The Orphan Master's Son

“Catch somebody with your hands, then let them go with your mind. Do the opposite of keeping count”

Officer So says this to Jun Do, whom he has enlisted to perform a kidnapping mission. Directly after Jun Do’s first kidnapping, Officer So told Jun Do that he had kidnapped twenty-seven people, but in truth the number was higher because he never kept count. He is advising Jun Do to do the work and then put it out of his mind.

“That’s how he’d thought of most people—appearing in your life like foundlings on the doorstep, only to be swept away later as if by flood” 

Jun Do has this thought after his first kidnapping mission with Officer So. Jun Do’s life has been one of people coming and going, ultimately leaving him alone. The flood reference relates to his friend Bo Song, an orphan who was swept away in a river, and for whose fate Jun Do feels responsible. In the same way that others have disappeared from his own life, he is now the cause of disappearances. 

“Jun Do had dealt with this his whole life, the ways it was impossible for people

from normal families to conceive of a man in so much hurt that he couldn’t acknowledge his own son, that there was nothing worse than a mother leaving her children, though it happened all the time, that ‘take’ was a word people used for those who had so little give as to be immeasurable” 

This line, in Jun Do’s narration, follows the observation by Gil, his fellow colleague on the kidnapping mission, that Jun Do should forget his martyr’s name and reinvent himself to be whatever he wants. He is reflecting on his own family situation, where his father treated Jun Do like one of the orphans and his mother, a singer, was never involved in his life. Jun Do has so little that what he does have is “immeasurable” in its significance.