Johnson. A. (2012). The orphan master’s son. New York: Random House.

The Orphan Master’s Son is divided into two parts. Part one describes the life of Pak Jun Do, a child of a singer who disappeared, and an orphanage master of Long Tomorrow in North Korea. Growing up in the orphanage, Jun Do was familiar with hunger and famine. He taught himself to survive in harsh conditions and starvation. At the age of fourteen, Jun Do joined the army to be a tunnel soldier in which he learned to combat in darkness, a skill that later helped him in his military career. He performed many jobs for the army: kidnapping, language translator, and signal spying. While he was working as a signal spy on the fishing boat, his life began to take a different course.

Part two, which was told by an investigator in Division 42, is about how Jun Do assumed a new identity. Jun Do became Commander Ga, a Tae Kwon Do golden belt winner, a successful commander with a wife and two children. Jun Do fell in love with his ‘replacement’ wife, Sun Moon. Jun Do planned an escape to save Sun Moon and her children at the cost of losing his life.

Though some people claimed the book to be “ridiculously funny” or “comedic,” it was a sad and heavy reading for me. It took me a while to finish this book. I picked it up, read few pages, and could not continue to read it. It was not because it was hard to read. It was because Johnson wrote about topics that were very personal to me: poverty and communism. These areas are like hives breaking out on my skin- I have an urge to scratch them yet I know best not to touch upon them.

Throughout the book, it seems that Adam Johnson is written about me and my experiences. Like Johnson’s Jun Do, I grew up in a country that was divided into North and South, and communism slowly seeped into people’s minds. My father fought in the South Army as a special force officer. When the South lost to the North in the Civil War, he was sent to a ‘re-education camp’ like the one Jun Do went in. While he was in prison, the communist officers came for us. They gathered us together and towed my wailing mother and her eight children in a covered truck. After a day of traveling, they dropped us in a jungle with a bag of rice and a tent.  My life from this point forward was a struggle with hunger and coldness like that of Jun Do’s when he was in the orphanage.  As Johnson described the coldness and hunger in North Korea and the orphanage, he brought back the memory of me searching for food; how my mother sent me to the empty harvested fields looking for left over rice grains; how we lined up at the neighbor’s house waiting for the left over; how nine of us lay so close together to keep warm in cold nights.

Johnson has a brilliant way of capturing people living under the communist government. Where I grew up, communism was very big on propaganda. Days and nights; in schools or on the streets, the speakers were always there to remind us how great our nation and Communism were. The propaganda chapters bring back memories when I was in Vietnam. At 5 A.M. the voice blared through the speaker, loudly and clearly, praising Uncle Ho as a great leader, a patriotic song of how great Communism was played; a reminder of how we should thank the work of Uncle Ho and Communism that saved us from the misery of Capitalism. The same thing happened again at 12 P.M.,  5 P.M., and at 8 P.M. Private family conversations over dinner were seldom. At first, we were not allowed to talk to each other except praising Uncle Ho and Communism. I remembered when my dad returned from the ‘re-education’ camp, a communist officer stayed with us for a month to make sure there was no rebellious talk.  He carried with him a gun and I often saw him taking it out and looking at it then at us, as if to tell us he was ready to shoot if any us show any signs of unpatriotic.

At the end, I did not understand why Jun Do had to hold himself back during the escape. The reason Johnson provided was because it was the surest way for Sun Moon and her children to have a safe escape, but with all the logic, I was hoping the Americans took him with them and they all live happily ever after in Texas.

The Orphan Master’s Son is a good read. It brings out sad yet comical hidden truth about Communism, the people who struggle within system, and the lives in communist countries that are misinterpreted and misunderstood by developed countries. They are truthful and heartbreaking. I wholeheartedly recommend you to finish the book!