Homesick and alone, a teen-aged girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school, so she works long, sun-less days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer.
Koreas brightest literary star sets this complex and nuanced coming-of-age story against the backdrop of Koreas industrial sweatshops of the 1970s and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression, and urbanization that helped catapult Koreas economy out of the ashes of war. But it was girls like Shins heroine who formed the bottom of Seouls rapidly changing social hierarchy, forgotten and ignored.