Irony-free zone

Aug 25, 2012 | 12:00 AM

What started as a casual interest in North Korea quickly became an almost decade-long obsession for writer and Stanford professor Adam Johnson. The fruit of his fixation, his novel “The Orphan Master's Son,” was just released in paperback. Speaking from his home in San Francisco, Johnson, 45, talked about a research trip he took to North Korea for the book. Here's an edited transcript.

Q: Where did the idea for this book come from?

A: I really started getting interested in North Korea as a curious reader while I was working on another literary fiction project. I went from one book on North Korea to the other, and I became obsessed. It seems to me that there is no place on earth exercising total mind control and total behavior control like North Korea. In North Korea, you are supposed to curtail your own wants and needs and desires. I wanted to look at what happens to your own yearnings and motivations (in that system) and when and how you communicate your personal desires if they can be used against you.

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Q: You visited North Korea, what was that like?

A: We got the standard weeklong tour of North Korea. We were highly managed and were shown the sites that they wanted us to see. It's illegal for a citizen of the DPRK to speak to a foreigner, so I didn't have a genuine interaction with anyone. There were certainly a lot of weird things. There were a lot of normal, wonderful things as well. And some scary things, too. Since Kim Jong Il has died, it seems like America is taking its first serious look at North Korea. Before that, it seemed like a place of buffoonery or a place that we dismissed as evil, but now (Americans) are getting a look at the plight of the people and how dark their existence is. (North Koreans) are real people struggling to get all the things out of life that we want under horrible circumstances.

Q: How much of your book is based on real life events that you read about or witnessed?

A: Well, it is a work of fiction. In journalism, things need to be confirmed and verified in order to be promulgated. I think that because it is difficult to print things that can't be sourced, it is almost impossible for nonfiction and for journalism to truly report on North Korea. What we have and what we know about North Korea is based on satellite photos and the testimonies of defectors, and those stories can't be confirmed. We can give credence to those stories through accumulation of similar stories, but when people get out of gulags there is no way to confirm what they've seen. I kind of feel that North Korea is one of the places that only literary fiction can really get to.

Q: You were watched intensely the whole time you were there. What was that like?

A: Because we were Americans, they were very nervous about us. We had basically four minders for the four of us, including a person who videotaped everything we said. He was supposedly making a tourist DVD for us, but it was very intimidating for him to stick a big camera in our face all the time.

Americans are very used to irony. We are very used to two levels of meaning. We can watch Stephen Colbert and know that he's pretending to be a conservative, but he's really mocking them. There is no irony in North Korea. Everything is literal. My traveling companions and I could speak on a secondary level with meaning that the North Koreans didn't understand.

I remember we were taken to a museum of Korean history, and the first display we were shown was a skull fragment they claimed was about 4 million years old. They claimed it was found on the Taedong River bank and that it was the oldest proof of humanity in the world. The museum docent ended her explanation by declaring that therefore all people are Korean. I was really just stunned. I couldn't believe that someone was just nakedly giving false information to my face with a straight face.

The older gentleman that helped me get to North Korea turned to me and said, "Professor Johnson, do you hear that, you are Korean! Do you feel Korean?" I sort of patted my thighs and said, "I guess I do feel Korean." It was a way to relieve the weird tension that I was feeling. Of course, (the North Koreans) only take things literally, so they all nodded in agreement and thought that it was great that the foreigner finally realized he was Korean.

Courtney Crowder covers the Chicago literary scene for Printers Row Journal.

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Adam Johnson will appear at Printers Row Live! on Wednesday. For tickets, click here.

"The Orphan Master's Son"
By Adam Johnson, Random House, 480 pages, $15

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