Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son

Gil stared at all the town houses around them. They looked traditional, with dark beams and ceramic roofs, but you could tell they were brand new.

“I want to open all these doors,” he said. “Sit in their chairs, listen to their music.”

Jun Do stared at him.

“You know,” Gil said. “Just to see.”

The tunnels always ended with a ladder leading up to a rabbit hole. Jun Do’s men would vie to be the ones to slip out and wander South Korea for a while. They’d come back with stories of machines that handed out money and people who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never looked. He knew the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he wanted no part of it—he was scared that if he saw it with his own eyes, his entire life would mean nothing. Stealing turnips from an old man who’d gone blind from hunger? That would have been for nothing. Sending another boy instead of himself to clean vats at the paint factory? For nothing.

Jun Do threw away his half-eaten plum. “I’ve had better,” he said.

On the pier, they walked planking stained from years of bait fishing. Ahead, at the end, they could see a face, lit from the blue glow of a mobile phone.

“Just get him over the rail,” Jun Do said.

Gil took a breath. “Over the rail,” he repeated.

There were empty bottles on the pier, cigarette butts. Jun Do was walking calmly forward, and he could feel Gil trying to copy this beside him. From below came the throaty bubble of an outboard idling. The figure ahead stopped speaking on the phone.

“Dare?” a voice called to them. “Dare nano?”

“Don’t answer,” Jun Do whispered.

“It’s a woman’s voice,” Gil said.

“Don’t answer,” Jun Do said.

The hood of a coat was pulled back to reveal a young woman’s face.

“I’m not made for this,”

Gil said. “Stick to the plan.”

Their footsteps seemed impossibly loud. It struck Jun Do that one day men had come for his mother like this, that he was now one of those men.

Then they were upon her. She was small under the coat. She opened her mouth, as if to scream, and Jun Do saw she had fine metal work all along her teeth. They gripped her arms and muscled her up on the rail.

“Zenzen oyogenai’n desu,” she said, and though Jun Do could speak no Japanese, he knew it was a raw, imploring confession, like “I’m a virgin.”

They threw her over the rail. She fell away silent, not a word or even the snatching of a breath. Jun Do saw something flash in her eyes, though—it wasn’t fear or the senselessness of it. He could tell she was thinking of her parents and how they’d never know what became of her.

From below came a splash and the gunning of an outboard.

Jun Do couldn’t shake that look in her eyes.

On the pier was her phone. He picked it up and put it to his ear. Gil tried to say something, but Jun Do silenced him. “Mayumi?” a woman’s voice asked. “Mayumi?” Jun Do pushed some buttons to make it stop. When he leaned over the rail, the boat was rising and falling in the swells.

“Where is she?” Jun Do asked.

Officer So was staring into the water. “She went down,” he said.

“What do you mean she went down?”

He lifted his hands. “She hit and then she was gone.”

Jun Do turned to Gil. “What did she say?”

Gil said, “She said, I can’t swim. ”

“ ‘I can’t swim’?” Jun Do asked. “She said she couldn’t swim and you didn’t stop me?”

“Throwing her over, that was the plan. You said stick to it.”

Jun Do looked into the black water again, deep here at the end of the pier. She was down there, that big coat like a sail in the current, her body rolling along the sandy floor.

The phone rang. It glowed blue and vibrated in Jun Do’s hand. He and Gil stared at it. Gil took the phone and listened, eyes wide. Jun Do could tell, even from here, that it was a woman’s voice, a mother’s. “Throw it away,” Jun Do told him. “Just toss it.”

Gil’s eyes roamed as he listened. His hand was trembling. He nodded his head several times. When he said, “Hai,” Jun Do grabbed it. He jabbed his finger at the buttons. There, on its small screen, appeared a picture of a baby. He threw it into the sea.

Jun Do went to the rail. “How could you not keep count,” he yelled down to Officer So. “How could you not keep count?”

That was the end of their practice. It was time to get the opera lady. Officer So was to cross the Sea of Japan on a fishing vessel, while Jun Do and Gil took the overnight ferry from Chongjin to Niigata. At midnight, with the singer in hand, they would meet Officer So on the beach. Simplicity, Officer So said, was the key to the plan.

Jun Do and Gil took the afternoon train north to Chongjin. At the station, families were sleeping under cargo platforms, waiting for darkness so they could make the journey to Sinuiju, which was just a swim across the Tumen River from China.

They made for the Port of Chongjin on foot, passing the Reunification Smelter, its great cranes rusted in place, the copper lines to its furnace long since pilfered for scrap. Apartment blocks stood empty, their ration outlet windows butcher-papered. There was no laundry hanging to dry, no onion smoke in the air. All the trees had been cut during the famine, and now, years later, the saplings were uniform in size, trunks ankle-thick, their clean stalks popping up in the oddest places—in rain barrels and storm drains, one tree bursting from an outhouse where a human skeleton had shit its indigestible seed.

Long Tomorrows, when they came to it, looked no bigger than the infirmary.

Jun Do shouldn’t have pointed it out because Gil insisted they go in.

It was filled only with shadows. Everything had been stripped for fuel—even the doorframes had been burned. The roster of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution, painted on the wall, was the only thing left.

Gil didn’t believe that Jun Do had named all the orphans.

“You really memorized all the Martyrs?” he asked. “What about number eleven?”

“That’s Ha Shin,” Jun Do said. “When he was captured, he cut out his own tongue so the Japanese could get no information from him. There was a boy here who wouldn’t speak—I gave him that name.”

Gil ran his finger down the list.

“Here you are,” he said. “Martyr number seventy-six, Pak Jun Do. What’s that guy’s story?”

Jun Do touched the blackness on the floor where the stove had once been. “Even though he killed many Japanese soldiers,” he said, “the revolutionaries in Pak Jun Do’s unit didn’t trust him because he was descended from an impure blood line. To prove his loyalty, he hanged himself.”

Gil stared at him. “You gave yourself this name? Why?”

“He passed the ultimate loyalty test.”

The Orphan Master’s room, it turned out, was no bigger than a pallet. And of the portrait of the tormenting woman, Jun Do could find only a nail hole.

“Is this where you slept?” Gil asked. “In the Orphan Master’s room?”

Jun Do showed him the nail hole. “Here’s where the portrait of my mother hung.”

Gil inspected it. “There was a nail here, all right,” he said. “Tell me, if you lived with your father, how come you have an orphan’s name?”

“He couldn’t give me his name,” Jun Do said, “or everyone would see the shame of how he was forced to raise his son. And he couldn’t bear to give me another man’s name, even a Martyr’s. I had to do it.”

Gil’s expression was blank. “What about your mother?” he asked. “What was her name?”

They heard the horn of the Mangyongbong-92 ferry in the distance.