In years to come, he would joke that it was like a celestial object falling from the sky to be discovered by some bewildered nomad and made the centerpiece of a new religion. Sometimes, as people competed to reveal his crimes, Jun-su thought about sharing his own story of the teacher’s depravity.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Hachette UK The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Hachette UK

When his classmates were given days off to help in the collective farm, Jun-su did extra schoolwork. On his first day back, at midmorning, all the students were given a protein supplement sent by their comrades in China that they mixed with water and drank. At the side of the classroom, Jun-su’s mother stood in pained silence, her eyes gleaming with tears, her features frozen in a mask of shame.In Jun-su’s building, this was nosy Kim Song-hwa, a slight yet formidable woman in her fifties with an impressive coiffure, who observed all the comings and goings of the residents and also gleaned information from a network of informants—mainly people who were too old and infirm to do anything but spy on their neighbors. Similarly, there were moments when I had to go back and re-read passages to make sure I read them correctly. By throwing the yut sticks, Jun-su created numbers that corresponded to certain qualities that he wrote down in pencil on a sheet of scratchy brown paper.

The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux | Waterstones

Jun-su was rolling his head, flapping his arms, and making hilarious spastic movements with his jelly legs. At that moment, Teacher Kang opened the door of the classroom, bowed to Jun-su’s mother, and motioned them in.After a sudden descent and an abrupt landing that left the tour party shaken, the passengers made their way down the boarding ramp and towards the boxy Soviet-style terminal. In fact, Theroux's blurring of the lines between fact and fiction made me care about Jun-Su even more in the end.