An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2012: It is only
January, but Adam Johnson’s astonishing novel is destined to cast
a long shadow over the year in books. Jun Do is The Orphan
Master’s Son, a North Korean citizen with a rough past who is
working as a government-sanctioned kipper when we first meet
him. He is hardly a sympathetic character, but sympathy is not
author Johnson’s . In a totalitarian nation of random violence
and bewildering caprice—a poor, gray place that nonetheless
refers to itself as “the most glorious nation on earth”—an
unnatural tension exists between a citizen’s national identity
and his private life. Through Jun Do’s story we realize that
beneath the weight of oppression and lies beats a heart not much
different from our own—one that thirsts for love, acceptance, and
hope—and that realization is at the heart of this shockingly
believable, immersive, and thrilling novel. --Chris Schluep
Adam Johnson on The Orphan Master's Son
---------------------------------------
When I arrived at Pyongyang's Sunan Airport a few years ago, my
head was still spinning from a landing on a runway lined with
cattle, electric fences and the fuselages of other jets whose
landings hadn't gone so well. Even though I'd spent three years
writing and researching The Orphan Master's Son, I was unprepared
for what I was about to encounter in “the most glorious nation in
the world.”
I'd started writing about North Korea because of a fascination
with propaganda and the way it prescribes an official narrative
to an entire people. In Pyongyang, that narrative begins with the
founding of a glorious nation under the herly guidance of Kim
Il Sung, is followed by years of industry and sacrifice among its
citizenry, so that when Kim Jong Il comes to power, all is
strength, happiness and prosperity. It didn't matter that the
story was a complete fiction--every citizen was forced to become
a character whose motivations, desires and fears were dictated by
this script. The labor camps were filled with those who hadn't
played their parts, who'd spoken of deprivation instead of
plenitude and the purest democracy.
When I visited places like Pyongyang, Kaesong City, Panmunjom
and Myohyangsan, I understood that a genuine interaction with a
North Korean citizen was unlikely, since contact with foreigners
was illegal. As I walked the streets, not one person would risk a
glance, a smile, even a pause in their daily routine. In the
Puhung Metro Station, I wondered what happened to personal
desires when they came into conflict with a national story. Was
it possible to retain a personal identity in such conditions, and
under what circumstances would a person reveal his or her true
nature? These mysteries--of subsumed selves, of hidden lives, of
rewritten longings--are the fuel of novels, and I felt a powerful
desire to help reveal what a dynastic dictatorship had forced
these people to conceal.
Of course, I could only speculate on those lives, filling the
voids with research and imagination. Back home, I continued to
read books and seek out personal accounts. Testimonies of gulag
survivors like Kang Chol Hwan proved invaluable. But I found that
most scholarship on the DPRK was dedicated to , political
and economic theory. Fewer were the books that focused directly
on the people who daily endured such circumstances. Rarer were
the narratives that tallied the personal cost of hidden emotions,
abandoned relationships, forgotten identities. These stories I
felt a personal duty to tell. Traveling to North Korea filled me
with a sense that every person there, from the lowliest laborer
to leaders, had to surrender a rich private life in
order to enact one pre-written by the Party. To capture this on
the page, I created characters across all levels of society, from
the orphan soldier to the Party leaders. And since Kim Jong Il
had written the script for all of North Korea, my novel didn't
make sense without writing his role as well.
Featured Photographs
--------------------
Anti-tank devices seen while traveling south from
Pyongyang toward Panmunj
DPRK soldier
Air raid sirens
Revelutionary Martyr's Cemetery on Taesong
- Used Book in Good Condition.