The Orphan Master's Son
He is Jun Do (certainly the names' similarity to John Doe is not a coincidence). He is raised in an orphanage, but is not an orphan, as his father in the master there. But everyone takes him for an orphan, despite his correcting them. He doesn't know who his mother was, though, and is told she was an opera singer.
The first half or so of the book takes on Jun Do's peripatetic life. At first he is hired out to a crew that kidnaps people from Japan. Apparently there is a rash of this--the "Dear Leader" (Kim Jong-il, who is a prominent character in the book) wants some type of person, and a goon squad goes out to get them. Later, Jun Do will be on a fishing boat, monitoring U.S. communications. He becomes obsessed with the progress of a pair of American women who are rowing around the world, especially the one who rows at night.
The fishing crew are all married (a must, as wives back home prevent them from defecting, as they know their wives will be punished) and have tattoos of their spouses' faces on their chests. Jun Do is not married, but they get him a tattoo of North Korea's most famous actress, Sun Moon, who is in reality married to a fierce military man, Commander Ga.
The second half of the book finds Jun Do now taking the place of Commander Ga. Through flashbacks told from the point of view of an interrogator, we learn that Jun Do killed Commander Ga in prison, and is now assuming his identity, married to Sun Moon. At first she resents the idea of this lowly boy taking her husband's place, but then they plot together to get out of the country.
The book is a magical read, and certainly the first glimpse I've had into the North Korean way of life. It's almost like a parallel world, a dystopia right out of 1984, where the people are told things via broadcasts in their own home (we all know how it was claimed that Kim Jong-Il had several holes-in-one during his first round of golf). Johnson has fun exploring the difference between the culture of totalatarianism, where people get food via ration books and widows are given "replacement" husbands by the state, and the free market world of America.
Much of this comes when Jun Do tags along on a diplomatic mission to Texas: "When the dogs returned, the Senator gave them treats from his pocket, and Jun Do understood that in communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes."
There are a lot of harrowing scenes, too, though, especially in the interrogation center. The unnamed interrogator believes in new, kinder ways, but the old style guys believe in torture. The lobotomy is described in simple terms: "Careful not to puncture anything, you'd run the nail in along the top of the eyeball, maneuvering it until you felt the bone at the back of the socket. Then with your palm, you gave the head of the nail a good thump. After punching through the orbital, the nail moved freely through the brain. Then it was simple: insert fully, shimmy to the left, shimmy to the right, repeated with other eye."
The book is also drippingly romantic. The notion of tattooing one's wife's image on the chest, above the heart, is endearing (if not painful). "Yes, an object could hold a person, that you could talk photograph, that you could kiss a ring, that by breathing into a harmonica, you can give voice to someone far away. But photographs can be lost. In your sleep, a ring can be slipped from your finger by the thief in the barracks...No, you had to keep the people you loved safer than that. They had to become as fixed to you as a tattoo, which no one could take away."
It speaks to the brutality of the North Korean system that Jun Do will be wrong about that, that even a tattoo can be taken away.
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