Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

He fetched a chair, stood upon it, discovered a section of molding that was loose. He reached behind it, into the wall, and removed a carton of cigarettes.

“Oh,” the boy said. “I understand now. You were looking for hiding places.”

It was the first time the child had spoken to him.

“That’s right,” he told the boy.

“There’s another one,” the boy said. He pointed toward the portrait of Kim Jong Il.

“I’m sending you on a secret mission,” Ga told them and handed over a pack of cigarettes. “You must get these cigarettes under your mother’s pillow, and she must not wake.”

The girl’s expressions, in contrast to her mother’s, were subtle and easily missed. With a quick lip flare, she suggested this was much beneath her spying abilities, but still she accepted the mission.

When the oversized portrait of the Dear Leader was removed, Commander Ga found an old shelf recessed in the wall. A laptop computer occupied most of it, but on the top shelves, he found a brick of American hundred-dollar bills, vitamin supplements, protein powder, and a vial of testosterone with two syringes.

The onions had sweetened and clarified, turning black at the edges. He added an egg, a pinch of white pepper, celery leaves, and yesterday’s rice. The girl set out the plates and chili paste. The boy served. The mother emerged, half asleep, a lit cigarette in her lips. She came to the table, where the children suppressed knowing smiles.

She took a drag and exhaled. “What?” she asked.

Over breakfast, the girl asked, “Is it true that you went to America?”

Ga nodded. They ate from Chinese plates with silver chopsticks.

The boy said, “I heard you must pay for your food there.”

“That’s true,” Ga said.

“What about an apartment?” the girl asked. “Does that cost money?”

“Or the bus,” the boy asked. “Or the zoo—does it cost to see the zoo?”

Ga stopped them. “Nothing is free there.”

“Not even the movies?” Sun Moon asked, a little offended.

“Did you go to Disneyland?” the girl asked. “I heard that’s the best thing in America.”

The boy said, “I heard American food tastes horrible.”

Ga had three bites left, but he stopped, saving them for the dog.

“The food’s good,” he answered. “But the Americans ruin everything with cheese. They make it out of animal milk. Americans put it on everything—on their eggs at breakfast, on their noodles, they melt it on ground meat. They say Americans smell like butter, but no, it is cheese. With heat, it becomes an orange liquid. For my work with the Dear Leader, I must help Korean chefs re-create cheese. All week, our team has been forced to handle it.”

Sun Moon still had a little food left on her plate, but with the talk of the Dear Leader, she extinguished her cigarette in the rice.

This was a signal that breakfast was over, but still the boy had one last question to ask. “Do dogs really have their own food in America, a kind that comes in cans?”

The idea was shocking to Ga, a cannery dedicated to dogs. “Not that I saw,” he said.

Over the next week, Commander Ga oversaw a team of chefs constructing the menu for the American delegation. Dak-Ho was enlisted to use props from the Central Movie Lot to construct a Texas-style ranch, based on Ga’s drawings of the lodgepole corral, mesquite fences, branding hearth, and barn. A site was chosen east of Pyongyang, where there was more open space and fewer citizens. Comrade Buc acquired everything from patterns for guayabera shirts to cobbler molds for cowboy boots. Procuring a chuck wagon proved Buc’s greatest challenge, but one was located at a Japanese theme park, and a team was sent to get it.

It was determined that a North Korean Weedwacker would not be engineered since tests showed that a communist scythe, with a 1.5-meter razor-sharp blade, was the more effective tool at clearing brush. A fishing pond was constructed and filled with eels from the Taedong River, a most voracious and worthy opponent for the sport of fishing. Teams of volunteer citizens were sent into the Sobaek Mountains to capture a score of rock mamushi, the nation’s most poisonous snake, for target practice.

A group of stage mothers from the Children’s Palace Theater was enlisted to make the gift baskets. While calfskin could not be found for the making of gloves, the most supple replacement—puppy—was chosen. In place of bourbon, a potent snake whiskey from the hills of Hamhung was selected. The Junta in Burma donated five kilos of tiger jerky. Much debate was given to the topic of which cigarettes best bespoke the identity of the North Korean people. In the end, the brand was Prolot.

But it wasn’t all work. Each day, Commander Ga took a long lunch at the Moranbong Theater, where, alone, he watched a different Sun Moon movie. He beheld her fierce resilience in Oppressors Tumble , felt her limitless capacity to suffer in Motherless Fatherland , understood her seductive guile from Glory of Glories , and went home whistling patriotic tunes after Hold the Banner High!

Each morning before work, when the trees were alive with finches and wrens, Commander Ga taught the children the art of fashioning bird snares from delicate loops of thread. With a deadfall stone and a trigger twig, they each set a snare on the balcony rail and baited it with celery seeds.

After he arrived home in the afternoons, Commander Ga taught the children work. Because they’d never tried work before, the boy and the girl found it new and interesting, though Ga had to show them everything, like how to use your foot to drive a shovel into dirt or how you must go to your knees to swing a pick in a tunnel. Still, the girl liked to be out of her school uniform and she wasn’t afraid of tunnel dust. The boy relished hauling buckets of dirt up the ladder and muscling them out back to the balcony, where he slowly poured them down the mountainside.

While Sun Moon sang the children nightly to sleep, he explored the laptop, which mostly consisted of maps he didn’t understand. There was a file of photographs, though, hundreds of them, which were hard to look at. The pictures were not so different than Mongnan’s: images of men regarding the camera with a mixture of trepidation and denial toward what was about to happen to them. And then there were the “after” pictures, in which men—bloodied, crumpled, half-naked—clung to the ground. The images of Comrade Buc were especially hard.

Each night, she slept on her side of the bed, and he slept on his.

Time to get some shut-eye , he’d say to her, and she’d say, Sweet dreams .

Toward the end of the week, a script arrived from the Dear Leader. It was called Ultimate Sacrifices . Sun Moon left it on the table where the messenger had placed it, and all day she approached it and retreated, circling with a fingernail fixed in the space between her teeth.

Finally, she sought the comfort of her house robe and took the script into the bedroom, where with the aid of two packs of cigarettes she read it over and over for an entire day.

In bed that night, he said, Time to get some shut-eye . She said nothing.

Side by side, they stared at the ceiling.

“Does the script trouble you?” he asked. “What is the character the Dear Leader wishes you to play?”

Sun Moon pondered this awhile. “She is a simple woman,” Sun Moon said. “In a simpler time. Her husband has gone off to fight the imperialists in the war. He had been a nice man, well liked, but as manager of the farm collective he was lenient and productivity suffered. During the war, the peasants almost starved. Four years pass, they assume he is dead. It is then that he returns. The husband barely recognizes his wife, while his own appearance is completely different—he has been burned in battle. War has hardened him and he is a cold taskmaster. But the crop yields increase and the harvest is bountiful. The peasants fill with hope.”