How we cite our quotes: (Page)
Quote #4
"I'm just saying, I'm a guy who's got a lot to lose." The Second Mate paused, choosing his words. "But you, you got no one. You're on a cot in the kitchen of a monster's house... if you'd just punched that American in the face," he said, "you'd be in Seoul by now, you'd be free. That's what I don't get. If a guy has no strings, what's stopping him?" (70)
The Second Mate's astute observation makes us think: what makes Jun Do tick? Why does he feel compelled to return, as Gil does not, from Japan? There's never really a clear answer to this question. Maybe he wants to find his mother in Pyongyang, or maybe he believes the propaganda that he's heard his whole life about other countries. It's also entirely possible that Jun Do is naïve. As with many other characters in the work, he has not yet plumbed the unique depths of misery that his country has to offer.
Quote #5
How to explain his country to her, he wondered. How to explain that leaving its confines to sail upon the Sea of Japan—that was being free. Or that as a boy, sneaking from the smelter floor for an hour to run with the other boys in the slag heaps, even though there were guards everywhere, because the guards were everywhere—that was the purest freedom. (154)
Jun Do believes, as many do, that you can't really experience something fully without have experienced its opposite. So good cannot be known fully without evil, wealth without poverty. In this case, Jun Do wants to tell Wanda that perhaps she doesn't know what freedom really is, because she's always been free. Freedom without risk, he thinks, is no kind of freedom at all. He later changes his understanding of what it means to be free.
Quote #6
"In prison, they kept us right at the edge of starvation. You could still do work, but you couldn't think. Your mind would try to retrieve a thought, but it wouldn't be there. There's no sense of time when you're hungry. You just labor until it's dark, no memory." (295)
The physical confinement of prison life doesn't even touch the experience of the prison camps of North Korea. They also practice a passive form of mind control there through starvation. The idea that a person can be trapped in his or her own mind through outside manipulation is the founding concept of torture, especially as practiced by the Interrogator. Playing with a prisoner's memory and ability to reason is a surefire way to ensure docility and minimize escape attempts.