Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son

Jun Do said, “Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything.”

That night Jun Do stood in the dark stern of the ship, looking down into the turbulence of its wake. Rumina , he kept thinking. He didn’t listen for her voice or let himself visualize her. He only wondered how she’d spend this last day if she knew he was coming.

It was late morning when they entered Bandai-jima Port—the customs houses displaying their international flags. Large shipping vessels, painted humanitarian blue, were being loaded with rice at their moorings. Jun Do and Gil had forged documents, and in polo shirts, jeans, and sneakers they descended the gangway into downtown Niigata. It was a Sunday.

Making their way to the auditorium, Jun Do saw a passenger jet crossing the sky, a big plume behind it. He gawked, neck craned—amazing. So amazing he decided to feign normalcy at everything, like the colored lights controlling the traffic or the way buses kneeled, oxenlike, to let old people board. Of course the parking meters could talk, and the doors of businesses opened as they passed. Of course there was no water barrel in the bathroom, no ladle.

The matinee was a medley of works the opera troupe would stage over the coming season, so all the singers took turns offering brief arias. Gil seemed to know the songs, humming along with them. Rumina—small, broad-shouldered—mounted the stage in a dress the color of graphite. Her eyes were dark under sharp bangs. Jun Do could tell she’d known sadness, yet she couldn’t know that her greatest trials lay ahead, that this evening, when darkness fell, her life would become an opera, that Jun Do was the dark figure at the end of the first act who removes the heroine to a land of lament.

She sang in Italian and then German and then Japanese. When finally she sang in Korean, it came clear why Pyongyang had chosen her. The song was beautiful, her voice light now, singing of two lovers on a lake, and the song was not about the Dear Leader or defeating the imperialists or the pride of a North Korean factory. It was about a girl and a boy in a boat. The girl had a white choson-ot , the boy a soulful stare.

Rumina sang in Korean, and her dress was graphite, and she might as well have sung of a spider that spins white thread to capture her listeners. Jun Do and Gil wandered the streets of Niigata held by that thread, pretending they weren’t about to abduct her from the nearby artists’ village. A line kept ringing in Jun Do’s mind about how in the middle of the water the lovers decide to row no further.

They walked the city in a trance, waiting for dark. Advertisements especially had an effect on Jun Do. There were no ads in North Korea, and here they were on buses and posters, across video screens. Immediate and imploring—couples clasping one another, a sad child—he asked Gil what each one said, but the answers pertained to car insurance and telephone rates. Through a window, they watched Korean women cut the toenails of Japanese women. For fun, they operated a vending machine and received a bag of orange food neither would taste.

Gil paused before a store that sold equipment for undersea exploration. In the window was a large bag made to stow dive gear. It was black and nylon, and the salesperson showed them how it would hold everything needed for an underwater adventure for two. They bought it.

They asked a man pushing a cart if they could borrow it, and he told them at the supermarket they could get their own. Inside the store, it was almost impossible to tell what most of the boxes and packages contained. The important stuff, like radish bushels and buckets of chestnuts, were nowhere to be seen. Gil purchased a roll of heavy tape and, from a section of toys for children, a little watercolor set in a tin. Gil at least had someone to buy a souvenir for.

Darkness fell, storefronts lit suddenly with red-and-blue neon, and the willows were eerily illuminated from below. Car headlights flashed in his eyes. Jun Do felt exposed, singled out. Where was the curfew? Why didn’t the Japanese respect the dark like normal people?

They stood outside a bar, time yet to kill. Inside, people were laughing and talking.

Gil pulled out their yen. “No sense taking any back,” he said.

Inside, he ordered whiskeys. Two women were at the bar as well, and Gil bought their drinks. They smiled and returned to their conversation. “Did you see their teeth?” Gil asked. “So white and perfect, like children’s teeth.” When Jun Do didn’t agree, Gil said, “Relax, yeah? Loosen up.”

“Easy for you,” Jun Do said. “You don’t have to overpower someone tonight. Then get her across town. And if we don’t find Officer So on that beach—”

“Like that would be the worst thing,” Gil said. “You don’t see anyone around here plotting to escape to North Korea. You don’t see them coming to pluck people off our beaches.”

“That kind of talk doesn’t help.”

“Come, drink up,” Gil said. “I’ll get the singer into the bag tonight. You’re not the only guy capable of beating a woman, you know. How hard can it be?”

“I’ll handle the singer,” Jun Do said. “You just keep it together.”

“I can stuff a singer in a bag, okay?” Gil said. “I can push a shopping cart. You just drink up, you’re probably never going to see Japan again.”

Gil tried to speak to the Japanese women, but they smiled and ignored him. Then he bought a drink for the bartender. She came over and talked with him while she poured it. She was thin shouldered, but her shirt was tight and her hair was absolutely black. They drank together, and he said something to make her laugh. When she went to fill an order, Gil turned to Jun Do. “If you slept with one of these girls,” Gil said, “you’d know it was because she wanted to, not like some military comfort girl trying to get nine stamps a day in her quota book or a factory gal getting married off by her housing council. Back home pretty girls never even raise their eyes to you. You can’t even have a cup of tea without her father arranging a marriage.”

Pretty girls? Jun Do thought. “The world thinks I’m an orphan, that’s my curse,” Jun Do told him. “But how did a Pyongyang boy like you end up doing such shitty jobs?”

Gil ordered more drinks, even though Jun Do had barely touched his. “Going to that orphanage really messed with your head,” Gil said. “Just because I don’t blow my nose in my hand anymore doesn’t mean I’m not a country boy, from Myohsun. You should move on, too. In Japan, you can be anyone you want to be.”

They heard a motorcycle pull up, and outside the window, they saw a man back it in line with a couple of other bikes. When he took the key from the ignition, he hid it under the lip of the gas tank. Gil and Jun Do glanced at one another.

Gil sipped his whiskey, swishing it around then tipping his head to delicately gargle.

“You don’t drink like a country boy.”

“You don’t drink like an orphan.”

“I’m not an orphan.”

“Well, that’s good,” Gil said. “Because all the orphans in my land-mine unit knew how to do was take—your cigarettes, your socks, your shoju . Don’t you hate it when someone takes your shoju ? In my unit, they gobbled up everything around them, like a dog digests its pups, and for thanks, they left you the puny nuggets of their shit.”

Jun Do gave the smile that puts people at ease in the moment before you strike them.

Gil went on. “But you’re a decent guy. You’re loyal like the guy in the martyr story. You don’t need to tell yourself that your father was this and your mother was that. You can be anyone you want. Reinvent yourself for a night. Forget about that drunk and the nail hole in the wall.”