The Island of Sea Women Read online

  I had to get my family home. We retraced our steps to the square, where villagers had the two policemen in ropes. People yelled and cursed. Someone kicked the smaller policeman.

  “Jabbing him with your old sandal is not enough!” an old man railed. “Let’s take them to the police outpost in Hamdeok! We’ll make sure they’re punished!”

  The crowd roared its approval. I should have followed my plan and gone home, but I roared along with everyone. My terror had turned to fury. How could other Koreans—even if they weren’t from Jeju—shoot at us? We were innocent people, and this had to stop! So we joined the throng as they dragged the two policemen through the olle and along the shore the three kilometers to Hamdeok. Barely an hour had passed since my family and I left our dry fields.

  “We want to lodge a complaint against these two!” one of the elders from Bukchon called out when we reached the small police station. “Let us tell you our grievances.”

  The Japanese had listened when we complained, but not our own people. Instead, I watched in horror as some policemen came out on the roof, ran to a mounted machine gun, and, without warning, began to fire. It took a moment to realize they’d fired blanks, but we’d already scattered like bugs on the floor of a latrine when startled by the light of an oil lamp. Hiding behind some barrels, I snuck a quick look to see if it was safe. There, in the window of the police station, staring out, was Sang-mun. I fell back out of sight. My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. My eyes had to be lying, but when I peeked out again, there he was. Our eyes met.

  I didn’t stop to visit Mi-ja on my way back to Bukchon. I didn’t know what I could possibly say to her. For the first time in our many years of friendship, I wasn’t sure I could trust her.

  My husband was waiting for us at the front gate when we got home. Wordlessly, he took me in his arms. I sobbed out what I’d seen.

  “You’re safe,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”

  But I was deeply ashamed that I’d let the anger and confusion of the moment put my children and Yu-ri at risk. I promised myself I’d never let that happen again. Not as a mother. Not as a wife.

  The next day, the newspaper reported that the police had “needed” to crack down on those distributing leaflets, but that the culprit in Bukchon had gotten away. Two days after that, a report leaked from the U.S. Twenty-fourth Corps also made the front page. My husband read the story:

  “Two women and one man were wounded in a wild gunfight between leftists distributing leaflets and police in Bukchon—”

  “But that’s not what happened!” I cried, indignant.

  Jun-bu returned to the article. “A mob of approximately two hundred attacked the police station in Hamdeok,” he read. “Police reinforcements were required to disperse the mob.”

  “But that’s not what happened,” I repeated. “How can they change what I saw with my own eyes into something so different?”

  He didn’t have an answer. I watched the muscles in his jaw move as he read the final words: “All political rallies, marches, and demonstrations are now banned. Crackdowns will occur for any street gatherings, and the posting or handing out of leaflets is forthwith illegal.” He folded the newspaper and laid it on the floor. “From now on, we must be very careful.”

  I’d watched my mother die in the sea. I’d seen Yu-ri go into the sea one person and come out another. I understood the sea to be dangerous, but what was happening on dry land confused and scared me. In the last few months, I’d witnessed several people get shot in front of me. I’d seen people on both sides beaten. Those who’d been killed or injured were all Korean—whether from the mainland or Jeju—and the perpetrators had all been our countrymen. This was unfathomable to me, and I couldn’t stop shaking from fear, not even when my husband held me tight and told me he would keep us safe.

  The Ring of Fire

  March–December 1948

  The year following the March 1 demonstration was filled with family and work, and I didn’t once see Mi-ja. She had to be struggling with her situation, and I felt terrible about that. But as much as I loved and missed her, I needed to take precautions. She lived in Hamdeok, where the military was headquartered. Her husband was, I believed, on the wrong side, and he was unpredictable. I couldn’t risk that in a moment of rage or suspicion he might turn against Jun-bu or me. Of course, there were times I questioned why Mi-ja didn’t seek me out and what that might mean. I wondered too if she thought about me or if she was as occupied with work and family as I was.

  My children were doing well. Min-lee and Sung-soo would soon have birthdays. They’d turn three and two. Jun-bu and I had been blessed with a second son, Kyung-soo. He was a docile baby, and it pleased me that Min-lee was already learning to take care of her brothers. My husband was respected by his students, and I was well established as a small-diver in the Bukchon collective. Despite our good fortune, we had our disagreements. Jun-bu remained clear that he wanted all our children to be educated, and at least once a week we had nearly the same conversation.

  “Let me remind you of the old saying,” he said one afternoon after he’d had to punish a boy in his class for cheating. “If you plant red beans, then you will harvest red beans.” My mother had often recited this aphorism, and it explained that it was up to the parents to plant, grow, and nourish their children, so they became good and useful adults. Then he added, “You should want Min-lee to have the same opportunities as our sons.”

  “I understand your wishes,” I responded. “But I continue to hope that if I have another baby, it will be a girl, who will help her older sister pay for her brothers’ learning. After all, it took three women—your mother, your sister, and me—to put you through school. When Sung-soo is ready to go to college, Min-lee will be nineteen and earning money by doing leaving-home water-work. But by the time Kyung-soo goes to college, Min-lee will surely be married. I’ll need at least one other haenyeo in the household to help pay for the boys’ school fees.”

  Jun-bu just smiled and shook his head.

  To me, all this showed that, as much as I loved and respected him, he was still only a man and didn’t have the larger worries I had. When he was at home or at school, I was in the world. I had to be practical and think ahead, because everything was unstable around us. Here we were a year after the demonstration and acts of retaliation continued. If village elders filed complaints that members of the Northwest Young Men’s Association had demanded money or bags of millet as bribes, they would not be seen again. If a group of leftists came down Mount Halla and shot a policeman, squads of policemen combed the mountain in search of the perpetrators. If the culprits couldn’t be found, the police shot innocent villagers as a lesson.

  The U.S. military government decided to make some changes. Our first Korean governor was replaced by Governor Yoo, who was reported to wear sunglasses twenty-four hours a day and sleep with a gun. Even the U.S. authorities labeled him an extreme rightist. He purged all Jeju-born officials and replaced them with men who’d escaped from the north and were as anti-communist as he was. He swapped many Jeju-born police and police captains with men from the mainland, who’d never liked or had sympathy for the people of our island. He banned all People’s Committees and called those like my family and me, who’d benefited from them, extreme leftists. I was not an extreme leftist. I wasn’t even a leftist. No matter. There would no longer be classes for women or any of the other activities that the village chapters had organized.

  We had only one newspaper on the island, but by the time a copy reached Bukchon the news might have been old, or it could have been wrong in the first place. Jun-bu also listened to the news on his radio, but one night he said rather glumly, “I think the station is controlled by the rightists, who, in turn, are controlled by the Americans. We have the gossip and rumors that pass from village to village, but can we trust anything we hear?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  The Americans announced that on May 10 those of us living south of th
e Thirty-eighth Parallel would finally have our own elections. My husband’s spirits momentarily lifted.

  “The Americans and the United Nations have vowed we will be free to vote as we wish,” he told me. But then reality brought him back to earth. “The Americans support Rhee Syngman as their preferred candidate. His biggest backers are former Japanese collaborators. Anyone who is against him is automatically labeled a red. Anyone who wants to punish former collaborators is labeled a red. That means that just about everyone on Jeju—including us—will be labeled a red.”

  I worried about Jun-bu’s increasingly dark frame of mind.

  A radio broadcast from a station above the Thirty-eighth Parallel offered an invitation to leaders from the south to go to Pyongyang to discuss reunification and write a constitution that would solve all our problems. In response, the U.S. military government and Governor Yoo strengthened their anti-communist crackdown on Jeju. Former Governor Park, originally appointed by the U.S. military, was the first to be arrested. He was famous, and people were shocked. Then the body of a young man was pulled from a river. He was identified as a protester. A witness to one of the torture sessions reported that the student had been hung from the ceiling by his hair and his testicles pierced with awls. There could not have been a mother on the island who did not imagine the grief she would feel if this boy had been her son.

  * * *

  In the early hours of April 3, we were roused from sleep by the sounds of gunfire, yelling, and people clattering through the olles. Jun-bu and I protected our children with our bodies. I was terrified. The children whimpered. The commotion seemed to last forever, but maybe it only felt that way because the night was so dark. Finally, Bukchon fell silent. Had arrests been made? How many people were shot, and how many had died? The gloomy shadows revealed no answers. Then we began to hear shouts.

  “Hurry!”

  “Come quick!”

  Jun-bu got up and slipped on his trousers.

  “Don’t go out there,” I begged.

  “Whatever happened is over. People may be hurt. I must go.”

  After he left, I held the children even closer. From outside, I heard men speaking in urgent voices.

  “Look at the hills! They’ve lit the old beacon towers!”

  “They’re sending a message around the island!”

  “But what’s the message?” my husband asked.

  The men muttered back and forth about it for a while longer but arrived at no conclusions. Jun-bu returned and lay down next to me. The children fell back asleep, curled around us like piglets. When dawn streaked the sky with pink hues, I quietly got up, changed into day clothes, and went outside. I was about to go to the village well when Jun-bu joined me.

  “I’m coming with you. I don’t want you going alone.”

  “The children—”

  “They’re still asleep,” he said, picking up a water jar. “It’ll be safer to leave them here for a few minutes than to take them with us.”

  We went to the front gate and peeked out. The olle was empty except for a few abandoned bamboo spears. We hurried to the main square, where we discovered that rebels had broken into the village’s one-room police station. Furniture littered the cobblestones. Papers drifted across the ground, pushed by the wind. A few uniformed men scrambled to pick them up. One man had a bandage on his head. Another limped. Some villagers had gathered under the tree to peer at a poster tacked to it. Jun-bu and I pushed our way to the front.

  “Tell us what it says, Teacher,” someone said.

  “Dear citizens, parents, brothers, and sisters,” he read, his eyes moving over the written characters. “Yesterday one of our student-brothers was found killed. Today we come down from the mountains with arms in hand to raid police outposts all over the island.”

  The crowd murmured, confused, scared. Some voices of support rose for the rebels. Retribution had been exacted for the boy who’d been tortured and killed.

  Jun-bu continued to read: “We will oppose country-dividing elections to the death. We will liberate families who have been separated by a line. We will drive the American cannibals and their running dogs from our country. Conscientious public officials and police, we call on you to rise up and help us fight for independence.”

  I didn’t care for the language, but the sentiment was real to all of us. We wanted our own unified country. We wanted to choose our own future.

  “Fight! Fight! Fight!” men shouted, their arms raised. Soon women’s voices joined in. But Jun-bu and I had learned to be wary. We returned home to continue our own lives as word passed from mouth to mouth. By the time we’d eaten breakfast, gotten Granny Cho settled with the children and Yu-ri, and I’d made my way to the bulteok, every haenyeo seemed to have another piece to add to the night’s story.

  “The South Korean Labor Party was behind the attacks,” Gi-won said once we were settled around the fire.

  “No! It was rebels, plain and simple,” Ki-yeong said, scratching an ear.

  “I heard five hundred insurgents came down Grandmother Seolmundae—”

  “It was a lot more than that! Three thousand people joined the rebels as they went from village to village. That’s how they hit so many police stations at once.”

  “And that’s not all. They blew up roads and bridges.”

  “With what?” someone asked, dubious.

  Before an answer could come, another diver exclaimed, “They even cut telephone lines!”

  This was serious. None of us had telephones in our homes, so the line in the police station was the only way a village could call for emergency help from Jeju City.

  “It looked to me like they were armed with little more than what we take into the sea,” Gi-won said.

  “You looked?” Ki-yeong asked in awe.

  “You think anyone would dare do something to me?” Gi-won jutted out her chin to make her point. “I went to my front gate. I saw men—and some women—carrying sickles, scythes, shovels, and—”

  “They sound like farmers, not haenyeo,” Ki-yeong speculated.

  “They are farmers,” her daughter said.

  “And some fishermen too.”

  “This isn’t about all that leftist and rightist stuff the men on the radio talk about,” Gi-won said. “It’s about not wanting to be told what to do by another country—”

  “And reunifying the country. I have family in the north.”

  “Who here hasn’t been touched? First, we had the Japanese. Then the war. And now all the problems of living and eating—”

  “Was anyone killed?” I asked.

  The bulteok quieted. In the excitement, no one had stopped to consider who might have gotten hurt or how badly.

  Gi-won knew the answer. “Four rebels and thirty policemen were killed around the island—”

  The woman next to me groaned. “Thirty policemen?”

  “Hyun!”

  “Aigo!”

  “And two officers were lost in Hamdeok,” Gi-won added.

  That was only three kilometers away. Mi-ja. Maybe I should have been more scared for her, but ever since seeing Sang-mun that day in the police station, I had to figure she was safe.

  “Lost? What does lost mean? Did they desert?”

  “They were kidnapped!”

  Fear played across the faces of the women around me. Attack and retribution had become a way of life for us, and we were all anxious.

  “No one died in Bukchon,” Gi-won said. “We can be grateful for that.”

  The relief was unmistakable. If no one was killed here, then we might not experience reprisals. We could hope that nothing would happen.

  Once in the sea, I pushed aside thoughts of dry land. By the time we returned to the bulteok a few hours later to eat and warm up, our worries about last night’s events had diminished. If we could go back to boasting about what we’d caught, then maybe others would shrug off the raids as well.

  The U.S. colonel in charge was also dismissive. “I’m not interested
in the cause of the uprising,” Colonel Brown told a reporter on the radio that night. “Two weeks will be enough to quash the revolt.” But he was wrong. This day, April 3—Sa-sam—came to be called the 4.3 Incident, although we did not yet know that this date would be so important in our lives.

  Two days later, Jun-bu told me that the U.S. military government had created something called the Jeju Military Command. A more stringent curfew was set in place.

  “But how am I supposed to stay in our home between sunrise and sunset, when water needs to be hauled, fuel gathered, and pigs cared for?” I asked my husband.

  Jun-bu ran his hands through his hair. He had no solution.

  On the radio, we heard the commander of the Ninth Regiment of the Korean Constabulary explain that he was trying to negotiate peace: “I’ve asked for the complete surrender of the rebels, but they’re demanding that the police be disarmed, all government officials be dismissed, paramilitary groups—like the Northwest Young Men’s Association—be sent away, and that the two Koreas be reunified.”

  Naturally, neither side could agree to those conditions. After that, the constabulary brought in nearly a thousand men to strengthen their force on Jeju. Some of those men were sent to guard villages along the coast like Bukchon, Hado, and Hamdeok, for which, I’ll admit, I was grateful. Then—and all this we heard about either on the radio or through gossip—the constabulary climbed Mount Halla and attacked the rebels. By the end of April, Jeju City was completely cordoned off, and police were conducting house-to-house searches to weed out what they were calling communist sympathizers. But many people in the constabulary and the police were from Jeju. When they could no longer bear what was happening, they defected to the rebels in the mountains. We even had a few people leave Bukchon to join the renegades.

  Major General Dean, the U.S. military governor now in charge of Korea, came to our island to “assess the situation.” He repeated a rumor that the North Korean Red Army had landed on Jeju and now commanded the rebels. This was followed by rumors about North Korean naval ships and a Soviet submarine circling the island. These false stories cemented a hard-line policy. Major General Dean sent another battalion to Jeju. And while the order was that the U.S. Army should not intervene, it kept track of Korean operations by using reconnaissance aircraft. When I worked in the dry fields, those planes passed overhead, hunting for their prey. At night, I saw cruisers out at sea using searchlights to scan the horizon. When I went to the five-day market, vegetable peddlers from the mid-mountain area told me they’d come across American officers riding in jeeps or on horseback on Korean-led missions. By the end of six weeks, four thousand people had been arrested.