The Orphan Master's Son_ A Novel - Adam Johnson [206]
“How can a person lose a tattoo?” my father asked.
“Unfortunately, it’s easier than you’d think,” I told them. “It got me thinking, though, and I realized I wasn’t composing for posterity or the Dear Leader or for the good of the citizenry. No, the people who needed to hear my story were the people I loved, the people right in front of me who’d started to think of me as a stranger, who were scared of me because they no longer knew the real me.”
“But your friend, he killed the people he loved, right?”
“It’s unfortunate, I know,” I said. “There’s no forgiving him for it, he hasn’t even asked. But let me get started with my biography. I was born in Pyongyang,” I began, “to parents who were factory workers. My mother and father were older, but they were good parents. They survived every worker purge and avoided denunciation and reeducation.”
“But we already know these things,” my father said.
“Shh,” I told him. “You can’t talk back to a book. You don’t get to rewrite a biography as you’re reading it. Now, back to my story.” As they finished the peaches, I relayed to them how normal my childhood was, how I played the accordion and recorder at school, and while in the choir, I sang high alto in performances of Our Quotas Lift Us Higher. I memorized all the speeches of Kim Il Sung and got the highest marks in Juche Theory. Then I began with the things they didn’t know. “One day a man from the Party came to our school,” I said. “He loyalty-tested all the boys, one at a time, in the maintenance shed. The test itself only lasted a couple of minutes, but it was quite difficult. I suppose that’s the point of a test. I’m happy to say I passed the test, all of us did, but none of us ever spoke of it.”
It felt very liberating to finally speak of this, a topic I could never commit to paper. I knew suddenly that I would share everything with them, that we’d be closer than ever—I’d tell them of the humiliations I suffered in mandatory military service, of my one sexual encounter with a woman, of the cruel hazing I’d received as an intern of the Pubyok.
“I don’t mean to dwell on the subject of this loyalty test, but it changed how I saw things. Behind a chest of medals might be a hero or a man with an eager index finger. I became a suspicious boy who knew there was always something more beneath the surface, if you were willing to probe. It perhaps sent me down my career path, a trajectory that has confirmed that there is no such thing as the right-minded, self-sacrificing citizen the government tells us we all are. I’m not complaining, mind you, merely explaining. I didn’t have it half as rough as some. I didn’t grow up in an orphanage like my friend Commander Ga.”
“Commander Ga?” my father asked. “Is that your new friend?”
I nodded.
“Answer me,” my father said. “Is Commander Ga your new friend?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But you can’t trust Commander Ga,” my mother said. “He’s a coward and a criminal.”
“Yes,” my father added. “He’s an imposter.”
“You don’t know Commander Ga,” I told them. “Have you been reading my files?”
“We don’t need to read any files,” my father said. “We have it on the highest authority. Commander Ga’s an enemy of the state.”
“Not to mention his weaselly friend Comrade Buc,” my mother added.
“Don’t even say that name,” my father cautioned.
“How do you know all this?” I asked. “Tell me about this authority.”
They both pointed toward the loudspeaker.
“Every day they tell some of his story,” my mother said. “Of him and Sun Moon.”
“Yes,” my father said. “Yesterday was episode five. In it, Commander Ga drives to the Opera House with Sun Moon, but it’s not really Commander Ga, you see—”
“Stop it,” I said. “That’s impossible. I’ve made very little progress on his biography. It doesn’t even have an ending.”
“Listen for yourself,” my mother said. “The loudspeaker doesn’t lie. The next installment is this afternoon.”
I dragged a chair to the kitchen, where