Q: In the story, the music that the wife listens to is by Kurt Cobain. So I used another condition that was new to me, that I could research, called Guillain-Barré syndrome. In "Nirvana," I chose not to use cancer because it's often done so poorly in popular culture - sentimentalized, rendered in a maudlin way. It happens to many people, it's not unique in any way, but bearing witness to the ways those challenges reverberated through our family was difficult, and as a fiction writer, that's what I do: try to make meaning out of events, through narrative and through the distance of fiction. My wife battled breast cancer a couple of years ago. Q: It sounds like the phenomenon of prison inmates who, when released, go back to prison because they can't deal with life on the outside.Ī: Yeah. So we see in the story two people who are more savvy than the average North Korean defector, but how difficult it is even for them to cope. One of them had run a criminal syndicate just like the one described in the book - stripping car parts, etc. I interviewed a couple of defectors last year, in South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, who were high-level people. And it's actually true that some people have re-defected to North Korea, because they just couldn't cope with all the choices and complexities of modern life. In fact, some defectors are very nostalgic for North Korea, a place that makes a lot of sense to them when the rest of the world doesn't. So I thought I'd write one more piece showing a couple of defectors and how terribly difficult it is for them. Having lived in isolation, having lived without any of the trappings of modernity, having lived without some of the abstractions we take for granted - like freedom, choice, possibility - defectors from North Korean often really struggle in their new countries. But based on the people I'd interviewed, it was very difficult once they got out of the country. I think the book left the impression with readers was that all you had to do was get out of North Korea and everything would be great. A: When I was done with "The Orphan Master's Son," I felt like a couple of things needed a little more justice.
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