Plot Summary
Abandoned on the Mountain
Bari, the seventh daughter born to a North Korean family desperate for a son, is abandoned by her own mother at birth in a patch of woods. Rescued by the family dog, nurtured by her shaman grandmother, Bari's earliest memories are soaked in rejection and survival. Her life unfolds under the shadow of familial disappointment, gendered expectations, and suffering. The specter of abandonment shapes her sense of self and destiny, foreshadowing her lifelong journey as both literal and mythic exile. Through her grandmother's tales and rituals, Bari absorbs her spiritual inheritance, quietly discovering a gift for communicating with spirits—an inheritance both comforting and heavy.
Ghosts and Family Divided
Growing up amid poverty and political tension, Bari is both witness and recipient of familial trauma. Relationships with her six sisters and their parents are defined by scarcity, her father's frustrated masculinity, and moments of fleeting tenderness. As hunger and hardship deepen, Bari experiences a feverish illness, during which she has her first vision of otherworldly visitors. Ghosts of typhoid and famine begin to haunt her physical and spiritual senses, linking the landscape's decay to ancestral curses and personal fate. This supernatural sensitivity deepens her bond to her grandmother, setting Bari apart as someone existing between worlds—within her own house and the boundaries of the living and dead.
The Famine Comes
As famine rips through North Korea, the Bari family suffers like millions. The idyllic yet impoverished city of Chongjin unravels as food grows scarce, rations disappear, and government control tightens. Bodies float down rivers; neighbors die in droves; desperation replaces hope. Bari's father, once a minor party official, loses his position amid political purges. The family's meager stores dwindle, and soon the family is forced to fracture: some sisters disappear, one by one, taken by hunger, disease, or escape. Survivors cling to each other, but Bari's world is already grief-stricken and empty, echoing with unresolved farewells.
Orphaned Across Borders
After their father is disappeared by the authorities, Bari, her grandmother, and the last of her siblings flee across the Tumen River to China, escaping certain death. This crossing marks a rebirth through trauma: the trio hides, forages, and survives in stranger's orchards and sheds, living as stateless outcasts. The boundaries between worlds—Korea, China; living, dead—blur for Bari as her gift for seeing spirits grows. Tragedy is relentless: her grandmother dies suddenly, and Bari is left alone, a child holding both traditions and ghosts, carrying her family's broken hopes and the myth of Princess Bari on her shoulders.
Survival in China
Driven by hunger and the need for safety, Bari becomes an outsider in China. She falls under the care of Uncle Salamander, a genial Korean–Chinese merchant who helps her find lowly jobs: babysitter, cleaner, then apprentice masseuse. Through labor and relentless adaptation, her foreignness is by turns concealed, exploited, and formative. Alongside other refugees and the impoverished, Bari learns Chinese, absorbs new skills, and gradually crafts a fragile independence. Yet human trafficking, violence, and systemic discrimination lurk everywhere, and friends are lost to prostitution, disappearance, or death. Bari's spiritual gift—the shamanic sight—remains her only link to meaning and power.
Journey to the Other Side
Seeking a better life, Bari is swept up in the machinery of Chinese human smuggling, joining a group packed into a shipping container bound for England. The journey is dehumanizing: little food or air, squalor, death among the captives. Bari survives by separating her spirit from her body, traveling through the realms between life and death, guided by animal spirits and ancestors. These passages through spiritual underworlds mirror her literal journey: each phase is a test of endurance, empathy, and relinquishment. Her capacity to ease the suffering of others there—ghosts of starved, beaten, and lamenting souls—solidifies her role as a modern shaman for all the world's abandoned.
Among the Living Dead
Bari emerges in England, traumatized but alive, and is sold into servitude at a Chinatown restaurant. An illegal immigrant, she works in harsh silence, her debt to smugglers keeping her bound. Small acts of kindness from other immigrant laborers—Uncle Lou, Uncle Tan—help her break her chains, eventually finding steadier work at a nail salon. Every migrant she meets is marked by flight, loss, and invisible labor. Bari's community becomes a patchwork of refugees and strivers from Africa, South Asia, Eastern Europe, and East Asia, all living in the cracks of the city. Her ability to read pain and history through touch draws her to a healing path.
Underworld Crossing
In London, Bari perfects her skill as a masseuse and healer, channeling other people's memories, traumas, and deaths through her touch. Massaging rich and poor, lonely and grieving, she sees their ghosts, their sins, their migrations. A patron, Lady Emily, draws out the extent of Bari's shamanic abilities, introducing her to the English metaphysics of hauntings and guilt. In ritual dream-journeys, Bari travels to the Korean underworld where she relives her personal and collective traumas: negotiating with gods, ferrying the souls of the dead, and confronting her own anger and shame. Each crossing brings her closer to the archetype of Princess Bari—one who guides restless souls.
Life in Exile
Gradually, Bari constructs a precarious life in London, amidst immigrants who have lost everything yet persist in memory and habit. Connections deepen: she marries Ali, a gentle minicab driver from a family of Muslim immigrants, and finds community among their neighbors of every origin—African, Bengali, Chinese, Pakistani, Bulgarian. The convergence of different languages, faiths, and remembrances creates a shared space of mutual help and persistent exile. Despite external hostilities, prejudice, and the specter of war, Bari finds moments of domestic hope: love, pregnancy, shared meals, and healing work.
Love and Loss in London
Bari's idyll is shattered by her husband Ali's disappearance—he travels to Pakistan to search for his missing brother, swallowed by war. Pregnant and then a mother, Bari faces London's violence, racism, and the constant threat of police raids on "illegals." Deeply isolated, her only solace is her daughter, Hurriyah-Suni. But tragedy strikes: her daughter dies in an accident while Bari is briefly away, compounded by a betrayal from her only friend. Overwhelmed with shame, grief, and rage, Bari descends into despair, questioning God, fate, and the meaning of suffering for the world's abandoned daughters.
The Weight of Grief
Frozen by grief, Bari enters a prolonged fast—physically and spiritually isolating herself, living only in visions. Through ritualistic dreams, she journeys once more to the underworld, ferrying between lands of fire, blood, and sand. She meets souls she failed to save, those she hates, and the loved ones she has lost or failed. Called upon to explain the senseless suffering of good and evil, Bari realizes that forgiveness, self-release, and shared mourning are the only means to peace—there is no magic water but the willingness to bear and share grief.
Rituals of Forgiveness
Bari's long shamanic vision culminates in a symbolic ceremony at the "castle at the ends of the earth." She gives up her claim on vengeance, cleansing and freeing the souls of those who harmed and abandoned her—her own daughter's ghost included. She learns that life's only "miracle water" is the capacity to weep for each other, to transform hatred and carry on with compassion. Her own ghosts—grandmother, daughter, ancestors—urge her back among the living, where letting go is the only return. Emerging from mourning, Bari chooses the world again.
Return from the Underworld
With time, Bari resumes work, maintains friendships, and begins to forgive herself and others, including her betrayer Xiang, who ultimately dies, herself a victim of the world's cruelty. Bari's circle—multiethnic, fragile, persistent—offers glimpses of redemption and kindness even in the face of ongoing wars and new violence. Through ritual, prayer, and communal meals, interrupted by news of bombings, detentions, and deportations, she recognizes that loss is universal, but so is love. Her healing is never final but continual, a re-choosing of empathy.
Reunion in Strangers' Lands
After years of uncertainty, Ali returns, scarred by war and detention, but alive. The family's reunion, though marred by loss and changed selves, becomes a microcosm for the world's restless quests for home and belonging. New life springs forth, and new griefs—the cycle is ongoing. Bari and Ali settle into business, family, and the struggle for normalcy amidst the world's cataclysms, recognizing that the journey toward healing and forgiveness never ends.
Water That Sustains
Princess Bari's mythic quest for "life-giving water" reframes itself in Bari's real experiences: water is found in tears, sweat, soup, and the mutual aid of the dispossessed. True salvation is not a magical spring but ongoing acts of empathy and forgiveness, even as history repeats its violence. Amid wars, family separations, and disasters, Bari's hard-won wisdom ripples out in acts of ritual, story, and living. There are no unbroken endings, only the insistence on choosing to love, help, and remember—over and over again.
The Tale's Last Lesson
We end with Bari as healer, shaman, and mother to all who wander—or are cast out—between worlds. Her voice, carrying the ancestral stories of Princess Bari, now guides migrants in exile, the bereaved, and the haunted. The lesson is not how to undo suffering but how to live with it, transmute it, and keep going. In storytelling, ritual, and community, water is passed: sustenance for the lost, forgiveness for the living, and hope for those still searching for home.
Analysis
Princess Bari is both a harrowing contemporary migration epic and a modern shamanic tale: through Bari, Hwang Sok-yong adapts an ancient Korean myth—of the abandoned seventh daughter sent to retrieve the water of life—into a story that illuminates the psychological and social wounds of modern exile. The journey from famine-stricken North Korea to the underworlds of China and London exposes the intergenerational legacies of violence, gendered oppression, and colonial exploitation, not as unique tragedies but as universals in a broken world. By making Bari a healer who carries her ancestors in her blood, Hwang transforms trauma into ritual, suffering into compassion, and displacement into a new form of belonging. The novel demonstrates that redemption does not come through miracles but repeated acts of empathy despite constant abandonment, where "life-giving water" is found only in the willingness to suffer, remember, and forgive—over and over across boundaries of nation, language, faith, and death. For today's fractured world, Princess Bari teaches that only through collective mourning and compassion can we hope for renewal.
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Characters
Bari
Bari is both an individual and a mythic everywoman—named for the "abandoned" princess of Korean shamanic legend, she moves from rejected daughter to orphan, refugee, migrant, spiritual medium, and finally, healer. Her defining trait is endurance: she survives familial neglect, famine, exile, trafficking, and irreparable loss without succumbing to bitterness. Bari's secret ability to see and console spirits marks her as both outsider and bridge between worlds: she heals the sick, comforts the haunted, and ultimately accepts her role as spiritual guide to the living and dead. Her psychoanalytic depth lies in her capacity for empathy and her struggle to forgive both herself and others, crafting from her pain an ethic of radical compassion.
Bari's Grandmother
Grandmother is Bari's shamanic mentor, her source of cultural memory and otherworldly wisdom. Steeped in Korean folk rituals and stories, she nurtures Bari's gifts, bridges the ancestral past, and provides maternal support both in life and after death. Her faith helps Bari survive—her passing shatters the last sense of familial belonging Bari has in the world. Yet, through dreams and visions, she continues to instruct Bari: offering moral clarity, courage to forgive, and assurance that the boundaries between worlds can be navigated with song, food, and ritual.
Ali
Ali is Bari's husband and anchor in her new life in London. Himself the child of trauma—a refugee lineage from Kashmir—Ali represents gentleness, decency, and the potential for cross-cultural tenderness. His disappearance into the jungles of migration and war mirror Bari's losses, and his eventual return is bittersweet, marked by scars both physical and emotional. Ali's integration of tradition and modernity, Islam and British life, reflects wider themes of adaptation and the pain of building a home from ruins.
Xiang
Xiang, a Chinese woman Bari meets while working as a masseuse in Yanji, becomes a sister-in-suffering: they escape together to Europe, endure trafficking, and struggle to survive. Xiang's inability to escape the cycles of exploitation, addiction, and loss marks her as both a warning and a wound for Bari. Ultimately, Xiang betrays Bari in an act of desperation with tragic results, and her later death offers Bari the hardest lesson—how to forgive, even the unforgivable. Xiang's journey psychoanalytically exposes the corrosiveness of shame and the hunger for home.
Uncle Salamander
Uncle Salamander (Pak Xiaolong) is a pragmatic, street-smart Korean–Chinese trader. Acting as a protector, smuggler, and father-figure at critical points, he represents the ambiguous morality of survival networks—sometimes helpful, sometimes complicit. His sympathy for Bari and her kin softens the industrial nature of trafficking and migration, but his inability to ultimately safeguard those in his care is a microcosm of the failures and fleeting victories in displaced communities.
Lady Emily
Lady Emily, an Englishwoman Bari befriends as a client, is herself exiled within her own affluent country—a survivor of colonial damage, personal betrayal, and familial loss. Her fascination with spiritual healing and shamanism reflects her need to make sense of guilt and grief. In parallel dream-journeys, she comes to embody the global nature of trauma, both inflicting and suffering it. Her evolving relationship with Bari illuminates the possibility of cross-racial and cross-class empathy.
Hurriyah-Suni
Bari's daughter by Ali, Hurriyah-Suni represents the hope of renewal, the struggle to build a family, and the persistent vulnerability of the world's innocents. Her sudden death—caused indirectly by Bari's friend—forces Bari to confront her own limitations, capacity for hatred, and the necessity of forgiveness. Hurriyah's spirit remains as a presence both anchoring and releasing Bari from her grief.
Bari's Father
The father's arc tracks political ambition, disappointment, fear, and inability to adapt. His obsession with sons, anger over daughters, and ultimate vulnerability to state violence illuminate the structural tragedies of totalitarianism, patriarchy, and modernity gone awry. His usefulness to Bari is more symbolic—a source of wounds, a proof of loss.
Bari's Mother
She is the embodiment of hardship under oppressive circumstances: her abandonment of Bari at birth is not simply cruelty but the desperate act of someone warped by social and personal constraints. Occasionally glimpsed in dreams, she is the unreachable home, her fate ultimately unknown or tragic, a reminder of those lost in passage.
Becky
Becky is Lady Emily's African nanny and spiritual mirror to Bari's own grandmother: a victim of colonial violence whose soul lingers in the underworld, still searching for peace. She acts as a companion, questioner, and provocateur in Bari's spiritual quests, pointing out the global unhealed wounds of history.
Plot Devices
Shamanic Folklore and Dreams
The novel's backbone is constructed from the Korean myth of Princess Bari, infusing autobiographical migration with shamanic symbolism. Dreams, rituals, and spiritual journeys function as literal and metaphorical plot devices—facilitating escapes, transformations, and the processing of trauma. Bari's crossings between life and death echo her real migrations, granting her wisdom in both worlds. The folk motif acts as both foreshadowing and resonance, with retellings of the Bari myth setting expectations for Bari's own trials.
Interconnected Narratives of Exile
Characters' fates—across continents, religions, and generations—are interconnected, reflecting the universal nature of displacement, grief, and survival. Repeated motifs (food, water, journeys, mothers and daughters) connect past and present, East and West, personal and political. Bari's life cycles through stages—home, disaster, escape, loss, found family, loss again—each time deepening insight but destabilizing the notion of "arrival."
Spiritual Sight as Empathy
The device of Bari's shamanic "sight"—her ability to see the dead, read pain in the living, and travel to the underworld—functions both as a form of magical realism and as a psychoanalytic expansion of empathy. Her insight is both a curse (making her unable to rest in the world) and a source of healing for herself and others. It allows for narrative compression: wrestling with collective and historical trauma through direct spiritual encounter.
Social Realism and Allegory
The world's calamities—famines, crackdowns, trafficking, war, racism—are narrated with unflinching realism, interlaced with allegorical dream-journeys. Social violence is literal and psychic, mirrored in bureaucratic decisions, familial ruptures, suicides, and spectral hauntings. Plot events are consistently foreshadowed by folk tales and spiritual warnings, always returning to communal, not individual, resolution.
