56 pages • 1 hour read
Adam JohnsonThe Orphan Master's Son
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 18-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: The Confessions of Commander Ga
Chapter 18 Summary
The new Ga awakes in Sun Moon’s bed and makes breakfast for the children. He discovers the real commander’s hiding spot and brings Sun Moon her cigarettes. The children talk to him for the first time, asking him questions about America. For the next week, the new Ga is part of a team constructing a Texas-style ranch outside Pyongyang in anticipation of the Americans’ visit. At lunch he goes to the cinema and watches Sun Moon’s movies. When he finds the real commander’s laptop, he goes through his photos, which are before-and-after shots of men he has hurt. He finds it hard to look at the photos of Comrade Buc.
The Dear Leader delivers a new script for Sun Moon, for a movie in which she will play the role of a woman whose kind husband leaves for war. When he returns, he is cruel and not physically recognizable due to his burns. In the script, the woman is trapped in the relationship and does not know if the man is truly her husband. Sun Moon believes the Dear Leader is mocking her, saying, “When he wants you to lose more, he gives you more to lose” (286). The new Ga suggests that they rewrite the script to give it a different ending. Sun Moon proposes that the burden be put on the burned man to prove who he is or go to a camp, but either way the woman will end up alone.
That night a bird is caught in the trap that the new Ga taught the children to set. He shows them how to clean the bird and eats the raw breast meat.
Chapter 19 Summary
In the next installment of the Best North Korean Story, Commander Ga, Sun Moon and the children have a picnic lunch at the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery. Commander Ga asks about Sun Moon’s family, and she tells him that her mother has retired to Wonsan, but she never writes. The announcer explains that this is because Sun Moon’s mother is having too much fun in a city on the beach dedicated solely to the pleasures of its retired persons. Commander Ga shows the children the graves of the martyrs, telling a story for each of them. Sun Moon is aroused by his patriotism and tells the children to play. She leads Commander Ga to the botanical garden greenhouses “that exclusively cultivate kimjonilia and kimilsungia” (291). Inside the Kim Il Sung greenhouse, the plants respond to their ardor by opening their blossoms, spreading their petals and releasing their scent. Then “Sun Moon offered her Juche to him, and he gave her all he had of Songun policy. At length, in depth, their spirited exchange culminated in a mutual exclaim of Party understanding” (292).
The broadcast ends with these ominous words: “Though [Commander Ga] is remarkable at satisfying the political needs of a woman, we will look closely at the ways in which he has defiled all seven tenets of North Korean Good Citizenship” (292).
Chapter 20 Summary
The new Ga, Sun Moon and her children visit the Revolutionary Martyr’s Cemetery to lay a wreath at her great uncle’s grave. They take the dog, Brando, with them as they wander past the names of martyrs on marble pedestals, Ga finds his namesake. He thinks, “I’m not you. I’m my own man” (294). Ga shows the children how to make a meal from what is around them—fingerlings from the stream, ssukgat, seogi, yarrow, ginger, and shiso leaves. Sun Moon tells him that she misses her mother, who she has not heard from since she left for Wonsan, and Ga, being kind, tells her not to believe the rumors.
During their picnic, the new Ga remembers the moment when the “fundamental lies that formed [his] identity faltered and fell” (296). It was at a stoning during his time in Prison 33. As he approached the victim to throw his stone, Ga realized it was the Captain. He knelt down next to him and the Captain explained, “I told you I’d protect all of you. I saved my crew again” (297). Mongnan comforts him, saying, “Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much” (298).
Brando hears a noise and leads them on a chase through the cemetery, where they find a family of four suffering from hunger and malnutrition. It is Sun Moon and the children’s first experience with real poverty. They give the family their food, and each contributes something—shoes, a belt, earrings. That night, Ga tells Sun Moon he must confess the truth—that there is no retirement center in Wonsan. She tells him, “You are a thief who came into my life and stole everything that mattered to me” (301).
In the morning, Ga talks to Comrade Buc in the back yard. Ga tells him about the laptop with photos of men, including Comrade Buc. Buc tells him the story of the commander’s attack, and how he seemed to lose interest before raping him and only took his picture.
The new Ga tells Buc the story of how he killed the real commander Ga. They were down in a mine, and Commander Ga grabbed a man to attack him. The prisoner formerly known as Jun Do stopped him, and the real Commander Ga said, “I knew you were the only real man here” (304). He proceeded to use his taekwondo skills against Jun Do, but Jun Do kicked the lightbulb, knowing that his experience fighting in the tunnels would give him the advantage and proceeds to beat the commander.
That night the new Ga and Sun Moon watch Casablanca together. At first Sun Moon criticizes the movie, but then she begins to cry, saying that her whole life has been a lie. “I have to get out of this land and make it to a place where real acting exists,” she tells him. Ga tells her he will make a plan.
Chapter 21 Summary
The interrogator lies awake at night, considering the ways he is like the imposter Ga—both of them nameless and essentially unknown. At work in the morning, he finds that a member of the team is missing. The rest of his team searches the houses of Comrade Buc and Sun Moon. The interrogator finds a garden that has been picked clean, as well as the real Ga’s stash of martial arts magazines and a handkerchief he used when masturbating. Q-Kee, going through the bedroom, finds that Sun Moon and the imposter Ga shared a rinse cup and calls this love. The interrogator inhales the smell of secretion on the sheets and realizes Sun Mon and the imposter Ga had sex. The search of Buc’s house reveals five miniature Bibles.
During his next interrogation of the imposter Ga, the narrator asks how Ga was able to summon the nerve to go to Sun Moon’s house. “You were a replacement husband,” he accuses. “Nobody truly loves a replacement husband” (313).
The interrogator takes his parents’ files home, to try to learn more about them, to get a sense of who they really were. At work, he is hounded by Q-Kee and the Pubyok about his open cases, so he takes a detained nurse to an interrogation bay and attaches the autopilot. As a last effort to save herself, the nurse lifts her skirt, but the interrogator only inhales her scent before restraining her and turning on the machine.
Chapter 18-21 Analysis
From the imposter Ga’s activities with Sun Moon’s children, it is clear he is preparing them for a life unlike the one they have lived, where poverty is a real possibility. Sun Moon and her children have been protected from some of these unpleasant realities, and the imposter Ga’s few moments of anger come when he is teaching them the truth about the conditions so many people in the country live in. Sun Moon and her children do respond generously to the starving family in the cemetery.
The new Ga and Sun Moon are walking a tightrope—Ga becomes increasingly involved in the preparations for the American visit, which he recognizes as a climactic moment in his story. He finally reveals (to Buc) how he killed the real commander Ga. Although Commander Ga was praised as the man who eliminated homosexuals from the army, he seems to have homosexual desires, and used fear and threats to rape his victims. Jun Do’s training as a fighter in the tunnels of the DMZ has prepared him to be victorious against the commander.
Sun Moon appears to be trapped by the Dear Leader, who writes her scripts and decides when—or if—her movies will be released. He is clearly toying with her when he gives her a script about the imposter husband, and also testing her loyalty to a more important relationship—with the Dear Leader himself.
Comically, the Best North Korean Story has twisted the relationship between Ga and Sun Moon to be more like a traditional love story—although there are strong hints of its dark end. Sex between Ga and Sun Moon is described in terms that are both natural—they have sex in the botanic gardens—and pleasing to the state.
Meanwhile, the interrogator’s search of Ga’s home shows that they also had sex in Sun Moon’s bed; he finds evidence of “spoor” to support this. As a lonely man who wonders why his parents never found him a wife, he is intrigued by the imposter Ga. His question is not so much how Ga managed to escape prison, but how he came to insert himself in Sun Moon’s life and develop a real relationship with her.
Interestingly, the search of Buc’s house reveals hidden Bibles, which represents a higher sin against the state than any other form of contraband or cruelty.
