It's been a while, to be honest, since i've really devoured a book the way Em usually does. There's all the writing, and of course the kids, and the responsibilities of being a daddy these days that tend to make it a bit difficult to really get involved with a story. This time, though, was a bit different. I picked up "The Orphan Master's Son" the other day (Last Wednesday, to be precise,) and tore through it with the headlong relish of a four-year-old through a plate of Mac 'n Cheese. It was honestly that good, I kid you not...
It won the Pulitzer just a few years ago, so it counts among the more accessible novels to have won the prize, telling the story of Pak Jun Do, a North Korean Jack of all trades who very eloquently introduces us to some of the fascinatingly vague lives of the North Korean people.
Very often, we are presented with a view of Communism that is at its extreme. We think of the revolutions, the bloodshed, and the crappy, barely-drivable cars. We are presented a mishmash of drama that, be honest now, doesn't really educate us much about what Communism is these days, what its failures are, and how frankly impossible it is, operating the way it was intended to, outside the framework of a sociological and economic thought experiment. We simply don't see the lives of the people we assume are entirely oppressed. Rather than screaming at us how unsustainable such a system is, scratching the technical babble into the wall that is the monument to capitalism, the Orphan Master's son presents Communism as a backdrop against which the failures of our own human character are marqueraded. Of course, that's only part of the story...
Pac Jun Do feels like what we all might be in his situation, and perhaps we are. After all, aren't we all struggling in our own way to realize that thing that someone, somewhere called "The American Dream?" His struggle, very much to lay claim to his destiny, to control the course of his own life, does mirror very acutely the American experience today, even if our labors are made in a Capitalist society, rather than a Communist one. It's a beautiful reminder that at the heart, we are very much alike, and should not think of ourselves as quite so distanced from those who live under a different ideology than our own.
