If freedom is essential to inclusion, then the absence of freedom, as in the dictatorship of North Korea, equates to non-inclusion. Orphan Master's Son is a story about an orphan's struggle for survival in North Korea told through three narrators: a third person account, the propaganda version of Commander Ga and Sun Moon's Story. While everyone in North Korea struggles, none struggle as much as the orphan Jun Do who like all orphans in North Korea is considered the lowest class. The orphans were used as slave labor and often given the most difficult and dangerous jobs, "Then sleep communal, a hundred boys bunked four tiers deep, all their common exhaustion articulated as a singularity. It was nothing short of belonging, a feeling that wasn't particularly profound or intense, it was just the best he tended to get." Jun Do manages to transcend his trauma in the end by finally feeling a sense of responsibility for Sun Moon and her children and ultimately sacrifices his own life for the family he loves. By saving them, he realizes his mother, "hadn't left him behind, she'd saved him from what was ahead." He feels he was saved so that he in turn could save Sun Moon and her children.

Looking at the seven pillars of inclusion as it pertains to the Orphan Master's Son:
1. Access or presence of a welcoming environment-nonexistent in a dictatorship.
2. Attitude or willingness to embrace inclusion- In North Korea, the only attitude that counts is that of Kim Jong I1.
3. Choice- In North Korea, the populace has no choice regarding any aspect of their lives.
4. Partnership- Kim Jong I1 in Orphan Master uses a carrot and stick form of manipulation. He makes it appear as though he's forming partnerships when he's actually exerting ultimate control. Even the partnerships between husband and wife, and parent and child, have been eroded because of the mistrust created by family members turning each other in to the secret police.
5. Communication- In Orphan Master's Son the people of North Korea only know what they are told through propaganda. They don't have any uncensored media, they are unable to travel freely, and they do not communicate with their family members in South Korea. Therefore, they have no concept of what's happening outside of North Korea. Plays and operas are all written by Kim JongI1.
6. Policy- Policy is determined solely by Kim Jong I1.
7. Opportunity-There is only one ethnicity in North Korea. There is an elite class mostly consisting of military. Men have more power than women. Beautiful women have greater opportunity than unattractive women and are sent to the capital and married to high-ranking members of the military or made part of Kim Jong I1's "pleasure troupe". Parents and their children get sent to workcamps together for any infraction of the rules committed by any member of the family.

It would be interesting to think about the spectrum of inclusion. Would we see that the more freedom or choice people in a society have relates to its level of inclusion? Are societies that are more homogenous less or more inclusive? How does inclusion relate to the absolute number of resources a country has? Do richer countries do better than poorer ones with inclusivity? Do Western countries view inclusion differently than Eastern countries?

In conclusion, Adam Johnson did a brilliant job portraying various characters in this book who all were traumatized by the oppressive Kim Regime. As Johnson says, "North Korea is a trauma narrative on a national scale...the real mistake would have been to force this story into a shape that conformed to a Western reader's expectations." " We'll know the true way to write a novel set in North Korea when North Korean novelists become free to tell their own stories."
Janice Waldman’s Inclusive Cause: The Color of Change https://colorofchange.org/about/