The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [182]
Soon, the three of us were headed west, into the storm. The dark canopy was made of oiled canvas, which kept the rain out, though sprays of muddy water rose through the slats in the bed. The bench seats we sat on had been carved with people’s names. It was probably the work of folks being transported to faraway prison mines like 22 or 14-18, voyages that would give a person lots of time to think. Such was the human urge to be remembered.
Q-Kee ran her fingers over the carvings, tracing one name in particular.
“I knew a Yong Yap-Nam,” she said. “He was in my Evils of Capitalism class.”
“It’s probably a different Yong Yap-Nam,” I reassured her.
She shrugged. “If a citizen goes bad, he goes bad. What else should he expect?”
Jujack wouldn’t look at any of the names. “Why don’t we wait till after the storm?” he kept saying. “What’s the point of going out there now? We probably won’t find anything. There’s probably nothing to find.”
The wind started to rattle the black canopy, its metal ribs groaning. A cascade of water poured from the road, sluicing over the sewage ditches. Q-Kee leaned her head on her shovel handle, staring out the back of the truck at the two channels our tires cut through the water.
Q-Kee asked me, “You don’t think Sun Moon could have gone bad, do you?”
I shook my head. “No way.”
“I want to find Sun Moon as much as anybody,” she said. “But then she’ll be dead. It’s like, until our shovels unearth her, she still seems alive.”
It’s true that when I’d been imagining finding Sun Moon, I’d been picturing the radiant woman on all the movie posters. It was only now that I visualized my shovel raising up pieces of decomposed children, of the shovel’s blade sinking into the abdomen of a corpse.
“When I was a girl, my father took me to see Glory of Glories. I’d been acting out a lot, and my father wanted me to see what happened to women who challenged authority.”
Jujack said, “That the movie where Sun Moon gets her head cut off?”
“It’s about more than that,” Q-Kee said.
“Good special effects, though,” Jujack added. “The way Sun Moon’s head rolls away and everywhere the blood spills, the flowers of martyrdom spring from the ground and blossom. That had me, man, I was there.”
Of course everyone knew the movie. Sun Moon plays a poor girl who confronts the Japanese officer who controls her farming village. The peasants must relinquish their harvest to the Japanese, but some rice goes missing and the officer decrees that all will starve until the culprit is caught. Sun Moon stands up to the officer and tells him it is his own corrupt soldiers who have stolen the rice. For this affront, the officer has her beheaded in the town square.
“Never mind what the movie was really about, or what my father thought it was about,” Q-Kee said. “All around Sun Moon were powerful men, yet she was without fear. I registered that. I saw the strength with which she accepted her fate. I saw how she changed the terms of men into her own. That I am here right now, in Division 42, I owe to her.”
“Oh, when she kneels down to take the sword,” Jujack said, as if he could see the moment before him. “Her back arches, her heavy chest swings forward. Then her perfect lips part and her eyelids slowly, slowly close.”
The movie is filled with famous scenes, as when the old women in the village stay up all night sewing the beautiful choson-ot that Sun Moon will wear to her death. Or how, before dawn, when Sun Moon is gripped by fear and falters in her resolve, a sparrow flies to her—the bird holds kimilsungia blossoms in its beak to remind her that she does not sacrifice alone. The moment I remember, the point of the story at which no citizen could hold back tears, is when, in the morning, her parents bid her a final farewell. They say to her what has always gone unspoken, how she is the thing that gives meaning to their lives, that without her they will be lessened, that their love is of no use if not for her.
I looked to Q-Kee, deep in contemplation, and I wished for