The Island of Sea Women Read online

  * * *

  Mi-ja came several times to the house, bringing gifts for the baby, packets of tea, and bags of tangerines—all such extravagances. I relied on Do-saeng, my father, and brother to turn her away:

  “Young-sook is sleeping.”

  “Young-sook is nursing the baby.”

  “Young-sook is not here.”

  Some of those excuses were real; others were not. If I was home, her voice insinuated itself through the cracks in the walls:

  “Tell Young-sook I miss her.”

  “Tell her I would love to hold her baby girl.”

  “Tell her I’m happy that such goodness came from such tragedy.”

  “Tell her I will be her friend forever.”

  Sometimes I peeked out to watch her walk away. She’d returned to Hado with a limp, which I hadn’t seen that day in the bathing enclosure. I heard people speculate about how she’d come to have it and what a shame it was that she’d lost her lovely gait. I didn’t care. I told myself that whatever had happened to her she probably deserved. Otherwise, I managed to avoid her. She went to the well early; I had a baby, so Do-saeng took Min-lee to fetch water. Like all little girls, Min-lee ran through the village to do errands for me and began caring for her younger siblings. “In this way, you are learning to be a wife and mother but also an independent woman,” I told her. “You need confidence and self-respect to lead your own household one day.” But having Min-lee out and about was also a way for me to elude Mi-ja.

  At night, after the baby was asleep, Do-saeng and I would go down to the bulteok to talk about the responsibilities that lay ahead for me. “You will sit where I am now,” she said. “You will need to listen deeply. You know how we praise Shaman Kim for her eye sensitivity and her ability to read a group’s mood? These characteristics you need to nurture in yourself.” She made me memorize breeding seasons for different sea creatures. She taught me new ways to tie knots and the importance of keeping the bulteok neat: “A haenyeo does not need mess around her,” she explained. “Too much clutter in the dry world has the ability to litter the mind when it needs to be clean and aware in the wet world.”

  Many of these things I’d already absorbed without knowing it, but to have them planted so directly gave me purpose. Over time, she turned to advice on how to settle an argument, how to calm the natural jealousy and envy that arose when some divers were better than others, and how to stay alert to dangers that might affect the collective.

  “You must keep track of the blood cycles for every woman. Sometimes a woman forgets that her time is coming, but you can whisper a reminder. Our local waters are usually safe, but a shark can smell blood from very far away. One shark, a collective can fight off. But a swarm of sharks . . .” She shook her head. Then, “One of the most difficult duties you will have is to tell a woman who has reached fifty-five that it is time for her to go home to her children and grandchildren.” When I pointed out that she was nearing that age, she said, “Exactly.”

  Finally, the diving ban ended. Do-saeng and I returned to the bulteok, and my father and brother came to the house to care for the children. Mi-ja dove with the collective in her part of the village, which was the group she would have joined if my mother hadn’t taken her in. So much malevolence and fighting existed all around us that it came as no surprise that the different enclaves in Hado would take sides. The people of Gul-dong, the section of Hado where I lived, stood with me; the people of Sut-dong, where Mi-ja’s aunt and uncle had cared for her, now felt sorry for her. This, after all the years of thinking her the daughter of a Japanese collaborator. But these were the times we lived in, where villages, families, and friends were divided, and you couldn’t trust anyone. The women’s fishing grounds, which had always been assigned, were now ferociously guarded by the women of the two factions. The sea became a place of territorial battles, old resentments, and continued bitterness. Home became my refuge, the place where I could shut out problems and focus love on my children.

  * * *

  A year passed and the first anniversary of the massacre at Bukchon arrived. Kyung-soo, not quite two and a half years old, was far too young to hold ancestor worship for his father, aunt, and brother, but his grandfather and uncle helped him. Do-saeng and I cooked for days, and then removed ourselves so the men could have their ceremony. Father guided my son, and together they placed offerings before the three spirit tablets that represented Jun-bu, Yu-ri, and Sung-soo. Neighbors paid their respects, with much weeping.

  In a separate ritual, the women in my family and collective went to the field where my mother was buried, since there were no graves for the other people I’d lost. Shaman Kim tapped me with her tassels. I hoped for messages from the dead that would calm my heart, but Jun-bu, Yu-ri, and Sung-soo remained silent. I was terribly disappointed. When the ceremony ended and I rose from my knees and turned to face my neighbors, I saw Mi-ja standing by the entrance to the field. Anger washed through me, flushing my face and constricting my breath. I suspected that her presence was why my loved ones had not sent messages. I walked straight to her.

  “You have not allowed me to visit,” Mi-ja said as I neared. “You’ve never given me a chance to explain.”

  “There’s nothing to explain. My husband is dead. My sister-in-law is dead. My firstborn son is dead.”

  “I was there. I saw.” She shook her head as if trying to drive out the memories.

  “So was I. You told me you had to protect your own family! You wouldn’t even take my children!”

  Muted gasps rose up around us. Mi-ja turned red—whether in anger or in humiliation, I couldn’t tell. Then her body stiffened, and her eyes went cold.

  “Every family on this island has suffered. You are not the only victim.”

  “You were my friend. We were once closer than sisters.”

  “What right do you have to accuse me of not saving your family?” she asked. “I’m only a woman—”

  “And a haenyeo. You could have been strong. You could have—”

  “I ask you again. Who are you to condemn me? Look at your own deeds. Why didn’t you stop Yu-ri from diving down again—”

  I staggered back. This woman, whom I’d loved, and who had—through her own actions and inactions—destroyed my family, was using a secret I’d confided to her against me. And she wasn’t done.

  “And what about your mother’s death? She was the best haenyeo. She went down with you and didn’t come back to the surface alive. Your kicking caused the abalone to clamp down on her bitchang. And you admitted you were inept with your knife—”

  Do-saeng, who for so long I’d believed saw me in a bad light for all the things I was being accused of now, stepped forward. On either side of her were Gu-ja and Gu-sun. They made a powerful trio.

  “This is a day of mourning for our family.” Do-saeng’s voice held the authority of a chief haenyeo. “Please, Mi-ja, leave our family alone.”

  Mi-ja held still for a few long moments. Only her eyes moved, slowly passing over the faces of people she’d known from childhood. Then she turned, limped out of the field, and disappeared behind the rocky wall. I did not speak to her again for many years.

  Big Eyes

  1950

  Five months later, on June 25, 1950, the north invaded the south. We called this the 6.25 War. Three days later, Seoul fell. On Jeju, the police demanded that all radios be turned in. I did not want to give them the wedding gift I’d bought for my husband. I considered all the places to hide it. Maybe in the granary. Maybe in the pigsty or the latrine. But those ideas were tossed aside when I saw neighbors not only had their carefully hidden radios seized but were arrested and not heard from again. I turned in the radio, and another piece of my husband disappeared.

  I didn’t know what was happening elsewhere in the country, but here on Jeju, in addition to the tens of thousands of refugees we had from the mountains still living in camps outside villages, we received more than a hundred thousand refugees from the mainland. Food bec
ame even scarcer. Human filth lay everywhere. Diseases spread. And more people were rounded up. Anyone suspected of being a communist—or having ever attended a meeting that might be considered leftist—plus their wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents—was detained. It was said over one thousand were now in custody on Jeju, including some from Hado. We never saw them again either.

  Those who’d been held in custody since the beginning of the 4.3 Incident were sorted into groups and labeled A, B, C, or D, depending on how dangerous they were perceived to be. On August 30, Jeju’s police were instructed to execute by firing squad the people in the C and D categories. The only good news in all this was that most members of the Northwest Young Men’s Association joined the army to fight against the northern regime.

  And still we haenyeo rowed, sang, and dove. When we’d first been allowed back into the sea, Do-saeng had paired me with a woman named Kim Yang-jin, who had married, as a widow, into our part of Hado. She was my age. She kept her hair cropped short. She had bowlegs, which gave her an amusing style of walking, but they didn’t seem to hinder her underwater.

  “As I enter the sea, the Afterlife comes and goes,” Do-saeng trilled as we headed to the open waters. “I eat wind instead of rice. I accept the waves as my home.”

  And we sang back to her. “Ill fate, I do have. Like a ghost underwater, diving in and diving out.”

  “Here comes a strong surge,” Do-saeng called. “Let us ignore it and keep diving.”

  “Our husbands at home, smoking and drinking, do not know our suffering. Our babies at home, crying for us, do not see our tears.”

  Far to our right, we spotted a boat filled with haenyeo. First, we had to make sure they weren’t from Sut-dong and that Mi-ja wasn’t among them. Several women grabbed their spears, knives, or prying tools, holding them low and out of sight in case we had to fight for our territory. Once we saw they weren’t our rivals, we rowed closer. I didn’t recognize any of the women on the boat. I glanced at my mother-in-law. She was ready for a confrontation, if these were poachers, but also ready to exchange information, if they were friendly.

  We pulled up our oars as we neared. The two vessels glided toward each other, rising and falling over the swells, until we were close enough that we had to use our oars as prods to keep the boats from crashing into each other. The chief of the other collective spoke first.

  “We’re sorry if we’re trespassing into your wet fields,” she said. “We decided to row away from home for a few days. We didn’t want to be followed back to our families.”

  “Where are you from?” Do-saeng asked.

  “We live to the east of Jeju City, near the airport.”

  They’d rowed more than thirty kilometers to get here. Something or someone had frightened them not just out of their territory but very far from home. The women on the boat, all physically strong, were clearly shaken. None would meet our eyes.

  “What happened?” Do-saeng asked.

  The other chief didn’t respond. Sound travels far across the water, and wind can carry voices even farther. I reached out and grabbed the tip of an oar from the other boat. The women holding that oar grabbed mine. A couple of other paired women did the same until we were close enough to hear low voices but not so close that we’d damage our boats. Now we could share information without fear that it would be heard by the wrong ears onshore.

  “We saw them dumping bodies in the sea,” the chief’s gravelly voice rasped.

  “In the sea?” Gu-ja, who was sitting at the back of the boat with her sister, blurted, too loud.

  “So many men . . .” The chief shook her head.

  Do-saeng asked a practical question. “Will they wash ashore?”

  “I don’t think so. The tide was going out.”

  Yet again, there’d be no proof of what had happened. But it also meant—and this was so disconcerting that my stomach flipped—the sea had become like our home latrines. Only instead of the cycle starting from our bottoms, going into pigs’ mouths, and then later our eating the meat from their bodies, which would later fall out of our bottoms, it was starting with our own people, who were even now being consumed by fish and other sea creatures, which we would harvest and eat.

  “What have you heard?” the chief on the other boat asked.

  My mother-in-law then revealed something that she hadn’t told me or the collective in the bulteok. “The haenyeo chief in Sehwa says that her cousin saw several hundred people shot near the airport. They’ve all been buried there.”

  I began to shake. Why, why, why did my countrymen have to turn on each other? Wasn’t the ongoing 4.3 Incident enough? Now we had an invasion and bloody war. To me, it was multiples upon multiples of sorrows and tragedy for families on both sides. We, the survivors, were linked together in an intricate web of grief, pain, and guilt.

  Do-saeng offered to let the women spend the night in our bulteok. “But in the morning, you’ll need to leave.”

  Over the following months, I found myself making offerings to different goddesses every day. I counted the ways I was lucky. One, my son was too young to fight. Two, the war never came directly to Jeju. That was it—One and Two—because in every other way these continued to be sad times. Those who’d participated in the uprising on Jeju and had been moved to mainland prisons were executed in case North Korean troops pushed far enough south to free those prisoners to fight by their sides. And right here on Jeju, high on Grandmother Seolmundae, rebels were still holed up, making weaker and weaker raids, unable to recruit new followers or resupply. The police continued to search and destroy camps and kill whomever they suspected of being rebels, even if that included a farmer, his wife, and his children. What I’m saying is that killing happened on both sides here on Jeju and on the Korean mainland. Guilty and innocent died every day across our country. This had been happening for years now. Imagine that for a moment. Day after day. Month after month. Seeing and smelling death, while mothers still tried to feed, clothe, and comfort their children.

  * * *

  Six months into the war, Do-saeng turned fifty-five. Everyone in the bulteok knew what that meant, but I took on the responsibility of saying the words.

  “My mother-in-law has led us for twelve years,” I said. “We have not had a single death or injury under the sea during her leadership. Now it is time for her to gather algae and seaweed and spend time with her grandchildren.”

  “Let us have a vote to elect our new chief,” Kang Gu-sun proposed. “I nominate my older sister, Gu-ja.”

  I did my best not to glance in Do-saeng’s direction. We’d earlier agreed that someone other than she should nominate me, and she’d been quietly working on my behalf, so this came as a surprise. A betrayal, even.

  “Gu-ja has always lived in Hado,” Gu-sun went on. “My sister did not marry out or move away. Most important, she has not been touched by grief.”

  Do-saeng asked for other nominations. None came. She called for a vote, and Gu-ja won unanimously. Every moment was colored by sadness for me in those days, but I think the other haenyeo took my subdued reaction for humility.

  “I will always be here to help Gu-ja,” Do-saeng said. “The deep-sea fields are gone from me, and I’ll miss them.”

  Later, when we returned home, Do-saeng handed me something wrapped in a piece of faded persimmon cloth. “I had hoped things would go differently today,” she confessed. “While it’s not the custom, I even bought you a present.”

  I peeled back the folds of the cloth and found a piece of glass surrounded by black rubber with a strap hanging from the back.

  “We’ve all suffered with our small-eyed goggles,” Do-saeng explained. “The metal rims press against our faces, and the sides limit our vision. This is something new. The Japanese call them big eyes. You’ll see better, and they’ll cause no pain. You may not be the chief, but you’re the first haenyeo on Jeju to have big eyes.”

  I thought of Mi-ja then with anger and confusion, as I often did.
I wondered how long it would be before she got big eyes too.

  The next time we went to sea, the other haenyeo in the collective were impressed, crowding around to look at my mask. I put it on, jumped in the water, and headed down. Looking through my big eyes, I began to forget the things I’d seen and the people I’d lost. My mind cleared and steadied as I searched for abalone and sea urchins. In just these few seconds, I understood that this mask would also be a way for me to protect myself from feeling anything about the woman who had once been my friend or from letting my emotions escape, if only by accident.

  Day 4: 2008

  Young-sook wakes up, folds her sleeping mat and blankets, and stacks them out of the way. Her wet suit and face mask hang from hooks, and her flippers lean against the wall, but she won’t be diving today. She steps outside and pads around the corner of the little house to the bathroom she added on to the exterior eight years ago. (She wasn’t quite the last person in Hado to sell off her pigs and buy a toilet, but she was close.) Once her business is done, she picks flowers from her garden and then heads for the kitchen. Standing at the sink, she trims leaves and thorns. She puts the ends of the stems in a small plastic bag, pours in a little water, and then seals it as best she can with a rubber band. Then she binds the bouquet with wrapping paper and ribbon. One task done.

  She takes a sponge bath at her kitchen sink, changes out of her night clothes into black slacks, a flowered blouse, and a pink sweater. Instead of her usual bonnet, she puts on a visor she bought the previous week at the five-day market. She packs her purse with the things she’ll need today, carefully cradles the bouquet, and leaves her house. She wishes Do-saeng were here to be a part of this day, but she died fourteen years ago at the age of ninety-five. There’d been other losses as well: Young-sook’s father back in 1980 from cancer and her third brother just last year from an aneurysm. She wishes they too could accompany her today.