Adam Johnson on the human face of North Korea

It was on a dark and stormy night that novelist Adam Johnson gave the keynote address of the 2018 Highland Park Literary Festival. The audience in Highland Park’s high school auditorium had gathered to hear Johnson, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, a peek inside a country as different as any could imagine from the toney Dallas suburb. But with media outlets awash in Winter Olympic news from the Korean peninsula and rare uncensored peeks at members of North Korea’s ruling dynasty, listeners were avid for any insights Johnson could provide.

Admittedly, The Orphan Master’s Son, the tale of North Korean everyman Pak Jun Do, is a work of fiction. By Johnson’s own admission, “all we know about North Korea comes from satellite phots and defectors.”

He had been allowed to make a brief, carefully “minded” visit to the country during the course of his research, and had read extensively from those memoirs and in some cases been able to interview defectors, although he cautioned his audience that those represent only a small percentage of the 24 million people estimated to inhabit North Korea.

They were, however, enough to enable him to put a human face on the country.

“I’ll tell you a couple of stories. That’s my favorite part.”

image: pixabay

Despite the heavy supervision of his visit  – “my minder had a degree in minding Americans,” he quipped --  because except for the “minders” assigned to visitors, “it’s illegal for a citizen of the DPKR (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to interact with foreigners,”) he managed to emerge with stories.

Like the one about the hotel he stayed in, where every servant was Chinese instead of Korean. And although the hotel had 49 floors, “since nobody wants to visit North Korea, they only had enough visitors to fill the 6^th and 33^rd floors.”

Or like the tale of the 105-floor building that boasted five revolving restaurants, only to be abandoned before completion.

And the Garden of Martyrs cemetery reserved for the bodies of people “who fought against the Japanese, or in the Korean war, or were just very close to the (ruling) Kim family. The ambition of all the elites is to get an ancestor into the cemetery.”

The problem, Johnson said, “there’s only 141 slots. To get your ancestor in there, you have to dig up somebody else’s.”

And demoting an ancestor from the Garden of Martyrs requires the construction of a new narrative, one which smears the reputation of that formerly revered ancestor – and by implication, all of his or her family.

But won’t people remember the former narrative, about how great the now excavated ancestor had been?

Not if they want to avoid associating themselves with the disgraced family. Koreans, Johnson said, “are some of the most resilient people in the world,” but after more than century of having their culture wiped out – from the Japanese colonization of the peninsula beginning in the 19^th century, through World War II and the Korean war – “no Korean has a relative who’s old enough to remember reading a novel. . . In North Korea there is one life event that no other people share – the realization that everything you know is a lie.”

“I personally think the North Koreans are the funniest people on earth (but) it’s hard-won humor, gallows humor. . . They’re people who just happen to have been born in the world’s largest psychology experiment – a giant Skinner box.”

The box has few escape hatches. One of course, is the route of defection. The other is that sought by the country’s elite families – the chance to travel outside the country, to send their children to foreign schools – “just like you do -- Switzerland is the dream” -- and to shop.

Despite Johnson’s background in journalist, he turned to fiction in The Orphan Master’s Son because he was unable to do the extensive fact-checking necessary for journalism. Many details of North Korean life, although reported in the memoirs of defectors, cannot be independently verified due to the country’s opacity.

“What I can’t make up is the truth of being raised in this environment,” Johnson said. “It’s only when North Koreans are free to write their own books that we’ll know the reality.”

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Johnson’s keynote talk was actually only a small part of the Highland Park Literary Festival. A collaboration of parents and Highland Park High School’s English department, it also provided more than 60 workshops – in photography, journalism, poetry, playwriting, song writing, fiction, nonfiction and more – for students. 

Lest I sigh too much over the abundance showered on HPHS kids, I remembered that the resurgent Dallas Book Festival April 7 in conjunction with the Dallas Festival of Ideas will offer a multitude of resources, including a promise of writing workshops. The Book Festival is still in “save the date” mode, but I’ll update as soon as information is available.