Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

“Our Party comrades fulfill all our needs,” my mother said.

“What about your aunt?” I asked my father. “Don’t you have an aunt in the South?”

My father’s face was blank, expressionless. “We have no ties to that corrupt and capitalist nation,” he said.

“We denounce her,” my mother said.

“Hey, I’m not asking as a state interrogator,” I told them. “I’m your son. This is just family talk.”

They ate in silence. I returned to the phone, moving through its functions, all of which seemed disabled. I dialed a couple of random numbers, but the phone wouldn’t connect to the network, even though I could see the cellular tower from our window. I turned the volume up and down, but the ringer wouldn’t sound. I tried to employ the little camera feature, but it refused to snap a photo. It looked like I would be selling the thing after all. Still, it irked me that I couldn’t think of one person to call. I went through a mental list of all my professors, but my two favorites got sent to labor camps—it really hurt to add my signature to their writ of sedition, but I had a duty, I was already an intern at Division 42 by then.

“Hey, wait, I remember,” I said. “When I was a boy, there was a couple. They’d come over and the four of you would play cards late into the night. Aren’t you curious what happened to them? Wouldn’t you contact them if you could?”

“I don’t believe I’ve heard of these people,” my father said.

“I’m sure of it,” I told him. “I remember them clearly.”

“No,” he said. “You must be mistaken.”

“Father, it’s me. There’s no one else in the room. No one is listening.”

“Stop this dangerous talk,” my mother said. “We met with no one.”

“I’m not saying you met with anyone. The four of you would play cards after the factory closed. You would laugh and drink shoju. ” I reached to take my father’s hand, but the touch surprised him, and he recoiled. “Father, it’s me, your son. Take my hand.”

“Do not question our loyalties,” my father said. “Is this a test?” he asked me. He looked white-eyed around the room. “Are we being tested?” he asked the air.

There is a talk that every father has with his son in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family. I was eight when my father had this talk with me. We were under a tree on Moranbong Hill. He told me that there was a path set out for us. On it we had to do everything the signs commanded and heed all the announcements along the way. Even if we walked this path side by side, he said, we must act alone on the outside, while on the inside, we would be holding hands. On Sundays the factories were closed so the air was clear, and I could imagine this path ahead stretching across the Taedong Valley, a path lined with willows and vaulted by singular white clouds moving as a group. We ate berry-flavored ices and listened to the sounds of old men at their chang-gi boards and slapping cards in a spirited game of go-stop. Soon my thoughts were of toy sailboats, like the ones the yangban kids were playing with at the pond. But my father was still walking me down that path.

My father said to me, “I denounce this boy for having a blue tongue.”

We laughed.

I pointed at my father. “This citizen eats mustard.”

I had recently tried mustard root for the first time, and the look on my face made my parents laugh. Everything mustard was now funny to me.

My father addressed an invisible authority in the air. “This boy has counterrevolutionary thoughts about mustard. He should be sent to a mustard-seed farm to correct his mustardy thinking.”

“This dad eats pickle ice with mustard poop,” I said.

“That was a good one. Now take my hand,” he told me. I put my small hand in his, and then his mouth became sharp with hate. He shouted, “I denounce this citizen as an imperialist puppet who should be remanded to stand trial for crimes against the state.” His face was red, venomous. “I have witnessed him spew capitalist diatribes in an effort to poison our minds with his traitorous filth.”

The old men turned from their game to observe us.

I was terrified, on the verge of crying. My father said, “See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If your mother ever must say something like that to me, in order to protect the two of you, know that inside, she and I are holding hands. And if someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it’s not really you. That’s inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands.”

He reached out and ruffled my hair.

It was the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep. I’d try to sleep, but I’d just lie on my cot puzzling over how Commander Ga had managed to change his life and become someone else. With no record of who he’d been. How do you escape your Party Aptitude Test score or elude twelve years of your teachers’ Rightness of Thinking evaluations? I could sense that Ga’s hidden history was chaptered with friends and adventures, and I was jealous of that. It didn’t matter to me that he had probably killed the woman he loved. How had he found love itself? How had he pulled that off? And had love made him become someone else, or, as I suspected, had love suddenly appeared once he took on a new identity? I suspected that Ga was the same person on the inside but had a whole new exterior. I could respect that. But wouldn’t the real change be, if a person was to go all the way, to get a new inner life?

There wasn’t even a file for this Commander Ga character—I only had Comrade Buc’s. I’d toss and turn for a while, wondering how Ga was so at peace, and then I’d relight my candle and pore over Buc’s file. I could tell my parents were awake, lying perfectly still, breathing evenly, listening to me as I rifled Comrade Buc’s file for any insight into Ga’s identity. I was jealous for the first time of the Pubyok, of their ability to get answers.

And then there came a single clear sound from the phone. Bing , it rang.

I heard the creak of canvas as my parents stiffened in their cots.

The phone on the table began to blink with a bright green light.

I took the phone in my hands and opened it. On its little screen was an image, a photo of a sidewalk, and set in the pavement was a star and in the star were two words in English, “Ingrid” and “Bergman.” It was daylight where this photo was taken.

I turned again to Comrade Buc’s file, looking for any images that might contain such a star. There were all the standard photos—his Party commission, receiving his Kim Il Sung pin at sixteen, his oath of eternal affiliation. I flipped to the photo of his dead family, heads thrown back, contorted on the floor. And yet so pure. The girls in their white dresses. The mother draping an arm over the older girls while holding the hand of the youngest. I felt a pang at the sight of her wedding ring. It must have been a hard time for them, their father newly arrested, and here at some formal family moment without him, they succumbed to “possibly carbon monoxide.” It’s hard to imagine losing a family, to have someone you love just disappear like that. I understood better now why Buc had warned us in the sump to be ready, to have a plan in place. I listened to the silence of my parents in that dark room, and I wondered if I shouldn’t have a plan in place for when I lost one of them, if that’s what Buc meant.

Because Comrade Buc’s family was clustered on the floor, the eye was naturally drawn there. For the first time I noticed that sitting on the table above them was a can of peaches, a small detail in relation to the entire photo. The can’s jagged lid was bent back, and I understood then that the method Commander Ga would use to excuse himself from the rest of his biography, whenever he felt like it, was sitting on his bedside table.