Summary

Chapter 1 begins in the small fishing village of Yeongdo, Korea in 1910, the same year Japan annexed the country. Hoonie, a young man with a cleft palate and limp, is not a desirable marriage, even though his parents ran a boarding house and he can write in both Japanese and Korean. Hoonie is eventually matched in marriage with a young woman named Yangjin, who, because of the famine in the country and because she was the last of a family of all girls. Yangjin and Hoonie have three children, each of whom die soon after childbirth. Hoonie’s parents die three years after his marriage. Hoonie and Yangjin’s fourth child, a girl named Sunja, lives, and after she turns three, her parents finally stop worrying she will die. Hoonie is devoted to his daughter, but he too dies when Sunja turns...