Long ago, a poor man and a poor woman met on a mountain road and made a home together - a home with two rice bowls, and nothing else.
They had three daughters. The youngest was born with a darkness in her name, and a stillness in her manner. No one in the house noticed that blessing had entered with her.
One evening, her parents asked their daughters a question they had already answered in their own minds: Whose blessing do we live by? Her older sisters gave the answer their parents wanted. The youngest gave a different one.
"There is a blessing within me, too."
For that answer, she was sent out the door.
What follows is not a story of revenge, or of a daughter proven right. It is the story of a girl who walked a dark road, found a fortune the earth had been holding all along, and - instead of keeping it for herself - opened her door, again and again, until her house became large enough to hold beggars, wanderers, lost children, and, at last, the blind parents who had once turned her away.
Gameunjangagi: The Blessing Within is a literary retelling of Samgong Bonpuri, one of Jeju Island's oldest shamanic narrative songs - the story of a goddess of fortune and fate. Told in spare, quiet prose for readers young and old, it asks a single question that outlasts the story itself: once you have received a blessing, what will you do with it?
A NO SOLDA Signature title. Companion to Baridegi: The Child Who Returned with the Water of Life and She Who Returned to the Sky - three retellings of Korean myth united by one thread: water and descent, wind and ascent, and now, earth and recognition.
