The Island of Sea Women Page 6

  “The self, the family, the country, and the world,” Mi-ja recited. “They believed that every person on earth lives under someone else—all people beneath the king, children beneath their parents, and wives beneath their husbands—”

  “And now we have the Japanese.” Grandmother snorted. “They’ve turned us into a stepping-stone again, building airfields on our island so their planes can take off to bomb China—”

  “We can’t stop everything they do,” Mother interrupted, “but maybe we can force some change. I want you girls to be a part of that.”

  The next morning, Mi-ja was waiting for us in her usual spot in the olle. The air was frosty, and steam mushroomed from our mouths. We continued walking through the olles, picking up Do-saeng, Yu-ri, and other women and girls, all of us wearing white diving kerchiefs to mark us as past, present, and future haenyeo.

  “Hurray for the independence of Korea!” we shouted.

  “Stop unfair labor practices!” our voices rang out together.

  The five-day market in Sehwa was always crowded, but, on that day, it was even more so. The five leaders from the Hado Night School took turns making speeches. “Join us in our march to the district office. Help us deliver our demands. We’re strongest when we dive together. We’re even stronger when the collectives come together. We’ll make the Japanese listen!”

  Top-level haenyeo led us, but it was the presence of grandmothers, who remembered the time before the Japanese arrived, and girls like Mi-ja and me, who’d lived our entire lives under Japanese rule, that reminded everyone of our purpose. This wasn’t just about the forty percent discount price that the Japanese were imposing on the haenyeo. It was about freedom and our Jeju independent ways. It was about the strength and courage of Jeju women.

  Mi-ja’s eyes glittered in a way I’d never seen. She often felt alone, but now she was part of something much larger than she was. And Mother was right. Mi-ja’s presence did seem to make an impression on the women in our group, because several of them came up to walk by her side for a while so they could hear her shout, “Hurray for the independence of Korea!” I was excited too, but for very different reasons. This was the farthest I’d been from home. I had Mi-ja by my side. We held hands, while raising our other arms, fists clenched, to shout the slogans. We’d been growing closer—between all the things I’d taught her and all the imagination, stories, and joy she’d given me—but in this moment, we were one person.

  By the time we reached Pyeongdae, thousands of women had come together. Mi-ja and I linked arms; Mother and Do-saeng walked shoulder to shoulder. We entered the district office’s compound. The five organizers climbed the steps of the main building and began addressing the crowd. The speeches were more or less the same as the ones they’d made earlier, but they seemed to generate more energy with so many people listening and reacting, with shouts echoing what had just been said.

  “End colonization!” Kang Gu-ja called out.

  “Freedom for Jeju!” Kang Gu-sun roared.

  But no one could top my mother’s voice. “Independence for Korea!” For everything Mother did in her life, and for all the ways she protected and inspired the women in her diving collective, this was the moment of which I was most proud.

  Japanese soldiers came to stand between those making speeches and the front door to the district office. Other soldiers took positions on the edges of the crowd. The situation felt tense, with so many people shoved together. At last, the door opened. A Japanese man stepped out. Out of habit, out of fear, the five Hado women bowed deeply. From her low position, the one standing in the middle extended her hands to present the list of demands. Wordlessly, the man took it, went back inside, and shut the door. We all looked at each other. Now what? Now nothing, because there would be no negotiations that day. We all walked back to our villages.

  Before we left, Mi-ja and I had to make a remembrance. I pointed to a Japanese character etched on a door to one of the buildings in the compound. Mother was speaking to her friends, and, now that the excitement was over, the soldiers had lost interest too, so no one paid us any attention as we walked to the door and began our ritual. It may not have been the best idea, though, because two things happened simultaneously: four guards ran over to see what we were doing, and Mother yelled at us. “Get away from there right now!” Mi-ja, with the piece of charcoal securely in her hand, and I, with the completed rubbing tight in mine, dashed through the milling women to Mother’s side. Hyng, but was she angry! But when we looked back at the soldiers, they were bent over, hands on their knees, laughing. It was many years before we learned that the character we’d chosen for our treasure said toilet.

  * * *

  The march was one of the three largest anti-Japanese protests ever to be held in Korea, the largest led by women, and the largest for the year with seventeen thousand supporters. It inspired another four thousand demonstrations in Korea over the following twelve months. The new Japanese governor of Jeju agreed to some demands. The discount ended, and a few crooked dealers were removed from their posts. All that was good, but other things also happened. We began to hear of one arrest, and then another. Thirty-four haenyeo—including the five original leaders from the Hado Night School—were arrested. Dozens of others were detained during a crackdown to stop additional protests. Rumors spread that some of the teachers at the Hado Night School were socialists or communists, and many of them went into hiding or moved away. None of that stopped Mother from attending classes.

  “I wish you two girls could learn to read, write, and do basic math, because it will help you if, in the future, one of you becomes chief of a haenyeo collective,” she told us. “If I can save up enough money, I’ll pay for the two of you to come to school with me.”

  That sounded far more dangerous than marching in a demonstration, because the women who’d been arrested were being held precisely because of what their education had inspired them to do. But I wanted whatever Mi-ja wanted, and she wanted to go very much. My mother was her only hope.

  * * *

  Eight months after the Hado-led demonstration, Mother, Mi-ja, and I were once again doing farm tasks in our dry field. Weeding is awful—bent over all day, being wet to the bone from rain or sweat or both, the tediousness of the precision required to pull out the intrusive plants without damaging the roots of those we were growing. Mother led us in a call-and-response song to keep us distracted from our discomfort, but with Mi-ja by my side I could never complain too much. She’d become adept at fieldwork after toiling so long with us. Mother paid her in food, which she always asked Mi-ja to eat in our presence. “I don’t want your aunt and uncle consuming the results of your labors,” Mother said.

  We weeded and sang, not paying attention to the world outside the stone walls that surrounded our field. Mother’s hearing wasn’t good, but her peripheral vision was sharp, and she was alert for all dangers. I saw her leap up, with her hand hoe held before her. Then she dropped the tool, collapsed to the ground, and rested her forehead on her folded hands. All this I registered in seconds.

  Beside me, Mi-ja stopped singing. I started to tremble, petrified, as a group of Japanese soldiers strode into the field.

  “Bow down,” Mother whispered.

  Mi-ja and I fell to the ground, imitating Mother’s supplicant position. Terror heightened my senses. Wind whistled through cracks in the stone walls. A few plots over, I could hear singing as other women did their farm chores. The soldiers’ boots crunched through the field as they approached. I tilted my head so I could peek at them. The sergeant, recognizable by the polish of his boots and the insignia on his jacket, flicked the stick he was carrying, slapping it into the palm of his other hand. I lowered my eyes back to the dirt.

  “You’re one of the troublemakers, aren’t you?” he asked my mother.

  My mind scrambled. Maybe they’ve come to arrest her. But if they knew about her involvement with the demonstrations, they would have come for her already. Then my mind spiraled to a da
rker possibility. Perhaps one of our neighbors turned her in. These things were known to happen. The right piece of information could bring a family a sack of white rice.

  “Let the girls go home,” Mother said, which, it seemed to me, was hardly a proclamation of innocence.

  It may have been something else, though. I was only ten, but I’d already been cautioned about what soldiers could do to women and girls. I peered up again, needing to get a sense of when I should run.

  “What are you growing here?” The sergeant nudged Mother with the toe of his boot. Her body stiffened in what I first took to be anger. She’d proved her strength by becoming a haenyeo chief, so inside she must have been getting ready to fight them one by one. But then I saw the way her clothes vibrated on her body. She was shaking with fear. “Answer me!” He raised the stick above his head and brought it down on her back. She swallowed a scream.

  Behind the sergeant, other men yanked up plants and shoved them in satchels looped over their shoulders. This invasion wasn’t about my mother’s activities. Or doing bad things to Mother, Mi-ja, and me. It was about stealing our food.

  The sergeant raised his stick and was about to bring it down again when I heard Mi-ja whisper in Japanese. “Please don’t take our plants by their roots.”

  “What’s that?” The sergeant pivoted toward her.

  “Pay no attention to her,” Mother said. “She doesn’t know any better. She’s an ignorant—”

  “I’ll cut some leaves for you,” Mi-ja said as she started to rise. “That way the crop will continue to grow, and you can come again.”

  Silence grabbed the men’s throats as they took in what she’d said and how she’d spoken. Her Japanese was clear in tone. She was lovely in the way we’d heard the Japanese liked—pale, delicate features, with a natural subservience. In a flash, too quick for Mi-ja to tighten her muscles or try to move out of the way, the sergeant struck her bare leg with his stick. She dropped to the dirt. He raised the stick above his head and brought it down again and again. Mi-ja screamed in pain, but my mother and I didn’t move. One of the soldiers fingered his belt buckle. Another one, biting his upper lip, retreated until his back was against the stone wall. My mother and I remained completely still. When the sergeant’s fury had worn out and he finally stopped whipping Mi-ja, she lifted her head.

  “Stay down,” Mother mouthed.

  But Mi-ja kept moving, pulling herself to her knees and raising her palms upward. “Please, sir, let me harvest for you. I will pick the best leaves—”

  The men were suddenly as paralyzed as Mother and I were. They watched, as still as the ancient stone grandfather statues that could be found dotted around the island, as she struggled to her feet, then bent to peel off the outer leaves of a cabbage. With her head bowed, she offered the leaves to the sergeant with both hands. He wrapped his hands around her wrists and pulled her closer.

  The sharp metallic trill of a whistle cut through the air. The seven men turned their heads in the direction of the sound. The sergeant released Mi-ja, spun on his heel, and marched toward the break in the wall. Five of the soldiers followed right behind him. The sixth one, who’d shied away earlier, grabbed the leaves, stuffed them in his satchel, and took off after the others, preceding up the olle, going farther inland.

  Mi-ja collapsed, whimpering. I crawled to her side. My mother scrambled to her feet and whistled a series of notes—high and shrill like a bird’s call—to warn others working in their fields. Later, we heard two women were arrested, but right then we had to care for Mi-ja. Mother carried her back to our house, where she used warm water to help peel Mi-ja’s clothes from her broken skin. I held her hand and mumbled, “You’re so brave. You saved Mother. You protected all of us.” Those stupid words couldn’t possibly have lessened Mi-ja’s pain. She kept her eyes clamped shut, but tears leaked from them anyway. And they didn’t stop until long after Mother had applied salve to Mi-ja’s wounds and wrapped her legs in clean strips of cloth.

  The next day, a different group of soldiers came to our house, marching through the rain and mud. This time it seemed certain they’d come for Mother. Or perhaps they wanted retaliation against my family. My oldest brother took as many of the young ones as he could gather, and they ran out the back and climbed over the wall. I sat on the floor next to Mi-ja’s mat. She was in so much pain that she seemed unaware of the commotion in the courtyard. No matter what happened next, I wouldn’t leave her side. Through the lifted slats on the side of the house, I watched as the soldiers spoke to my father. Our house was owned in his name, but he was not in charge of our family. He could comfort a crying baby better than my mother could, but he was unused to adversity or danger. Surprisingly, they treated him courteously. Rather, courteously for occupiers.

  “I understand damage was done to your crops and some things were . . . taken,” the lieutenant said. “I can’t return what’s already been eaten.”

  The entire time the lieutenant spoke, his eyes flicked around the courtyard. The pile of tewaks against the side of the house, the stone Father liked to sit on to smoke his pipe, the upside-down stack of bowls we used for our meals, as though he were counting how many people lived here. He focused his greatest attention on Mother, seemingly assessing her.

  “I apologize for the misbehavior of the women in my household,” Father said in his fumbling Japanese. “We always want to help—”

  “We are not bad people,” the lieutenant interrupted. “We’ve had to crack down on troublemakers, but we are husbands and fathers too.”

  The lieutenant sounded sympathetic, but there was no way to trust him. Father bit a thumbnail. I wished he didn’t look so scared.

  The lieutenant motioned to one of his men. A bag was dropped on the ground. “Here is your compensation,” he said. “From now on, try to do as we do. Keep your women home.”

  That was an impossible request, but Father agreed to it.

  After that day, Mother stopped attending classes and meetings. She said she was too busy running the haenyeo collective to stay involved in demonstrations, but she was only trying to protect us. What had happened seemed frightening and demeaning. We believed that these were the worst times we would experience—Japanese rule, resistance, and retaliation. As for Mi-ja, the way she’d stepped forward to protect my mother forever changed our friendship. From that day on, I believed I could trust her with my life. So did my mother. Only Grandmother’s heart refused to soften, but she was an old woman and stuck in her ways. All of which meant that by the time Mi-ja and I turned fifteen—and Yu-ri had become a different person—we were as close as a pair of chopsticks.

  Life Bubbles

  November 1938

  Our routines didn’t change after Yu-ri’s accident. Even Do-saeng returned to the bulteok. We dove for two periods during the lunar month, for six days each, following the crescent moons when waxing and waning. Over the next seven months, my swimming skills improved. I could dive straight down now, even if I still couldn’t go that far. If I took several shallow dives, then I could risk a deeper one. I now understood how carefully Mother had orchestrated Mi-ja’s and my education. When I’d turned ten, Mother had given me an old pair of her goggles, which I’d shared with Mi-ja. When I’d turned twelve, Mother had taught us how to reap underwater plants without damaging their roots so that they would grow back the next season, just as we did in our dry fields. Now my ability to read the seabed for things I could harvest increased daily. I could easily recognize the differences between brown algae, sea mustard, and seaweed, while my skills at sensing prey—the poisonous bite of a sea snake or the numbing sting of a jellyfish—improved too.

  “You’re not only painting a map of the seabed in your head,” Mother instructed me on a bright fall morning as we walked to the bulteok, “you’re learning where you are in space. You need always to be aware of where you are in relation to the boat, the shore, your tewak, Mi-ja, me, and the other haenyeo. You’re learning about tides, currents, and surges, and about t
he influence of the moon on the sea and on your body. It’s most important that you always be mindful of where you are in that moment when your lungs begin to crave breath.”

  I grew more accustomed to the cold, shivering less, and accepting this aspect of haenyeo life, which could not be remedied. I was proud of my accomplishments, but I still hadn’t found, let alone harvested, an abalone, while Mi-ja had already brought five onto the boat.

  Mother lapsed into silence as we neared the spot in the olle where we picked up Mi-ja. We never knew if she’d be there. If her uncle or aunt wanted her to do something, then that took precedence, and Mother couldn’t interfere. If Mi-ja were sick, if they beat her, if they asked her to haul water from two kilometers away just because they could make this cruel demand, we wouldn’t know in advance.

  We came around the curve in the olle, and there she was. “Good morning!” she called.

  Beside me, Mother’s shoulders relaxed.

  “Good morning,” I said, smiling as I reached Mi-ja.

  “We should enjoy these next six days,” Mother commented, “because the water is still bearable. Soon winter will be here . . .”

  Mi-ja gave me a sidelong glance. It was obvious to anyone who knew my mother that she was different after Yu-ri’s accident, and it kept people from teasing her too much about the fact that I had yet to harvest an abalone. Still, on occasion, a diver might mock her: “What kind of mother are you, if you can’t . . .” Or “A chief needs to teach her daughter to . . .” The question or sentence would never be finished, because another diver would poke that first woman in the ribs or quickly change the subject to husbands, tides, or the estimated time of arrival of a coming storm. Everyone tried to protect my mother—until some other haenyeo would get caught up in a moment of exuberance and say something thoughtless again—because the responsibility for the collective now weighed heavily upon her. This was worrisome, because who hadn’t heard the stories of haenyeo haunted by the injuries or deaths of other divers? Whether from ghosts, guilt, or sorrow, a diver could easily be lulled into making a mistake. We all knew of the woman who lived on the far side of Hado. She began to drink fermented rice wine after her friend died and became so disoriented she let a surge push her onto a sharp rock. It sliced deep into her leg, shredding her muscles, and she was never able to dive again. Or the neighbor whose son died of fever, and she let herself be carried away by the waves. Or the unlucky one whose monthly bleeding had attracted a swarm of sharks.