Adam Johnson: The Orphan Master's Son

CITIZENS ,gather ’round your loudspeakers, for we bring important updates! In your kitchens, in your offices, on your factory floors—wherever your loudspeaker is located, turn up the volume!

In local news, our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il was seen offering on-the-spot guidance to the engineers deepening the Taedong River channel. While the Dear Leader lectured to the dredge operators, many doves were seen to spontaneously flock above him, hovering to provide our Reverend General some much needed shade on a hot day. Also to report is a request from Pyongyang’s Minister of Public Safety, who asks that while pigeon-snaring season is in full swing, trip wires and snatch loops be placed out of the reach of our youngest comrades. And don’t forget, citizens: the ban on stargazing is still in effect.

Later in the broadcast, we’ll reveal the winning recipe for this month’s cooking contest. Hundreds of recipes were entered, but only one can be declared the best way to prepare—Pumpkin Rind Soup! But first comes grave news from the East Sea, where American aggressors flirt with acts of all-out war after stopping and looting a North Korean fishing vessel. Once again, the Yankees have violated Korean waters to steal the precious contents of a sovereign ship, all the while accusing us of everything from banditry to kidnapping to cruelty to sharks. First off, it is the Americans and their puppets who are the pirates of the sea. Secondly, did an American woman not recently row around the entire world to defect to our great nation, a worker’s paradise where citizens want for nothing? That alone should be proof enough that these persistent accusations of kidnapping are ludicrous.

But cruelty to sharks ? This charge must be addressed. Known as the fisherman’s friend, the shark has an ancient camaraderie with the Korean people. In the year 1592, did sharks not offer fish from their own mouths to help sustain Admiral Yi’s sailors during the siege of Okpo Harbor? Have sharks not developed cancer-preventing powers in order to help their human friends live longer and healthier? Does our own Commander Ga, winner of the Golden Belt, not have a soothing bowl of shark-fin soup before each triumphant taekwondo match? And citizens, did you not see with your own eyes a movie entitled A True Daughter of the Country , right here in Pyongyang’s own Moranbong Theater? Then certainly you remember the scene in which our national actress Sun Moon capsized in Inchon Bay while trying to prevent the American sneak attack. It was a scary moment for all of us as the sharks began to circle her, helpless amid the waves. But did the sharks not recognize Sun Moon’s Korean modesty? Did they not smell the hot blood of her patriotism and lift her upon their fins to carry her safely to shore, where she could join the raging battle to repel the imperialist invaders?

By these deeds alone, citizens, you must know that the rumors swirling around Pyongyang—that Commander Ga and Sun Moon are anything less than utterly in love—are baseless lies! Baseless as the boarding of our innocent fishing vessels by foreign powers, baseless as the outlandish allegations of kidnapping leveled at us by the Japanese. Do the Japanese think we forget it is they who once enslaved our husbands and made comfort women of our wives? Baseless to think that any woman loves her husband more than Sun Moon. Did the citizens not behold how Sun Moon bestowed the Golden Belt upon her new husband, her cheeks flushed with modesty and love? Were you not assembled in Kim Il Sung Square to witness it firsthand?

What are you going to believe, citizens? Rumors and lies, or your very own eyes?

But let us return to the rest of today’s programming, which includes a rebroadcast of Kim Il Sung’s glorious speech of April Fifteenth, Juche 71, and a public-service announcement from the Minister of Procurement Comrade Buc on the topic of prolonging the life of compact fluorescent lightbulbs. But first, citizens, a treat: it is our pleasure to announce that Pyongyang has a new opera singer. The Dear Leader has dubbed her the Lovely Visitor. And here she is, to sing for your patriotic pleasure the arias from Sea of Blood . So return to your industrial lathes and vinalon looms, citizens, and double your output quotas as you listen to this Lovely Visitor sing the story of the greatest nation in the world, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea!

JUN DO’S mother was a singer. That was all Jun Do’s father, the Orphan Master, would say about her. The Orphan Master kept a photograph of a woman in his small room at Long Tomorrows. She was quite lovely—eyes large and sideways looking, lips pursed with an unspoken word. Since beautiful women in the provinces get shipped to Pyongyang, that’s certainly what had happened to his mother. The real proof of this was the Orphan Master himself. At night, he’d drink, and from the barracks, the orphans would hear him weeping and lamenting, striking half-heard bargains with the woman in the photograph. Only Jun Do was allowed to comfort him, to finally take the bottle from his hands.

As the oldest boy at Long Tomorrows, Jun Do had responsibilities—portioning the food, assigning bunks, renaming the new boys from the list of the 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution. Even so, the Orphan Master was serious about showing no favoritism to his son, the only boy at Long Tomorrows who wasn’t an orphan. When the rabbit warren was dirty, it was Jun Do who spent the night locked in it. When boys wet their bunks, it was Jun Do who chipped the frozen piss off the floor. Jun Do didn’t brag to the other boys that he was the son of the Orphan Master, rather than some kid dropped off by parents on their way to a 9-27 camp. If someone wanted to figure it out, it was pretty obvious—Jun Do had been there before all of them, and the reason he’d never been adopted was because his father would never let someone take his only son. And it made sense that after his mother was stolen to Pyongyang, his father had applied for the one position that would allow him to both earn a living and watch over his son.

The surest evidence that the woman in the photo was Jun Do’s mother was the unrelenting way the Orphan Master singled him out for punishment. It could only mean that in Jun Do’s face, the Orphan Master saw the woman in the picture, a daily reminder of the eternal hurt he felt from losing her. Only a father in that kind of pain could take a boy’s shoes in winter. Only a true father, flesh and bone, could burn a son with the smoking end of a coal shovel.

Occasionally, a factory would adopt a group of kids, and in the spring, men with Chinese accents would come to make their picks. Other than that, anyone who could feed the boys and provide a bottle for the Orphan Master could have them for the day. In summer they filled sandbags and in winter they used metal bars to break sheets of ice from the docks. On the machining floors, for bowls of cold chap chai , they would shovel the coils of oily metal that sprayed from the industrial lathes. The railyard fed them best, though, spicy yukejang . One time, shoveling out boxcars, they swept up a powder that looked like salt. It wasn’t until they started sweating that they turned red, their hands and faces, their teeth. The train had been filled with chemicals for the paint factory. For weeks, they were red.