The sixth brother, as if to make up for his family’s lack of communist credentials, was an ardent communist who sent letter after letter to the Korean-American man, begging for money yet bad-mouthing everything America supposedly represented. But he never once told his brother to come back and live with them in North Korea.

Now, back to the book…. There are so many shocking episodes, but what’s most startling was the randomness with which the acts of violence were inflicted upon people. People just disappeared and no one said anything. The random disappearance was the norm. That was the scariest part. There was no set of rules that the North Koreans could follow to assure their safety. It was all about the story that an unfortunate group of people would have to tell, and they hung their hopes on keeping their story consistent. Whether it was the truth of not, it didn’t matter.

In the beginning, part 1 and part 2 of the book don’t seem to go together, especially part 2. It was confusing to figure out how characters all fit together. Parts of it were jarring, especially with a lot of point-of-view changes, but in the end, I have to concede that it’s brilliant. That jarring experience is what the main character experiences. There are many viscerally shocking scenes (but I have to admit, what I read in this book is mild compared to some true accounts I read in books written by North Korean defectors), but what I found even more unbearable was that even family members couldn’t be trusted to keep each other’s secrets and thereby keep one another safe.

In a world such as that, I wonder why people even have children. I wrote somewhere (maybe in the blog for the book The Road) that in a truly hopeless world, I didn’t think people would have children. If I had to live in North Korea, I wouldn’t have children, but then I wouldn’t know any better, either, I suppose. Also, I wondered what the suicide rate is for the country.

When my husband and I had our first child, our American friends asked if we’d name him after my husband and add junior. My parents were horrified by such thoughts because for Koreans, each name should be unique. There’s much thought, science (astrology in some cases), and aspirations all put in a name. You’d never jinx or burden a child with someone else’s already lived life associated with that name. So, I found it really interesting that the main character started off his life, as far as he could remember in the orphanage, with someone else’s name. He never had his own identity, and it was his duty to become whoever his country needed him to be.

I found the escape phase of the book to be something hard to believe, but because it’s hard to believe, I think it might actually be based on the truth. I intentionally stayed away from talking about the book more specifically because I want the reader to experience everything fresh. 

 

I would recommend this book to everyone. It might be a hard read, but it’s something that we should all read, at least once, sort of like Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang (however, this book, I wouldn’t recommend to everyone. The pictures are enough to induce nightmares). Good thing this book didn’t have pictures.

The important question is – what can we do to make the lives of everyday North Koreans a little better tomorrow? 

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

That’s the saddest part of this book.