The Northern Wind depicts turbulent South Korea in the mid-1960's, a time when her troops were ?ghting in Vietnam and North Korean in?ltrators were terrorizing their southern neighbors with killing and kidnapping. While doing her laundry at a remote creek on Kanghwa Island on a Saturday morning, eighteen-year-old Miyong, a member of women's group involved in urban development, notices a unit of armed South Koreans passing her. As the men gather on a dry creek bed some yards away, she discovers their use of certain words and their accent are not typically South Korean. She waits until they leave and hurries back to the community and reports them to the director, an army reserve of?cer working for the Central Intelligence Corp (CIC). The next day news reports a botched assassination of the South Korean president. As the person who saw and reported the commandos, Miyong becomes an overnight celebrity. Her exposure to the media leads her to an unexpected journey to North Korea as a South Korean agent, to help a prisoner escape from a labor camp. Edward Yi, a distinguished Korean-American architect, was abducted while visiting his ailing father, who is the brother of Korea's last king, Emperor Yi Sunjong. In the dreary labor camp, Miyong witnesses starvation, forced attendance of executions, rape and forced abortion of women inmates. When she returns, unexpected news awaits her.