253. The Orphan Master’s Son
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by: Aileen Schwab
Author: Adam Johnson
Genre: Fiction, Historical Fiction
443 pages, published January 10, 2012
Reading Format: e-Book
Summary
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Orphan Master’s Son is an epic novel set in North Korea. The book follows the life of Pak Jun Do, whose mother, a beautiful singer, was “stolen” to Pyongyang to entertain the corrupt elites. Pak is left to languish in Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans that is run by his influential father who does not acknowledge him. Considering himself “a humble citizen of the greatest nation in the world,” Pak becomes a professional kidnapper who must navigate the shifting rules, arbitrary violence, and baffling demands of his Korean overlords in order to stay alive. His service to North Korea takes him to the United States where his contact with a woman in the CIA changes the course of his life. Surviving horrific torture by the pitiless state machine, Pak pretends to be a rival to Kim Jong Il in an attempt to save the woman he loves, Sun Moon, a legendary actress “so pure, she didn’t know what starving people looked like.”
Quotes
“Where we are from… [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change. …But in America, people’s stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters.”
“But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can’t live with what they’ve done.”
“Today, tomorrow,” she said. “A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.”
“A name isn’t a person,’ Ga said. ‘Don’t ever remember someone by their name. To keep someone alive, you put them inside you, you put their face on your heart. Then, no matter where you are, they’re always with you because they’re a part of you.”
“They’re about a woman whose beauty is like a rare flower. There is a man who has a great love for her, a love he’s been saving up for his entire life, and it doesn’t matter that he must make a great journey to her, and it doesn’t matter if their time together is brief, that afterward he might lose her, for she is the flower of his heart and nothing will keep him from her.”
“In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range”
“When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.”
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
My Take
The Orphan Master’s Son is a depressing, yet intriguing, book. Depressing because author Adam Johnson takes you deep inside the violent, arbitrary and dehumanizing world of North Korea where even young children are fodder for the ruthless, totalitarian machine of the government. In 2018, it is remarkable that a place like North Korea exists. While the all encompassing suffering imposed on the people of North Korea is hard to read about, Johnson interlaces it with a captivating story of one man’s response to crushing dehumanization. He even manages to interject a little romance into his grim tale. Not hard to see why this book earned a Pulitizer Prize.
