The life story of Ja-hee, a 14-year-old Korean girl taken by the Japanese to be a sex slave, or 'comfort woman' for the Imperial Army. Ja-hee suffers terribly at the hands of the Japanese. Now with Japanese gone, she must carry on an important family legacy.Her terrible ordeal shapes the rest of her life as she finds and loses true love in the surreal communism of North Korea. After escaping to the south, she's forced to run a kijichon (brothel) for the American military in South Korea. Finally, she finds success in the cold capitalism of South Korea's economic boom until her coworkers discover that she was a comfort woman. But through courage and strength, she's able to fulfill her duty to her family.