The Orphan Master's Son

The reader is introduced to the Dear Leader through a news broadcast, which says, “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” (3). As a despot with a kindly nickname, the Dear Leader is a man of contradictions. He is immune to the suffering of others, but suffers deeply when his feelings for Sun Moon are not returned. In many ways he is infantile, simple-minded and oblivious. He saves Sun Moon from her dark destination when he overhears her singing on a passing train. He attempts to woo her with his words and with his movie scripts, and does what he can to please her, including having a Japanese opera singer kidnapped to assist Sun Moon with the role of an opera singer. He is petulant and proud, attempting to trick the imposter Commander Ga into a taekwondo match. Although he is presented as ridiculous in an omnipresent gray jumpsuit, he remains convinced of his allure, even insisting that the captured American rower has developed romantic feelings for him during her detention. It is only when Sun Moon leaves on the American plane that he finally realizes the extent of his feelings for her. 

Sun Moon received her name from the Dear Leader, who discovered her singing on a passing train and made her into both his muse and the national actress of North Korea. Sun Moon is known by the fiction attributed to her—that she is a descendent of a revolutionary martyr and that she is so pure she has never known the suffering of others. Still, her life has its share of difficulties—including a violent husband who enacts his rape fantasies on countless men and a tenuous relationship with the Dear Leader, whose fancies could change at any moment—and she seizes the opportunity for a better life for herself and her children in America.

Before meeting the imposter who replaced her husband, the real Commander Ga, Sun Moon had known neither the painful effects of poverty nor the true love of another human being. When her eyes are opened to the suffering of the starving family in the cemetery, she responds by offering food and clothing. As the Dear Leader’s muse, she is called on to portray any number of roles meant to glorify the State. In each movie, it seems, she must endure horrible things, including rape, torture and murder, meaning she is known as much for her martyrdom as anything else. It is only when she watches the movie Casablanca that she realizes her life has been a lie—her acting has not been acting, but merely playing a role for the Dear Leader. With this realization, she wants nothing more than to escape to the United States where she will have a chance to learn more about acting and take on real roles. 

Upon his entrance into the prison mine, Jun Do meets Mongnan, a fellow prisoner and a photographer who is chronicling the deaths of the people in the prison mines. Not much is known about Mongnan, although one of Jun Do’s interrogators later lets slip that she was a university professor. During his time in the prison mine, however, Jun Do knows her only as a savior—as the person who teaches him how to survive; helps to sustain him in conditions of starvation and advises him on what to do when he kills Commander Ga. After his escape, Jun Do (now the new Commander Ga) has no further contact with Mongnan, although he carries her pictures out of the prison mine and eventually sends them to America on the plane with Sun Moon. Mongnan herself may not survive—the conditions are poor enough in the camp to guarantee death for even the wiliest of prisoners—but through her photographs, the identities of others will live on.

While Jun Do comes from an orphanage, Comrade Buc comes from a line of important ancestors within the Party. At their first meeting on the plane to America, Comrade Buc seems to be simple and light-hearted; as a minister of procurement, it is his job to track down hundreds of DVDs and other items that are impossible to obtain within North Korea. His mission seems frivolous when compared to the mission of Doctor Song and Jun Do. However, motivated by his hatred of the real Commander Ga, who once tried to rape him and whose attack left him with a permanent scar, Buc proves to be a close and loyal friend to the imposter Ga.

Buc represents the members of an oppressive regime who toe the line and do what is necessary to please and appease the Dear Leader, while living a hidden life that contradicts the Party’s ideals. When his house is searched, for example, it is revealed that he has a number of Bibles, forbidden items in North Korea. He has also taken care to develop an “exit strategy,” understanding only too well that the tide may turn against him at any moment. The plan for his family’s mass suicide has been carefully orchestrated and rehearsed for years, and when the time actually comes, Comrade Buc is not even there. The photos of his deceased family show a wife and three daughters dressed in white at the dining room table—their passing appearing to be so painless it is assumed that they died of carbon monoxide poisoning. Buc’s death is no less sacrificial than Jun Do’s—although Jun Do ultimately laid down his life for the love of a woman, and Buc sacrificed himself for a friend.

The Pubyok are considered to be the “old guard,” a group of nameless men who interrogate prisoners using force and violence and take pride in their work. As a show of their own strength and fearlessness, they are described as regularly slamming their hands into doorframes, breaking the bones. It’s a bond of brotherhood based not on loyalty or love or shared belief but in the pleasure they derive from hurting others. They often turn on each other; as when they take the intern Q-Kee’s word as evidence of another intern, Jujack’s betrayal. Through the interrogation of the imposter Commander Ga, the Pubyok learn that one of their legendary colleagues, long retired, is not living out the rest of his days at a beach resort, but met a horrific end in the infirmary of a prison mine. Clearly the Pubyok are indoctrinated to believe that their actions have immense importance to the state—even when they are interrogating low-level university employees—and that they will be rewarded as true heroes.

Q-Kee represents a new branch of the Pubyok, a young woman who is every bit as brutal as the members of the old guard. Although she is trained by an interrogator who prefers to learn the prisoners’ stories and develop an understanding of who they really are, Q-Kee herself is drawn to violence. In one scene she holds a cattle prod and electrifies the water in which prisoners are forced to stand; later, she interrogates Buc by herself and is duped into letting him eat the can of poisoned peaches—a mistake she attempts to rectify with a stomach pump. After the interrogation of Jujack, she officially joins the Pubyok—cutting her hair, donning their uniform and breaking her own hand against the doorframe. As a result, she is made into a new national hero, and the Dear Leader writes a movie script for Sun Moon based on Q-Kee’s story. Symbolically, the movie also represents a break from many of Sun Moon’s other roles, where she has played a victim who remains loyal to her country despite harsh treatment at the hands of her enemies. In this film, Sun Moon would be the face of a new North Korean woman—brutal and ruthless.