The Orphan Master's Son - Adam Johnson

[GlenBarrington]

Set in North Korea, of all places. I've just started it. Bought it at Amazon

What a miserable place! Apparently beautiful women don't stand much chance there. A beautiful married woman catches the eye of some official and is arrested and her husband is fired from his job. To make ends meet he takes a job running an orphanage. Where people who expect to be arrested or disappear place their children. Their son comes with him and he is raised in the orphanage.

At the orphanage, there is no heat, no electricity, no real food in a town with no heat, no electricity, and no real food. Orphans are despised and are hired out by the system on a day basis to do the most dangerous, menial and humiliating jobs.

Factories come and 'adopt' the children for cheap labor. Groups of Chinese men come and 'adopt' children for reasons no one investigates too closely. No matter who adopts them, the ones who get 'adopted' are never heard from again.

The Orphan Master's son, Jun Do, grows up in this environment, in effect as an orphan, but not really. Because his dad is the Orphan Master, he is sort of the chief of the boys, he gets to decide who eats, who goes hungry, who does the most menial or easiest jobs. He even gets to name the boys as they come into the orphanage.

Because their parents are either enemies of the state or just got noticed by the state, the orphans must change their names upon entry to the orphanage to that of a 'Martyr of the Revolution' in the hopes that a new name will prevent whatever behavior that their parents did to get noticed. Jun Do takes no pleasure in this cruelty, he even likes many of the boys, but that's the way it is, his survival depends on their victimization.

Boy orphans (the girls aren't' mentioned, I don't think they count for very much in N. Korea) who don't starve to death or worked to death, or 'adopted' and manage to make it to maturity have only ONE option at adulthood. Join an orphans battalion in the army. They get the worst, most dangerous assignments. Digging, maintaining, and defending underground tunnels that lead to Seoul, clearing land mines, that sort of thing.

The protagonist joins an orphans battalion because everyone assumes he is an orphan having been raised in the system. He is assigned to a tunnel maintenance group where he become very adept at fighting S Korean Soldiers in the dark.

His fighting skills come to the attention of Officer So who is putting together a group to resume kidnapping Japanese civilians. His job is being 'the muscle'. On his first kidnapping, the victim (though the N. Koreans don't think of them that way) wears glasses. On the beach where they find him, his glasses fly off in the sand and out of curiosity our protagonist looks through them, he is astonished to realize he can see better with the glasses and keeps them. He also notices that the Japanese don't live in large impersonal barracks but seem to live in smaller detached barracks.

Over the course of several kidnappings at random, it becomes obvious to the unit that this is all a rehearsal to kidnap a popular opera singer who some big shot wants for his own personal 'comfort woman'. I've stopped at the point where the young woman is kidnapped but not yet returned to N Korea. It's only about 20% of the way into the book, so I don't think it's a romance or about him and her exactly.

But the writing is very powerful. The daily and hourly indignities and compromises with common human decency seems relentless. This is a book of great power and of great tragedy so profound that the characters trapped inside the story don't even understand the tragedy completely and many don't even see the tragedy at all. What's amazing, is just how free the N. Koreans are of ANY sort of moral judgement. NOTHING is good or bad, unless the state says it is good or bad.

I can't put it down and I can't stop thinking about it. And I pray that this is a work of fiction.

[GlenBarrington]

Gosh! Am I the only one to have read this book? That's weird, cause you guys will read ketchup labels. (You know you have!)

[SteveEisenberg]

Hold the ersatz kimchi. I'm 80 percent through.

P.S. I just picked up, in paper at the public library, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. So I will put off giving a capsule review of the novelization until after reading a non-fiction account.

However, I can't help now recommending the stupendously outstanding The Good Earth, which can be read as a picture of the societal defects that might lead to this sort of totalitarianism.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

And I pray that this is a work of fiction.

This review by a genuine North Korea expert addresses the question.

It's an excellent novel. The characters are so complex that I hesitate to make what could be unfair criticisms coming from someone who knows little of North Korea. But I thought that some of the characters talked more, and even acted more, like Americans than North Koreans.

I'm fanatical in my preference for realism, so it easy for my to be unfair to the book. The Orphan Master's Son isn't meant to be pure realism.

After reading the one current book about North Korea I totally recommend, Escape from Camp 14, I'm going to suggest that the Orphan Master's Son may have some snippets that aren't true to North Korean life, but the reality is just as distressing. As my first link mentions, the novel's claim of prisoners being lobotomised seems an invention. So, there, the real North Korea is better. But the biggest surprise to me, moving from the novel to the non-fiction book, was the extent to which the real North Korea has little social mobility (except, for those arrested, downwards). Born a slave, die a slave.

[GlenBarrington]

Frankly, a difficult read for me. I could only read for a bit and then had to put it down. I needed the rest.

Worth the read though. It refused to take you where you thought it would go. My theory about it being about Jun Do and the Japanese opera singer he kidnaps for the State is WAY off base!

Though we do sort of find out what happened to her. And it ended on an odd tragically happy note with suicide, murder/suicide, murder, cruelty to animals, delusions lost and delusions retained, folk songs, and tattoo removal. All of which combined to make an oddly triumphant ending. I know this paragraph makes it sound humorous, but I assure you this is very much a tragedy.

It would make a great movie that could lose many millions of dollars, but it would be a great movie. (and if you read the book you will find out why that is a most appropriate comment!)

I doubt I'll ever forget it. . .

[SteveEisenberg]

Now I'm reading another outstanding book on North Korea:

Nothing to Envy:
Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

This is much more a page-turner than the title might lead to you to believe. 1984 meets the caste system.

[HansTWN]

Amazon Prime video has an excellent documentary shot by a team let by a Nepalese doctor who went to North Korea to perform eye surgeries. It is amazing how brainwashed these people are. The comments from the patients are most telling "Q:What do you look forward to most when you regain your eyesight? A: That I can look at the portrait of the Great Leader who made our lives so wonderful!".

And you can tell that they are not just blurting out propaganda, they actually believe it.

[Kumabjorn]

I just got it and have a hard time getting any sleep, partly because i can't put it down and if I put it down if it's too disturbing to let me sleep.