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 the 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.
Now, when I looked at my mother, her body seemed worn from worry, from the pain of being under the sea, and from caring for so many others. She never had a chance to rest, because when we went home after our wet-or dry-field work, she still had much to do, including nurse Fourth Brother, now a chunky baby of eight months. The sun rose in the morning, mouths needed to be fed, and life went on, but laboring from before dawn until after dark was taking a toll on Mother.
When we reached the bulteok, she put on the face of a haenyeo chief. She dropped her basket next to the others and took her honorary spot by the fire. She told us where we would dive and how we’d be divided into groups. After we changed, the grandmother-divers went by boat with Mother to an area far offshore, the small-divers swam out with their tewaks to a spot a half kilometer from the beach, and the actual grandmothers and baby-divers, like Mi-ja and me, tended a nearby cove. It was every haenyeo’s duty to nurture our wet fields by cleaning and caring for them for future seasons and generations. The work was easy. I was happy, and I liked spending time with my grandmother.
When our group returned to the bulteok for lunch, Father and another man were waiting for us. Each carried a baby on his hip. Around their legs were other sons and daughters under five. The babies were crying, sounding like piglets held upside down by a single hoof. Father handed me Fourth Brother, who nosed at my nothing breasts. I didn’t have what he wanted, and his pink mouth became one long howl of frustrated craving. When the boat came to shore, the two mothers agilely leapt from the deck and ran over the rocks to us. They took their wailing babies into the bulteok, and in seconds the only sounds that remained were the rhythmic laps of small waves and the laughing of the remaining haenyeo as they made their way into the bulteok. Father and his friend walked off a few meters with their other sons and daughters straggling behind them. The two men sat on rocks, lit pipes, and spoke in voices too low to hear.
Mi-ja nudged me. “Let’s eat!”