The Orphan Master's Son

The loudspeaker broadcasts the second-to-last installment in the saga of Sun Moon and Commander Ga. After Sun Moon bathes the American rower, the Dear Leader tells her that her movie, Comfort Woman, will be released the next week. They stroll through the film set and the Dear Leader tells her to forget about the script she has been rehearsing. Instead, he has new projects planned. In one, she is captured by a ROK officer, but “begins showing her handsome captor how he is actually the imprisoned one” (383). Another is a biopic about the first female member of the Pubyok. Sun Moon begins to cry and asks if it can be arranged for her mother to visit to see the premiere of Comfort Woman. The Dear Leader promises that her mother will be sitting in the front row. The Dear Leader is relieved that they are back to their former agreement. He understands that she will have “impossibly complicated rules” (386) for him to follow, but says, “I agree to them right now, I accept all your new rules in advance” (386). As they leave the movie set, they pass Comrade Buc. The broadcast reminds listeners not to look at his “traitorous smile” (386). When they part, Sun Moon asks for assurance that nothing bad will happen to the new Ga, and the Dear Leader replies, “no one can make such a promise” (387). 

Commander Ga is waiting for Sun Moon when she returns with the three costumes she is supposed to wear the next day for the Americans. In bed, Sun Moon announces that the time has come for them to be intimate, for her to tell him “the things he doesn’t know” (390). She tells Ga about her father’s plan to defect, which backfired, about the death of her younger sister, about how her grandmother taught her to play songs based on what she lost during the Japanese occupation. She tells Ga how she first met the Dear Leader, when she was on a boxcar heading to a redeemability camp. She was singing to her mother in the next boxcar when the Dear Leader’s train pulled up beside hers and he heard her voice. In America, she says, she will sing the truth about the Dear Leader on central broadcast, so that the whole world will know about him.

She asks to see the new Ga’s tattoo, and he shows her. In the dark, he sings her a few lines of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” the only happy love song he knows. She undresses and slides her body beneath his. Ga asks what happens to the men who fall for her, and she replies that they “fall forever” (396). 

The interrogator roams the streets for days and is unable to recall where he went. When he finally returns to Division 42, he sees Commander Park, his arm in a sling, holding something “pink and wet and raw” (398). Sarge offers him a Pubyok badge, telling him that “there’s no such thing as a team of one” (398). Then he spots the branding machine, and Sarge tells him that it’s for the imposter Ga—he’ll be branded at dawn in the soccer stadium. The interrogator rushes to see Ga and finds that the tattoo has been removed from his chest. Ga tells him that if he ever has the choice of being attacked by a shark or Commander Park with a box cutter, he should choose the shark. The interrogator promises he’ll be back to save Ga. Sarge tells him that there will be no more biographies because “that age is over” (401).

The interrogator goes home and enters the apartment quietly. He finds his parents with his files, running their fingers across the words. In the kitchen, he opens the poisoned can of peaches and begins telling them about his new friend as he slips the peaches into their mouths. While the botulism begins to take hold in their bodies, he tells them his own biography, including the story of a man from the Party who came to his school and “loyalty-tested all the boys, one at a time, in the maintenance shed…. I’m happy to say I passed the test, all of us did, but none of us ever spoke of it” (405).

He tells them about the prisoner he is interrogating, and his father asks if he is talking about Commander Ga, whose story has been broadcast on the loudspeaker. The interrogator says it is impossible that the story is being broadcast, because it doesn’t yet have an ending. He helps his parents into their beds and talks to them until dark, then kisses them goodbye.

At Division 42, the interrogator ministers to Ga’s wounds, then tells him, “I’m getting out of here….. Would you like me to bring you along?” (408). Ga agrees. The interrogator talks to him about “a rural farm collective” (408), starting a new family and serving the “nation in the true spirit of communism—through labor and devotion” (408). As he talks, he prepares them for the journey ahead, putting on a diaper himself and booties for both of them. He straps Ga loosely into the chair. Until the end, Ga maintains that he did not kill Sun Moon, but that she got onto an airplane and flew away. He says, “My story’s ended ten times already, and yet it never stops. The end keeps coming for me, and yet it takes everyone else. Orphans, friends, commanding officers, I outlast them all” (410). His final words, before the interrogator flips the switch on the autopilot are, “My mother was a singer” (411).

The narrator sits in his own chair and adjusts the dial to six and a half, something that will cause him some damage but not render him senseless. As the electricity races through his body, he sees the imposter Ga work an arm free from its restraint to deliver himself a lethal dose.