North
Korea is an enigma (to me at least).
Only a few months ago the young North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was
saber rattling nuclear missiles, threatening not only South Korea, but American
bases in the Pacific as well. Bizarrely,
at about the same time, basketball celebrity Dennis Rodman visited the country
and the new leader (apparently Kim Jong-un likes basketball). Rodman
thinks he played peacemaker. How weird
to see the heavily tattooed Rodman sitting side by side with the young chubby
cheeked dictator.
Did
I really want to know more about the circus-like-train-wreck of North Korea? However, the accolades for Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son were overwhelming,
calling to me. So, I’ve read it and can understand why it deservedly won the Pulitzer
Prize for Literature last year.
This
is a compelling novel, such a good story, and so well written. But can life in North Korea really be as
Johnson writes? While no one can say
whether his depiction is accurate, it is fiction, and it succeeds as an
allegory of universal themes.
At
times episodic, with shifts in time and voice, mixing the 3rd person narrative
of Jun Du AKA Commander Ga, and the 1st person narrative of an interrogator who
is dedicated to extracting the “truth” from his interrogees by writing their
biographies (vs. the brute torture inflicted by the “Pubyok”). Interspersed are
propaganda broadcasts which surreally move the story further along. The entire narrative ultimately revolves
around the caprice of “The Dear Leader,” Kim Jong II, (Kim Jong-il, the father
of the present leader) who is the ultimate Orphan Master of an entire
nation.
One
can only describe the action as an extended nightmare, following the narrative
down a rabbit hole into a totalitarian state whose underpinning is brainwashing;
its people expecting no more than a life that would seem like Dante’s Inferno
to any westerner. The book makes normalcy of brutality and propaganda,
portraying a society where insanity is sanity.
In fact, I was constantly thinking of my college psychology professor,
Gustave Gilbert, who wrote The Nuremberg
Diary, had interviewed all the major Nazi figures who were put on trial
there, and came to the conclusion that as they were raised in a culture where
deference to authority took precedence over all, their actions would not be
considered “insane” in such a society. I
also couldn’t help but think of another WWII allusion, a work of fiction
though, Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird,
chronicling the horror witnessed by a young boy, who was considered a Jewish
stray, during the War.
And
similarly, this is a coming-of-age story of Jun Du (or, as some have aptly
noted, a “John Doe”) who, although the son of a man who ran the “Long
Tomorrows” orphanage, is raised as an orphan himself, as his beautiful mother,
an opera singer, had been shipped off to Pyongyang for the amusement of the New
Class, as is so often the fate of beautiful women in that State. From helping to run the orphanage (his father
was frequently drunk), he “graduates” to “tunneler” – working in the dark in
tunnels under the DMZ to kidnap South Koreans and then Japanese by boat. He further graduates to study English and
becomes a radio surveillance 3rd mate on a North Korean fishing
ship, reporting English conversations for reasons unknown. One of those conversations is of two American
women rowing across the ocean, one of which figures later in the novel.
When Jun Do had
filled out his daily requisition of military sounds, he roamed the
spectrum. The lepers sent out
broadcasts, as did the blind, and the families of inmates imprisoned in Manila
who broadcast news into prisons – all day the families would line up to speak
of report cards, baby teeth, and new job prospects. There was Dr. Rendezvous, a Brit who
broadcast his erotic “dreams” every day, along with the coordinates of where
his sailboat would be anchored next.
There was a station in Okinawa that broadcast portraits of families that
US servicemen refused to claim. Once a
day, the Chinese broadcast prisoner confessions, and it didn’t matter that the
confessions were forced, false, and in a language he didn’t understand – Jun Do
could barely make it through them. And
then came that girl who rowed in the dark.
Each night she paused to relay her coordinates, how her body was
performing and the atmospheric conditions.
Often she noted things – the outlines of birds migrating at night, a
whale shark seining for krill off her bow.
She had, she said, a growing ability to dream while she rowed.
What was it
about English speakers that allowed them to talk into transmitters as if the
sky were a diary? If Koreans spoke this
way, maybe they’d make more sense to Jun Do.
Maybe he’d understand why some people accepted their fates while others
didn’t He might know why people
sometimes scoured all the orphanages looking for one particular child when any
child would do, when there were perfectly good children everywhere. He’d know why all the fisherman on the Junma
had their wives’ portraits tattooed on their chests, while he was a man who
wore headphones in the dark of a fish hold on a boat that was twenty-seven days
at sea a month.
Not that he
envied those who rowed in the daylight.
The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked through
during the day. At night, they were
things you looked into. You
looked into stars, you looked into dark rollers, and the
surprising platinum flash of their caps.
No one ever started at the tip of a cigarette in the daylight hours, and
with the sun in the sky, who would ever post a “watch”? At night on the Junma, there was acuity,
quietude, pause. There was a look in the
crew members’ eyes that was both faraway and inward. Presumably there was another English linguist
out there on a similar fishing boat, pointlessly listening to broadcasts from
sunrise to sunset. It was certainly
another lowly transcriber such as himself.
Our
hero finally metamorphosizes into Commander Ga, a hero of the State (and the
reader is more than eager to suspend disbelief of this change) as this page
turning novel becomes a thriller of the first order. He is united with Commander Ga’s wife, Sun
Moon who is the State’s movie actress, a favorite of “The Dear Leader.” From there, all of the main characters in the
novel converge, even Sun Moon and the American rower, the propaganda speakers announcing: Citizens! Observe the hospitality our Dear Leader shows
for all peoples of the world, even a subject of the despotic United
States. Does the Dear Leader not
dispatch our nations’ best woman to give solace and support to the wayward
American? And does Sun Moon not find the
Girl Rower housed in a beautiful room, fresh and white and brightly lit, with a
pretty little window affording a view of a lovely North Korean meadow and the
dappled horses that frolic there? This
is not dingy China or soiled little South Korea, so do not picture some sort of
a prison cell with lamp-blacked walls and rust-colored puddles on the
floor. Instead, notice the large white
tub fitted with golden lion’s feet and filled with the steaming restorative
water of the Taedong.
Contrast
that Halcyon scene with the reality of our hero’s imprisonment: In Prison 33, little by little, you
relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might
be. Next went your past, and suddenly it
was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once
used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes
had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took
on. Before you relinquished yourself –
Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs – you let go of all the
others, each person you’d once known.
They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they
were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary.
It
is a love story as well, and it is the cry for individualism in a totalitarian
state. The nameless interrogator’s final
dreamlike thoughts express it best: I was on my own voyage. Soon I would be in a rural village, green and
peaceful, where people swung their scythes in silence. There would be a widow there, and we would
waste no time on courtship. I would
approach her and tell her I was her new husband. We would enter the bed from opposite sides at
first. For a while, she would have
rules. But eventually, our genitals would intercourse in a way that was correct
and satisfying. At night, after I had
made my emission, we would lie there, listening to the sounds of our children
running in the dark, catching summer frogs.
My wife would have the use of both her eyes, so she would know when I
blew out the candle. In this village, I
would have a name, and people would call me by it. When the candle went out, she would speak to
me, telling me to sleep very, very deeply…I listened for her voice, calling a
name that would soon be mine.
Adam
Johnson has written an epic novel, one that required research and a colossal
imagination. Sign me up for his next
work!
