The Island of Sea Women

by Lisa See

  On her third dive, her mind begins to relax. She tunes in to the thrum that connects her to the earth, to those she’s lost, to love. The way the blood pounds in her head makes her feel alive. When she’s in the sea, she’s in the womb of the world.

  And she forgets to be cautious.

  Young-sook dives deeper than she’s gone in years. The water pressure is harder on her now. She remembers when she could go down twenty meters . . . Deep enough to crush a plastic bottle. But that was before plastic bottles . . .

  Returning to the surface . . . Aaah. Her sumbisori sighs out across the swells. She takes in several panted breaths. She’s making many short dives in a narrow time span, releasing her sumbisori, then gulping in air for her next dive. She knows better, but the water feels so good. On her next dive, she’ll try for her old twenty meters, just to see if she can. One last intake of breath, then head straight down, kicking hard. Down, down, down she goes. She’s aware of other haenyeo watching her, which makes her bolder. Finally, for a few precious seconds, she’s able to forget the family she met on the beach, their photos, and their daughter, who looked so much like Mi-ja. But in those moments of forgetting, she loses track of the most important thing—air. Now she must return swiftly to the surface. She can see it . . . Then things start to go black . . .

  Her friends are waiting for Young-sook by her tewak when, unconscious, she breaks the surface. Together, they pull her to the boat. The boatman grabs Young-sook by the back of her wet suit, while the women lift her up from below. Once everyone is on board, the boatman pushes the throttle. One of the women calls for help on her cellphone. Young-sook is aware of none of this—her eyes closed, her body limp.

  An ambulance waits for them at the shore. Young-sook, awake now, already berates herself for being so foolish.

  The doctor in the emergency room is a woman, young, pretty, and born on the island to a haenyeo mother. Dr. Shin’s questions are nonetheless pointed and embarrassing. She ticks off a list of symptoms and possible causes. “Perhaps this is what you haenyeo call shallow-water blackout. It could have been caused by hyperventilation before your dive. I’ve seen several deaths from this. You take too many rapid inhales to expand your breath-holding capacity, but this type of hyperventilation lowers your carbon dioxide levels. This, in turn, can cause cerebral hypoxia.”

  The technical terms mean nothing to Young-sook, and it must show on her face, because the doctor explains, “When the brain stem forgets to send the signal that you need air, you pass out in the water. But you keep breathing . . . Water . . . If people hadn’t been there . . .”

  “I know. Quiet drowning,” Young-sook says, using the haenyeo expression for what happens when a diver loses her thinking capabilities and takes a breath as normally as if she were on land. “I wasn’t taking proper care with my breathing, but that’s not what happened.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “All right,” Dr. Shin says when it becomes clear that her elderly patient has nothing more to add. Then she goes on, musing to herself. “We can rule out a heart attack, but should we consider nitrogen narcosis? Deep diving can cause general physical impairment but also a feeling of euphoria—loss of judgment aggravated by forgetfulness that comes from exultation, for example. Some say these moments of bliss are what addict the haenyeo to the sea.” She purses her lips, nods sharply, and returns her focus to the woman before her. “Did you forget about breathing and the distance to the surface, because you were feeling elation, ecstasy, and joy—like you weren’t in your own body anymore?”

  Young-sook is barely listening. She aches all over, but she doesn’t want to admit it. How could I have been so stupid? she asks herself, sure the doctor thinks the same thing.

  “What about the cold?” Dr. Shin asks. “The human body cools very quickly in cold water.”

  “I know that. I dove in winter. In Russia—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard this about you.”

  So, Dr. Shin knows Young-sook’s reputation . . .

  “You should be more careful out there,” the doctor says. “You have a dangerous job. I mean, do you see men doing it?”

  “Of course not!” Young-sook exclaims. “The world knows that the cold water will cause their penises to shrivel and die.”

  The doctor shakes her head and laughs.

  Young-sook turns serious. “Actually, I’ve seen haenyeo die the moment they hit cold water.”

  “Their hearts stop—”

  “But it wasn’t very cold today—”

  “What does that matter?” Dr. Shin asks, letting her impatience come through. “At your age, even diving in warm weather is dangerous.”

  “I have some numbness on the right side of my body,” Young-sook suddenly reveals, but what she’s feeling is much worse than that. The aches have turned into burning agony.

  “Strokes are common for women who’ve been diving as long as you have.” Dr. Shin stares at her, assessing. “You look like you’re experiencing pain.”

  “I hurt everywhere.”

  The doctor’s eyes light with understanding. “I should have recognized this right away, but it’s hard when patients aren’t forthcoming. You’re a breath-hold diver. I think you’ve got decompression sickness—”

  “I didn’t go down that far—”

  “You haenyeo learned from your mothers and grandmothers, but what they taught you is the worst thing you can do. All those short breaths, followed by a deep dive, where you hold your breath for the entire time, and then the quick rise to the surface. And then you do it again and again and again? It’s terrible and very dangerous. You’ve got the bends. You’re lucky the air bubbles in your veins and lungs haven’t reached your brain.”

  Young-sook sighs. She won’t be the first haenyeo on Jeju to spend time in a hyperbaric chamber. Still, she worries. “Will I be able to dive again?”

  The doctor examines her stethoscope, refusing to meet Young-sook’s eyes. “There comes a point when you can no longer cheat the limits of the human body, but if I told you no, would you stop?” When Young-sook doesn’t respond, the doctor goes on. “What happens next time if you fall unconscious underwater? Sudden death at your age would not surprise me.”

  Young-sook shuts out the doctor, not wanting to hear the lecture.

  She closes her eyes as she’s wheeled through the corridors to another room. Nurses help her into a tube that looks like a coffin with a window that allows her to look out. She’s told she’ll have to remain in the hyperbaric chamber for several hours.

  “Do you want us to play music?” a nurse inquires.

  Young-sook shakes her head. With that, the nurse dims the lights. “I’ll be right here. You aren’t alone.”

  But in the chamber, Young-sook is alone. In the past, before we had modern medicine, I would have died. But in the past, I would have had Mi-ja to protect me. Things spiral from there, and all the thoughts she’s been trying to avoid since meeting that family yesterday crowd in around her.

  PART II

  Love

  Spring 1944–Fall 1946

  Leaving-Home Water-Work

  February 1944

  “Did my mother give birth to me only so I would have callused hands?” Mi-ja sang.

  “Did my mother give birth to me only to have future prosperity?” we sang back to her.

  “Look at how well our boatman goes!” Mi-ja trilled.

  “Money, money that doesn’t speak,” we responded, matching her rhythm. “Money, money that I take home. Go, boatman, go.”

  I much preferred this type of song to the usual laments the Kang sisters led about mothers missing their children or how difficult it was to live under a mother-in-law. Those two girls had changed since they’d become wives and mothers, and they weren’t nearly as much fun. They seemed to have erased from their minds that once they used to whisper about how they met boys in underground lava tubes or kissed someone atop a volcanic cone. They’d forgotten what joy it was
to sing for pleasure. Every one of us could complain, but would that make our situation emotionally easier or physically more comfortable?

  It was February, and the morning was still dark. The boat bumped over choppy waves off the coast of Vladivostok. The four of us huddled around a brazier, but its heat wasn’t enough to reach that place at the core of my body that shivered. None of us wanted to waste our earnings on tea, so we sipped hot water. I was hungry, but I was always hungry. The work combined with constant shivering—whether on land, on the boat, or in the sea—ate whatever stores I had in my body faster than I could replenish them.

  I wished I could be home on my island, but that wasn’t possible. When I turned sixteen, my youngest brother died from a fever that took him after three nights. Four times my father had been able to tie a golden rope strung with dried red chilies across our doorway to signal that a son had been born, and twice he’d tied pine branches to alert our neighbors that daughters—providers—had been born. If the family had been whole, Mother would have overturned Fourth Brother’s cradle before Halmang Samseung’s shrine to symbolize her release of him. But with Mother gone from us, this ritual was left to me. After Fourth Brother’s death, the faces of my remaining siblings went slack with grief and hopelessness. My sister, just eleven, was still too young to help. Without school to attend, my brothers lazed about the house or ran through the village and got into trouble. My father kept the house, visited men under the village tree, and refrained from bringing in a new wife, which meant only I could do something to change our destinies.

  After watching my mother die, I never wanted to see the ocean again, and I certainly didn’t want to dive in it, but I couldn’t avoid it either. Do-saeng had been elected head of the collective. No one could have felt guiltier than I already did for what happened to my mother, but Do-saeng made her views about me and the roles I assume she suspected I’d played in my mother’s death and Yu-ri’s accident known by assigning me to barren areas of a cove or reef. And still I needed to bring home money for us to buy food and other necessities. Fortunately, I had options. By now, a quarter of Jeju’s population had moved to Japan. The men worked in iron and enamel production; the women worked in spinning and sewing factories. Some, of course, were students. The only other legitimate way to leave the island was for women to work as haenyeo, diving from boats in other countries. I wasn’t a student and I didn’t think I could adapt to indoor factory work, so five years ago, when the recruiter came to the village in a flatbed truck looking for haenyeo to hire for a season of “summer earning,” I signed up for leaving-home water-work.

  “I’m coming too,” Mi-ja announced.

  I begged her not to do it. “The trip will mean hardship for you.”

  “But what would I do on Jeju without you?”

  We joined the Kang sisters, Gu-ja and Gu-sun, who had sons at home and had labored away from home for two seasons already. The four of us climbed onto the back of a truck—a first for me—and were driven to other villages until the recruiter hired enough haenyeo to fill many boats. Then we went to the Jeju City port, boarded a ferry, and chugged across five hundred kilometers of rolling seas to China. The following year, we traveled three hundred kilometers east over monster waves to reach Japan. The year after that, we bumped and rolled through the Strait of Jeju one hundred kilometers to the Korean mainland, where we boarded another ferry to take us to the Soviet Union. We’d heard it was the best for earnings. The last two years, Mi-ja and I had hired out for “summer earning” and “winter earning” in Vladivostok, which meant that we were gone for nine months and returned to Jeju for the August sweet potato harvest.

  So, for a total of five years Mi-ja had signed her name and I’d placed my thumbprint on contracts saying we agreed to be away from home. During that time, the world—and not just our island—was shaken. For decades, Japan had been a stable—if wholly hated—power on Jeju. Korea had been an annexed colony for thirty-four years. Yes, we had tensions. Yes, the Japanese colonists could abuse us without consequence. Yes, they could take advantage of us. Our only recourse had been strikes and marches, but the Japanese always triumphed in the end. Then, three years ago, Japan—not content with Korea as a colony or with invading China—had launched attacks across the Pacific. America entered the war and fighting erupted all around us.

  Mi-ja and I picked up news where we could—passing by the village tree when we were in Hado and overhearing the men in their discussions or listening to our dormitory’s radio in Vladivostok. When we were on Jeju, we saw with our own eyes that there were even more Japanese soldiers. They’d always been a danger to young, unaccompanied women, but they began to threaten women of all ages. They gave grandmothers, who’d once gathered on the shore to gossip and have fun, compulsory quotas of seaweed to collect and dry, because it was used as an ingredient in gunpowder. The risks for men and boys were perhaps the greatest as they were rounded up and conscripted into the Japanese army, sometimes without being given a chance to notify their families.

  Now here we were—on a boat off the shore of Vladivostok. I’d recently turned twenty-one, and Mi-ja would celebrate her birthday in a few months. I hadn’t once stopped being grateful for her companionship, her beautiful singing voice, or her bravery. There was a time we’d thought we would eventually grow accustomed to Vladivostok’s cold on land and in the sea, because the air temperature on Jeju could go very low. On our home island in winter, snow lay in drifts around the tide pools and our diving clothes froze when we laid them on the rocks to dry. But it turned out conditions on our home island were nothing compared to those in Vladivostok. Mi-ja and I told each other it was worth the discomfort, because we had reached the age when we needed to save enough money to get married and start our own households.

  The boatman turned off the engine. Our vessel bobbed in the waves like a piece of driftwood. Mi-ja, the Kangs, and I peeled off our coats, scarves, and hats. We were already dressed in our cotton water clothes with the lightweight cotton jackets to keep us warm. The others wore white, but I had on my black diving costume, because I had my monthly bleeding. Seventeen was a common age for bleeding to start, but it had been delayed for all of us by the daily cold and other hardships we experienced. We tied our kerchiefs over our hair, then stepped outside the cabin and into biting wind. I couldn’t see land in any direction.

  I made a personal offering to the Dragon Sea God, as I did every time I left the hard earth for the watery realm, following the custom for any woman who’d lost a relative to the ocean. I quickly grabbed my gear. Then, one by one, we jumped off the side of the boat. No place had colder waters than Vladivostok, where only the salt kept the sea from freezing. The constant shiver that always hid deep in my chest overtook my entire body. I forced my mind away from the physical torment. I’m here to work. I took a breath, pointed my head down, and kicked. I was aware of the boat engine starting and felt the change in the current as the boatman pulled away, leaving the four of us alone in the sea. The old man was not our safety net. He was only our driver. He stopped not too far away—within earshot—but not close enough to help if one of us got into trouble. He usually dropped a fishing line or net just to keep from being bored.

  Up and down I went. Mi-ja was always near, but not so close that she could grab something I already had my eye on. We were competitive but respectful of each other. We were also alert. We didn’t mind dolphins, but sharks were another matter, especially when I was bleeding into the sea.

  A half hour later, we heard the boat slicing through the water toward us. An octopus I’d spotted in a crevice retreated into the dark hollows from the vibrations. I’d come back for it later. We returned to the surface and swam to the boat, where the old man hauled up our nets. We climbed the ladder—the brutal wind slicing through our wet cotton suits—and hurried into the cabin. The brazier was going, and the boatman had prepared a trough filled with steaming hot water for us to soak our feet. Mi-ja’s thigh rested against mine. Our flesh had goosebumps and ou
r veins looked so thin and sad it was as if the blood within them had shrunk and slowed from the ruthless cold.

  “I found five sea urchins.” Gu-sun’s words got lost in the clattering of her teeth.

  The cold had an even worse effect on Gu-ja’s voice. “So? I found an abalone.”

  “Lucky you, but I got an octopus.” Mi-ja grinned, proud of herself.

  And on it went, because it was a haenyeo’s right and duty to brag.

  Despite, or because of, the dangers, hardships, and sacrifices, each of us was striving for one thing: to become the best haenyeo. We all knew the risks in prying loose an abalone, but catching an octopus was a bigger triumph—and a bigger risk. However, if one of us could reach the level of best haenyeo on this boat, then the captain would reward her with a new pair of shoes and a pair of underwear.

  “There is no impossible place for me in the sea,” Mi-ja crowed. Then she nudged me with her thigh, encouraging me to speak up.

  “I’m so good in the sea that I could cook and eat a meal underwater,” I boasted. None of them could deny it or top me, because I could go deeper and stay down longer than anyone else in our group. Back home, people speculated that it was because I’d waited with my mother until her death, expanding my lungs beyond the usual capacity of someone of my age and experience.

  When our half hour was up, we went back outside, grabbed our tools, and dove into the water. Once again, the boatman pulled away, so as not to disturb the creatures living on the seabed as we hunted for them. A half hour in the water, a half hour to warm up, back and forth. Some days we came to this site because it had a variety of things to catch. Other days we went to a rich abalone plot or to an abundant sea cucumber field. We’d even gone out at night, because it’s a known fact that you can find more sea urchins then.