Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

For four seasons, Jun Do managed to avoid poisonous snakes, self-criticism sessions, and tetanus, which struck soldiers nearly every week. It would start innocently enough—a barbed-wire puncture, a cut from the rim of a ration tin—but soon came fevers, tremors, and finally, a coiling of the musculature that left the body too twisted and rigid for a casket. Jun Do’s reward for these achievements was a listening post in the East Sea, aboard the fishing vessel Junma . His quarters were down in the Junma ’s aft hold, a steel room big enough for a table, a chair, a typewriter, and a stack of receivers that had been pilfered from downed American planes in the war. The hold was lit only by the green glow of the listening equipment, which was reflected in the sheen of fish water that seeped under the bulkheads and constantly slicked the floor. Even after three months aboard the ship, Jun Do couldn’t stop visualizing what was on the other side of those metal walls: chambers of tightly packed fish sucking their last breath in the refrigerated dark.

They’d been in international waters for several days now, their North Korean flag lowered so as not to invite trouble. First they chased deep-running mackerel and then schools of jittery bonito that surfaced in brief patches of sun. Now they were after sharks. All night the Junma had long-lined for them at the edge of the trench, and at daybreak, Jun Do could hear above him the grinding of the winch and the slapping of sharks as they cleared the water and struck the hull.

From sunset to sunrise, Jun Do monitored the usual transmissions: fishing captains mostly, the ferry from Uichi to Vladivostok, even the nightly check-in of two American women rowing around the world—one rowed all night, the other all day, ruining the crew’s theory that they’d made their way to the East Sea for the purpose of having girl sex.

Hidden inside the Junma ’s rigging and booms was a strong array antenna, and above the helm was a directional antenna that could turn 360 degrees. The U.S. and Japan and South Korea all encrypted their military transmissions, which sounded only like squeals and bleats. But how much squeal and where and when seemed really important to Pyongyang. As long as he documented that, he could listen to whatever he liked.

It was clear the crew didn’t like having him aboard. He had an orphan’s name, and all night he clacked away on his typewriter down there in the dark. It was as if having a person aboard whose job it was to perceive and record threats made the crew, young men from the port of Kinjye, sniff the air for danger as well. And then there was the Captain. He had reason to be wary, and each time Jun Do made him change course to track down an unusual signal, it was all he could do to contain his anger at the ill luck of having a listening officer posted to his fishing ship. Only when Jun Do started relating to the crew the updates of the two American girls rowing around the world did they begin to warm to him.

When Jun Do had filled out his daily requisition of military soundings, he roamed the spectrum. The lepers sent out broadcasts, as did the blind, and the families of inmates imprisoned in Manila who broadcast news into the prisons—all day the families would line up to speak of report cards, baby teeth, and new job prospects. There was Dr. Rendezvous, a Brit who broadcast his erotic “dreams” every day, along with the coordinates of where his sailboat would be anchored next. There was a station in Okinawa that broadcast portraits of families that U.S. servicemen refused to claim. Once a day, the Chinese broadcast prisoner confessions, and it didn’t matter that the confessions were forced, false, and in a language he didn’t understand—Jun Do could barely make it through them. And then came that girl who rowed in the dark. Each night she paused to relay her coordinates, how her body was performing, and the atmospheric conditions. Often she noted things—the outlines of birds migrating at night, a whale shark seining for krill off her bow. She had, she said, a growing ability to dream while she rowed.

What was it about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the sky were a diary? If Koreans spoke this way, maybe they’d make more sense to Jun Do. Maybe he’d understand why some people accepted their fates while others didn’t. He might know why people sometimes scoured all the orphanages looking for one particular child when any child would do, when there were perfectly good children everywhere. He’d know why all the fishermen on the Junma had their wives’ portraits tattooed on their chests, while he was a man who wore headphones in the dark of a fish hold on a boat that was twenty-seven days at sea a month.

Not that he envied those who rowed in the daylight. The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked through during the day. At night, they were things you looked into . You looked into the stars, you looked into dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps. No one ever stared at the tip of a cigarette in the daylight hours, and with the sun in the sky, who would ever post a “watch”? At night on the Junma , there was acuity, quietude, pause. There was a look in the crew members’ eyes that was both faraway and inward. Presumably there was another English linguist out there on a similar fishing boat, pointlessly listening to broadcasts from sunrise to sunset. It was certainly another lowly transcriber like himself. He’d heard that the language school where they taught you to speak English was in Pyongyang and was filled with yangbans , kids of the elite who were in the military as a prerequisite to the Party and then a life as a diplomat. Jun Do could just imagine their patriotic names and fancy Chinese clothes as they spent their days in the capital practicing dialogs about ordering coffee and buying overseas medicines.

Above, another shark flopped onto the deck, and Jun Do decided to call it a night. As he was turning off his instruments, he heard the ghost broadcast: once a week or so, an English transmission came through that was powerful and brief, just a couple of minutes before it was gone. Tonight the speakers had American and Russian accents, and as usual, the broadcast was from the middle of a conversation. The two spoke about a trajectory and a docking maneuver and fuel. Last week, there’d been a Japanese speaker with them. Jun Do manned the crank that slowly turned the directional antenna, but no matter where he aimed it, the signal strength was the same, which was impossible. How could a signal come from everywhere?

Just like that, the broadcast seemed to end, but Jun Do grabbed his UHF receiver and a handheld parabolic, and headed above decks. The ship was an old Soviet steel-hulled vessel, made for cold water, and its sharp, tall bow made it plunge deep into waves and leap the troughs.

He held the rail and pointed the dish into the morning haze, sweeping the horizon. He picked up some chatter from container-vessel pilots and toward Japan he got all the craft advisories crosscut with a VHF Christian broadcast. There was blood on the deck, and Jun Do’s military boots left drunk-looking tracks all the way to the stern, where the only transmissions were the squawks and barks of U.S. naval encryption. He did a quick sweep of the sky, dialing in a Taiwan Air pilot who lamented the approach of DPRK airspace. But there was nothing, the signal was gone.

“Anything I should know about?” the Captain asked.

“Steady as she goes,” Jun Do told the Captain.

The Captain nodded toward the directional antenna atop the helm, which was made to look like a loudspeaker. “That one’s a little more subtle,” he said. There was an agreement that Jun Do wouldn’t do anything foolish, like bringing spying equipment on deck. The Captain was older. He’d been a heavy man, but he’d done some time aboard a Russian penal vessel and that had leaned him so that now his skin hung loose. You could tell he’d once been an intense captain, giving clear-eyed commands, even if they were to fish in waters contested by Russia. And you could tell he’d been an intense prisoner, laboring carefully and without complaint under intense scrutiny. And now, it seemed, he was both.