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Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son: An Incredible Adventure in North Korea

By Juliet Simon Be the first to comment

In late 2011, people around the world watched the funeral of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il. The closed nation of labor camps, torture, and starvation showed its people “crying tears of blood” for a man who led them into ruin. But in the mix of fear and facade there still beats the human heart of desire and longing for survival, a world captured in Adam Johnson's beautiful, disturbing new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son.

Johnson’s writing is superb and cinematic. The reader feels thrust into a dark world that rapidly shifts with the fast-moving plot set in the threatening climate of North Korea. The protagonist, Jun Do, begins his story as a motherless boy living with a father who runs a work camp for orphans. Later, he is trained by the government to navigate a series of underground tunnels before carrying out his stealth attacks. Jun Do transforms yet again to a professional kidnapper, and then, in another turn in life, becomes a spy on a fishing boat, monitoring US Navy radio communications. A key moment occurs when his fellow sailors, in keeping with tradition, tattoo Jun Do’s “wife” on his chest; single and naïve about love, our hero lies about his “wife’s” identity, claiming that she is Sun Moon, a gorgeous, revered actress who practically belongs to the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, himself.

After a chilling event on the boat involving defection, shark bites, and torture, Jun Do is a hero, and is sent on a diplomatic mission to Texas to try to wrangle back a cryptic "something" that was supposedly stolen from the North Koreans. The mission fails and back home he is thrown into a labor camp to rot. In an act of extreme retaliation, however, he kills Commander Ga, the second most powerful man in the government, steals his identity, and escapes. It happens that Jun Do, as Commander Ga, gets to be "the replacement husband" to Sun Moon, who reluctantly plays along and tentatively falls in love with him. Together they craft a near-impossible plan to flee to America. Standing in their way is the nameless government interrogator, a torturer of those against the state, who is hunting down the imposter Commander Ga.

The individual dramas and escapades are stunningly composed, but Johnson also combines farce with poignancy, for instance, when showing how government propaganda has brainwashed its citizens. In talking to a captive American woman, Sun Moon ponders, “I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you … is it true you are 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 plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew … if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement … how does a society without a fatherly leader work?” This is heartbreaking dialogue, even more so because it seems a realistic estimate of the wonderings of a citizen from such an isolated society.

The Orphan Master’s Son is an epic adventure, love story, and nightmarish glimpse of the perverse power of the North Korean regime. With new leadership on the horizon, it’s a timely work that will remain with you, as that is the haunting genius of Adam Johnson.