The Island of Sea Women

by Lisa See

  “Look what I’ve done,” she said, taking back the book. “Here is a rubbing I did of a carving we had in our apartment in Jeju City. This one I made of the ironwork hinges on Father’s coffin. I made this one the day Auntie Lee-ok picked me up. It’s the pattern of the floor in my old room. It was the only way to save my memories.”

  The whole time I was trying to imagine what her life must have been like, living in the city, with a room of her own, surrounded by books.

  “Auntie sold our things. She said no one in Hado wanted to see reminders of my father. She also said she would use the money to feed me and send me back to school. Now that I’m here . . .” She jutted her chin. “You don’t have a school for girls. Auntie had to know that. She thinks my father was a bad man, so she only gives me seaweed and kimchee to eat. My father’s money has gone to buy pigs and . . . I don’t know . . .” After a long pause, her darkness evaporated. “You and your mother are the nicest people I’ve met since coming here, and this is the best day I’ve had since Father died. Let us, you and me, make a memory of it. Of this place. So we will always remember today.”

  Without waiting for me to agree, she tore a page from the book, placed it on one of the rocks at the entrance to our field, pulled out her lump of coal, and rubbed it on the paper. Rocks were nothing special to me. They were everywhere I looked. But when she put the rubbing in my hand, I saw the rough stone pattern of my birthplace, while the unintelligible words beneath the picture were part of a world I would never know or understand. Tiny pinholes where the coal and rock had punctured the paper seemed like the endless possibilities that the stars in the night sky promised. I felt like I’d been given something too special for me to keep, and I said so.

  Mi-ja considered that, and then pursed her lips, gave a tiny nod, and tucked the page in the book with the others she’d made. “I’ll keep it,” she said, “but it’s our memory. No matter what happens, we’ll always know where to find it.”

  * * *

  When you’re seven, you can say you’ll be best friends forever. It rarely turns out that way. But Mi-ja and I were different. We grew closer with each passing season. Mi-ja’s aunt and uncle continued to treat her terribly. To them, she was like a slave or a servant. She slept in their granary—barely bigger than a meter in diameter—between the main house and the latrine, with its pigs and smells. I showed her how to do chores and taught her the songs for grinding millet, knitting horsehair hats, netting anchovies, gathering pig excrement for our fields, and plowing, planting, and pulling weeds, and she rewarded me with her imagination.

  We have many sayings on Jeju Island. One of them is Wherever you are on Jeju, you can see Grandmother Seolmundae. But we also say, Grandmother Seolmundae watches over all of us. No matter where Mi-ja and I went—going to the fields, walking to the shore, running the few minutes between her neighborhood and my neighborhood within the larger confines of Hado—we could see her reaching for the sky. Her peak was covered with snow in winter. Chores were hardest then: hauling water in the bone-cold mornings, walking on ground white with frost or snow, wind so sharp it cut through our clothes as if we were wearing nothing.

  In the first and second months, Mi-ja and I helped Mother weed our millet and rapeseed crops, because it’s a well-known fact that men’s knees are too stiff for this work, and they are shy around sickles and hoes. Jeju was known for its five grains—rice, barley, soybean, millet, and foxtail millet. Rice was for the New Year celebration, but only if Mother had saved enough money to buy it. Barley was for the rich, who lived in Jeju City and in the mid-mountain area. Millet was for the poor. It was the food that filled our stomachs, while we could extract oil from rapeseed, so both crops were extremely important to us.

  That first winter, Mother also hired Mi-ja to work in the collective. “I’ll allow you to share the communal meal after the other haenyeo and I return from the sea,” Mother said. “Keep the fire hot and your mouth shut, and the others won’t bother you.” So Mi-ja entered the bulteok long before I did. She gathered firewood, kept the flames in the fire pit steady, and helped sort sea urchins, conch, and the agar-agar and kelp that the haenyeo brought to shore.

  This did not sit well with Grandmother, who said, “No one can ever remove the stain of her father’s activities for the Japanese, which is why no one other than you will hire her to do chores as they might another orphan.”

  But on this matter, Mother took a strong stand. “When I look at that girl,” she said, “I see someone who will always eke by on her wits and the hunger that drives her.”

  In spring, azaleas beamed magenta, purple, and crimson even from afar on Grandmother Seolmundae’s flanks. Fields of rapeseed gleamed as yellow as the sun. We harvested our crop of grain, plowed the field by hand, and planted red beans and sweet potatoes. At the end of spring, every family across the island stripped the thatch off their roofs. Mi-ja’s aunt and uncle made her haul away the old thatch, bring in new thatch, and do the best she could to pass stones up to the men to weigh down the thatch and keep it in place. When she was done, she came to my house, where Mother allowed her to help me sort through our old thatch to search for insect larva, which Mother boiled for us to eat.

  Summer brought the coolness of green to Grandmother Seolmundae’s slopes, but everything else was hot, humid, and rainy. Mother gave me my first tewak, which she’d made herself. I was so proud of it, and I didn’t mind sharing it with Mi-ja one bit. Since she’d lived in Jeju City, and without a mother’s wake to follow, she didn’t know how to swim. I took her to the tide pools where I’d played when I was three and four. We went on the very hottest days of summer to a shallow cove to splash and frolic with other Hado children. The Kang sisters were always there, and we loved to listen to them fight and make up. Yu-ri used to come with her brother, Jun-bu, who joined other boys his age to dive over the protective wall of rocks into the open and unprotected sea. We loved watching those boys. Especially Jun-bu. We wondered how someone so studious could laugh in such a carefree way.

  Sometimes Mother and the other haenyeo returned to shore at midday to nurse their babies. They would watch us, calling out to tell us to kick harder or to take a deeper breath to build our lungs. But mostly the mothers didn’t have time to come to shore during their workday, and the afternoon air was filled with the sounds of babies yowling in hunger and fathers murmuring soothing, but useless, words, for only a mother has the milk. By the end of our second summer, Mi-ja was swimming well, and we were beginning to practice diving down a meter or so to hide something under a rock for the other one to find or to touch an anemone to watch it close in on itself.

  Of course, summers were not just for play. During the sixth month in the lunar calendar, we harvested barley and dried it in the courtyard between the big and little houses. We helped Mother slaughter a rooster in a special ceremony; then we cooked it and served it to Grandmother so she would remain free of old-age illnesses. We learned how to mix ashes with seaweed to make fertilizer, which we carried to our field. We planted buckwheat, and weeded, weeded, weeded. And always, around 7.7 in the lunar calendar and August in the Western calendar, we made gal-ot, a special kind of cloth dyed in unripe persimmon juice. The tannin from the fruit prevented the cloth from holding odors or giving off sour smells, which meant we could wear it for days and weeks at a time without it stinking. It was also water resistant and worked as a mosquito repellent. Barley bristle didn’t stick to this type of cloth, and, because the persimmon juice strengthened it, our clothes didn’t rip, not even when we brushed against thorns. We used gal-ot for everything. Even Mi-ja, who’d outgrown her fancy city clothes, wore trousers, shirts, and jackets made from it. My clothes were passed down to my brothers and sister, but Mi-ja saved hers. “When I have children,” she said, “I’ll use the softened cloth for blankets and diapers.” The thought had not yet occurred to me that I might have a baby one day.

  Every fall, Grandmother Seolmundae’s slopes were aflame with leaves in yellow, orange, and red.
At this time of year, Mi-ja and I liked to climb oreum, the smaller parasitic cones Grandmother Seolmundae had given birth to when she erupted. We’d sit together—walled-in fields spreading out below us like a quilt, the sky cloudless, the ocean glittering in the distance, the taller oreum topped by ancient watchtowers, where beacon fires once warned islanders of approaching pirates. We’d talk and talk and talk. I loved hearing about Jeju City. To me, every story seemed more fantastic than the last.

  One day she mentioned that Jeju City had electricity. When I admitted that I didn’t know what that was, she laughed. “It lights up the room without burning pinesap or oil. There are lights on the streets. Colored bulbs brighten shop windows. It’s . . .” The space between her eyebrows creased as she thought about how best to describe the intangible to me. “It’s Japanese!”

  Mi-ja and her father had also owned a radio. She said it was a box with voices coming out of it, made in Japan. I couldn’t imagine that either. And it confused me to think that the cloven-footed ones could have so many marvelous creations.

  She talked about her father’s car—car!—and how he drove all over the island on roads that the Japanese had built, when all I had ever seen were pony-pulled carts and the occasional truck that came to our village to pick up haenyeo for leaving-home water-work in other countries. “Father managed road construction crews for the Japanese,” Mi-ja explained. “With his help, they connected the four parts of the island for the first time!”

  All I knew was Hado.

  “My father was well respected,” she told me. “He loved me. He took care of me. He bought me toys and pretty clothes.”

  “And he fed you.” I egged her on, because I loved to hear about all the dishes she’d eaten that I’d never tasted—buckwheat noodles with pheasant or spiced and grilled horsemeat from the mid-mountain area. To a little girl who had only tasted pig meat and sea creatures, it all sounded preposterous but delicious. And then there was sugar . . .

  “Imagine eating something that makes you smile so hard your face aches. That’s what it’s like to eat candy, ice cream, and pastries, or wagashi and anmitsu.”

  But when would I ever have a Western or Japanese dessert? Never.

  In Jeju City, Mi-ja had “playmates,” which were another thing I could not comprehend, not even when she described tag and hide and go seek. Who had interest in games that weren’t teaching you something practical like how to dive for top shell or gather seaweed? It was hard to imagine, as well, living in a house with its own attached garden with fruit trees and a pond in which the servants raised fish for the household, making it an impossibility that Mi-ja could ever go hungry.

  Mi-ja was aware of all she’d lost, so while talking about her past was fun for me, sometimes it made her feel low. That’s when I would suggest she bring out her father’s book. We’d sit side by side, turning the pages. It was a manual that her father had used in his travels around the island. In the beginning, Mi-ja could still remember the meaning of a character here and there—oil, east, road, mountain, bridge—but as the months passed, with no one to remind her, her ability to read waned. Still, there was something mysterious, magical even, about the characters on the page, and she liked to run a finger down a vertical line and “read” to me stories of goddesses and mothers that she made up.

  The saying You aren’t aware your clothes are getting wet in the rain suggests a gradual change and can be interpreted in two ways, one positive, the other negative. A positive story might involve friendship, which grows over time. First you are acquaintances, then friends, then a closer relationship develops, until you realize that you love each other. A darker example might be about a criminal. A person steals a small thing, then a larger thing, until finally he’s become a thief. The point is, you’re not aware just how wet you’re getting when the drizzle starts. Unlike most people, though, Mi-ja and I had physical proof that we were growing closer, because, as she had said on that first day, we were capturing moments with our rubbings. As precious as her father’s book was to her, she was never shy about ripping out one of the pages so we could make a rubbing together. One of us would hold the piece of paper and the other would rub the lump of coal over it so we could capture the ridged outline of a shell won in a swimming contest, the pattern of the wooden door to my house the first time she was allowed to spend the night, the surface of her first tewak, which Mother made for her, as though she were an actual daughter.

  * * *

  When we turned nine, the haenyeo of Hado helped plan an island-wide anti-Japanese demonstration. Mother had started attending the Hado Night School. As far as I could tell, she didn’t acquire much in the way of reading or writing, but she and her friends learned how to weigh their catches so they wouldn’t be cheated. She also learned about her rights. Inspired by a young male teacher—an intellectual and a leftist, Mother called him—a group of five haenyeo banded together to fight against rules that were being forced upon women divers by the Japanese. My mother wasn’t part of that core group, but she repeated what she’d picked up from them.

  “The Japanese don’t pay us a fair price. They take too high a percentage for themselves. Forty percent! How are we supposed to live with that? And some of their officials—collaborators—sneak our harvest of agar-agar through Jeju City’s port for their own gain.”

  Collaborators. Mi-ja shrunk into herself, pulling her shoulders up around her ears. Mother put a hand on the nape of Mi-ja’s neck to reassure her.

  “Resist,” she went on. “We have to resist.”

  News passed from one woman’s mouth to another woman’s ear, from one collective to the next, all around the island. Hearing so many complaints, the Japanese said they would make changes.

  “Except they lied to us!” Mother spat out. “Months have gone by—”

  Grandmother, who hated the Japanese more than anyone I knew, warned, “You must be careful.”

  But it was too late for that, because a plan had already been set. On a morning when the village of Sehwa held its five-day market, the haenyeo from Hado would march to the market, where they would gather even more haenyeo. From there, they would continue on to the district office in Pyeongdae to present their demands. Everyone was excited but nervous too, because no one could guess how the Japanese would respond.

  The night before the march, Mi-ja stayed at our house. It was early January and too cold to be outside gazing at stars, but Father had taken Third Brother out to see if he could walk him to sleep. Mother asked us to join her and Grandmother in the main room.

  “Do you want to come tomorrow?” Mother asked me.

  “Yes! Please!” I was thrilled to be asked.

  Mi-ja kept her eyes cast down. Mother liked Mi-ja and had done many things for her, but maybe an invitation to an anti-Japanese rally was too much to expect.

  “I spoke to your aunt,” Mother informed Mi-ja. “What a disagreeable woman.”

  Mi-ja looked up, pathetically hopeful.

  “I told her that if you accompany us it might do much to bleach the stain you carry of your father’s past actions,” Mother went on.

  “Ieeee,” Mi-ja squealed with joy.

  “Then all is settled. Now listen to Grandmother.”

  Mi-ja nestled next to me. Grandmother often told us stories she’d heard from her grandmother, who’d heard from her grandmother, and so on. It was through her that we learned about the past but also about what was happening in the world around us. Mother must have wanted to remind us of some of these things before the march.

  “In the long-ago days,” Grandmother began, “three brothers—Ko, Bu, and Yang—bubbled out of the earth to become the founders of Jeju. They worked hard, but they were lonely. One day, three sisters—all princesses—arrived in a boat heavy with horses, cattle, and the five seed grains, which had been given to them by Halmang Jacheongbi, the goddess of love. Together, these three couples created the Kingdom of Tamna, which lasted one thousand years.”

  “Tamna means ‘Island Cou
ntry,’ ” Mi-ja recited, showing how much she’d absorbed from past tellings.

  “Our Tamna ancestors were seafarers,” Grandmother continued. “They traded with other countries. By always looking outward, they taught us to be independent. They gave us our language—”

  “But my father said the Jeju language also has words from China, Mongolia, Russia, and from other countries too,” Mi-ja interrupted again. “Like Japan. Fiji and Oceania too. We even have Korean words from hundreds, maybe thousands, of years ago. That’s what he said . . .”

  Mi-ja’s voice trailed off. She could be enthusiastic, and she sometimes liked to show off the knowledge she had learned in Jeju City, but Grandmother never liked being reminded of Mi-ja’s father. Tonight, instead of hissing her disapproval, Grandmother simply went on. “The Tamna taught us that the outside represents danger. For centuries, we’ve been in a struggle against the Japanese, who’ve had to pass by us on their way—”

  “To loot China,” I said. I hadn’t heard of Fiji or Oceania, but I knew some things.

  Grandmother nodded, but her look of irritation made me decide to keep my mouth shut from then on. “Around seven hundred years ago, the Mongols invaded Jeju. They raised and bred horses in the mid-mountain area. They called the island the Star Guardian God of Horses. That’s how much they loved our pastures. The Mongols also used Jeju as a stepping-stone to invade Japan and China. We can’t hate them too much, though. Many of them married Jeju women. Some say it is from them that we gained our strength and perseverance.”

  Mother poured hot water into cups for us to drink. Once everyone was served, she picked up where Grandmother had left off. “Five hundred years ago, we became part of Korea and were ruled by kings. We were mostly left alone, because every king saw this as a place to exile aristocrats and scholars who opposed him. They brought with them Confucianism, which taught that social order is maintained through—”