The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Let this story be an inspiration when dealing with the weak-minded who share your communal housing blocks and the selfish who use all the soap in your group bathing wells. Know that change is achievable and that happy endings do come, for this story promises to have the happiest ending you will ever hear.

Jun Do understood that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

“Let me tell you about the Dear Leader,” she said. “When he wants you to lose more, he gives you more to lose.”

“When you’re out of sight of shore,” he said, “you could be anybody, from anywhere. It’s like you have no past. Out there, everything is spontaneous, every lick of water that kicks up, every bird that drops in from nowhere. Over the airwaves, people say things you’d never imagine. Here, nothing is spontaneous.”

Jun Do found the courage to gaze down upon them, and it was nothing like looking into the depths of the ocean. A hundred feet of air or sea alike would kill you, but the water would shuttle you, slowly, to a new realm.

It was Jun Do’s curse to be nocturnal in a nation without power at night, but it was his duty, too, like picking up a pair of oars at sunset or letting the loudspeakers fill your head as you sleep. Even the crew thought of her as rowing toward dawn, as if dawn was a metaphor for something transcendent or utopian.

Ga thought about reminding the Dear Leader that they lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them. He considered sharing how there was only one penalty, the ultimate one, for questioning reality, how a citizen could fall into great jeopardy for simply noticing that realities had changed. Even a warden wouldn

“The Dear Leader said I was going to act for the world. You know he gave me this name. In English, Sun means hae and Moon means dal, so I’d be night and day, light and dark, celestial body and its eternal satellite. The Dear Leader said that would make me mysterious to American audiences, that the intense symbolism would speak to them.”

then Jun Do remembered that he had no one that mattered to him, which was why his tattoo would be of an actress he’d never seen, taken from a calendar at the helm of a fishing boat.