Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Much of the city’s electricity was being diverted to run industrial rice dryers south of town, so the subway was shut down. And the line for the Kwangbok express bus was three blocks long. I started walking. I didn’t make it two blocks before I heard the bullhorns and knew I was in trouble. The Minister of Mass Mobilization and his cadres were moving through the district, sweeping up any citizen unlucky enough to be out on the street. Just the sight of their yellow insignia sickened me. You couldn’t run—if they even thought you were trying to avoid “volunteering” for harvest duty, it was off to a Redeemability Farm for a month of labor and group criticism. It was, however, the kind of thing a Pubyok badge could get you out of. Without it, I found myself in the back of a dump truck headed to the countryside to harvest rice for sixteen hours.

We drove northeast by moonlight, toward the silhouetted Myohyang Range, a dump truck filled with city folks in professional attire, the driver flashing on his headlamps when he thought he saw something in the road, but there was nothing in the road, no people, no cars, nothing but empty highways lined with tank traps and large Chinese excavators—their orange arms frozen in extension—abandoned by the canals for want of parts.

In the dark, we found a peasant village somewhere along the Chongchon River. We city folk, about a hundred of us, climbed down to sleep on the open ground. I had a smock to keep me warm and my briefcase for a pillow. The stars above seemed placed for my pleasure, and it was a welcome change from sleeping under dirt and goats. For five years, I’d used a badge to escape harvest details, so I’d forgotten the sounds of crickets and frogs in the summer, the pungent mist that rises off the rice water. I heard children somewhere playing a game in the dark, and I heard the sounds of a man and a woman engaged in what must have been intercourse. What followed was my best night of sleep in years.

There was no breakfast, and my hands blistered before the sun was fully up. For hours I did nothing but dig open irrigation dams and backfill running canals. Why we drained one field and flooded another, I had no idea, but light dawned hard on the peasants of Chagang Province. They all wore cheap, ill-fitting vinalon clothes, they had nothing but black sandals, and their bodies were rail thin with cracked, dark skin and teeth translucent to their black cores. Every woman with a hint of beauty had been siphoned to the capital. It turned out I showed too little promise as a rice harvester and was instead sent to empty latrine pots, raking the contents in between layers of rice hull. Then I dug ruts through the village that I was told would be of use when the rains came. An old woman, too old to work, watched me dig. She smoked her own kind of cigarette, rolled in corn husks, and told me many stories, but because she lacked teeth, I could not understand them.

In the afternoon, a city woman was struck by a grand snake, long as a man. They gave her wound a poultice. I tried to quiet her screams by stroking her hair, but that snakebite must have done something to her—she started hitting me and pushing me away. The peasants by then had caught the twisting snake, black as the befecaled water that had concealed it. Some wanted to take its gall bladder, others wished to milk its venom for liquor. They appealed to the old woman, who motioned for them to free it. I watched the snake swim away through a paddy field cleared of rice. The shallow water was both dark and flashing with sunset. The snake took its own course, away from all of us, and I had a feeling there was another black snake out across the water, waiting for this broad swimmer to make its way home to her.

It was midnight when I made it home. Though the key turned in the lock, the door wouldn’t open. It was somehow barricaded from within. I pounded on the door. “Mother,” I called. “Father, it’s me, your son. There’s something wrong with the door. You must open it for me.” I pleaded for a while, then put my shoulder to the wood, leaning into it some, but not too hard. Breaking down a door would cause much discussion in the building. Finally, I buttoned my smock and lay down in the hall. I tried to think of the sounds of the crickets and the children running in the dark, but when I closed my eyes I could imagine only cold cement. I thought of the peasants with their ropy bodies and harsh manner of speaking, of how, except for starvation, they didn’t have a care in the world.

In the dark, I heard a sound— bing! It was the red cell phone.

I found the phone, its green light flashing. On the tiny screen was a new picture: a Korean boy and a Korean girl stood half-stunned, half-smiling against a sunny blue sky. They wore black caps with ears that made them look like mice.

Come morning, the door was standing open. Inside, my mother was cooking porridge while my father sat at the table. “Who’s there?” my father asked. “Is someone there?”

I could see that one of the chairs had a shiny spot on its back where the doorknob had rubbed.

“It’s me, Father, your son.”

“Thank goodness you’re back,” my father said. “We were worried about you.”

My mother said nothing.

On the table were the files I’d pulled on my parents. I’d been studying them all week. They looked like they’d been rifled.

“I tried to get in last night but the door was blocked,” I said. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“I didn’t hear anything,” Father said. He spoke to the air. “My wife, did you hear anything?”

“No,” she said from the stove. “I heard nothing, nothing at all.”

I straightened the files. “I suppose you two have gone deaf, now, as well.”

My mother shuffled to the table with two bowls of porridge, her feet sliding in baby steps lest she stumble in her darkness.

I asked, “But why was the door blocked? You aren’t afraid of me, are you?”

“Afraid of you?” my mother asked.

“Why would we be afraid of you?” asked my father.

My mother said, “The loudspeaker said the American Navy was conducting aggressive military exercises off the coast.”

“You can’t take any chances,” my father said. “With the Americans, you must take measures.”

They blew on their food and took quiet spoonfuls.

“How is it,” I asked my mother, “that you cook so well without your sight?”

“I can feel the heat that comes off the pan,” she said. “And as the food cooks, the smell changes.”

“What about the knife?”

“Using the knife is easy,” she said. “I guide it with my knuckles. Stirring food in the pan is the hardest. I always spill.”

In my mother’s file was a photo of her when she was young. She was a beauty, perhaps the reason she was brought to the capital from the countryside, but what got her sentenced to a factory, rather than assigned as a singer or a hostess, was not in her record. I ruffled the folders, so they could be heard.

“There were some papers on the table,” my father said, his voice nervous.

“They fell to the floor,” my mother said. “But we picked them up.”

“It was an accident,” my father added.

“Accidents happen,” I told them.

“Those papers,” my mother said. “Were they work related?”

“Yes,” Father said. “Were they part of a case you’re working on?”

“Just research,” I said.

“They must be important files if you brought them home,” my father said. “Is anyone in trouble? Perhaps someone we know?”

“What’s going on here?” I asked. “Is it about Mrs. Kwok? Are you still mad at me for that? I didn’t want to turn her in. She was the one stealing coal from the furnace. In winter, we were all colder because of her selfishness.”