Yeongdo, Korea 1911: A club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old beauty. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then a Christian minister offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife. Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends and no home, Sunja's salvation is just the beginning of her story.