They say, When the hen cries, the household will collapse. But we don’t have a saying for what happens when the hen dies. As the eldest daughter, I had always been responsible for my younger siblings. Now I had to provide their food and clothing and be a second mother to them. My father was no help. He was a kind man, but he shuddered under the added responsibility. Too often I found him outside, alone with his sadness. No man was built to shoulder the full weight of feeding and caring for his family. That was why he had a wife and daughters.
If family worries were not enough, the Japanese colonists gripped us ever tighter in the months after my mother’s death. She had once hoped to earn enough money to send my brothers to school, if only to age ten. The extra income I earned might once have helped pay their way. But even if we could have relied on my extra income, it was too dangerous, when those “lucky” boys who attended schools around the island were suddenly being forced to build underground bunkers to hide Japanese soldiers.
I felt pressured from every direction. I sought courage and inspiration in the ways my mother had. Wherever you are on Jeju, you can see Grandmother Seolmundae. I walked on the goddess’s flesh, I swam over and through her skirts, I breathed in air she had exhaled. I also had two living people I could rely on: Mi-ja, who was a survivor, and my grandmother, who loved me very much and had also suffered tragedies; and they trusted me to do my best for the family.
“Parents exist in children,” Grandmother said to bolster my confidence. “Your mother will always exist in you. She will give you strength wherever you go.”
And on those days when we walked to the sea and found Mi-ja waiting at her usual spot in the olle, Grandmother recited common sayings in hopes of comforting us two motherless girls. “The ocean is better than your natal mother,” she said. “The sea is forever.”
Day 2: 2008
The morning after the encounter with the family on the beach, Young-sook wakes early. She’s had a nearly sleepless night. All through the darkness, her mind was troubled, thinking about the foreign woman, her husband, and their children. She remembered all the rumors she’d heard about Mi-ja over the years: she was in America, living in a mansion, driving her own car, and sending money to her part of the village. But there were other stories too: she had a small grocery store in Los Angeles, she lived in an apartment, she was lonely because she was too old to pick up the language. Having met Mi-ja’s family, Young-sook isn’t sure what to believe.
She pads to the kitchen, heats water, stirs in tangerine marmalade, and sips the tart, citrusy drink. She goes to her kitchen garden to pick chives and garlic to add to her morning bowl of little-crab porridge. Then she returns to her room to get dressed, put her bedding away, and eat her breakfast. Dawn still hasn’t arrived.
When she was a girl, a haenyeo officially retired at age fifty-five. Those who continued breathing the air of this earth didn’t want to stay home, so they did water work on the shore. Times have changed. When she joins her grandson and his family in the big house for breakfast, she often announces, “I get lonesome at home by myself. I think I’ll go down to the sea.” What she means is she gets bored sitting around the house with her youngest great-grandchildren. Yes, she should enjoy those special times with the babies—something she wasn’t able to do with her own children—but they don’t have stories or tease or joke around. And working in the dry fields has never been, as her great-grandchildren put it, “her thing,” with all that stooped weeding, hoeing, planting, and harvesting. For her, life is better when she can live in harmony with nature—the wind, the tides, and the moon.
Young-sook can do what she wants, because she’s financially self-sufficient. No one ever paid her way, and no one ever will. She considers the sea to be her bank. Even if she didn’t have checks or credit cards, she could make money underwater. She’d always felt healthiest when she dove too, always felt healed in the water. Whenever she had problems in her life, she went diving. Of course, it’s dangerous, but every day something pulls her to the sea. When her body isn’t underwater, her mind is.
“I hear the ocean calling,” she tells her grandson this morning, and he isn’t about to fight her, and neither will anyone else in the household. Even long after she could have retired, she was one of the best haenyeo, with the most hard-won experience of tides, currents, and surges, the deepest knowledge of the nesting grounds for octopus, and her ability to hold her breath. How strange that these days it’s hard to find a haenyeo under fifty-five. They say that in another twenty years, the haenyeo will be extinct.
She has constant pain and ringing in her ears from decades of water pressure. She gets headaches, vertigo, dizziness, and nausea—as if she were always on a rocking boat. Her hips ache from carrying the weights she wore around her waist to drag her to the ocean floor when she started wearing a wet suit and the effort it took to fight against them when she needed to resurface. Those weights were in addition to paddling back to a boat or to shore with her net as heavy as thirty kilos with a day’s catch, and then dragging it onto dry land and back to the bulteok. Still, the unrelenting sea . . . It beckons her . . .
As she walks to the shore, Young-sook sees the remnants of the old stone bulteok and bathing enclosures, where these days young people go to meet in secret, listen to music, and smoke cigarettes. Such a waste. She veers left and joins other old women as they enter the new bulteok. It has individual shower stalls, changing rooms, air-conditioning, a stove, and a huge tub that can fit at least a dozen women, so they can rinse away salt water and warm up at the same time. It doesn’t have a fire pit, but it has a roof, and area heaters can be pulled out when needed. All these amenities, along with healthcare, have been given by the government as a thank-you for the work the haenyeo have done.
The women peel off their clothes. Breasts that long ago fed babies and gave husbands pleasure droop down to belly buttons. Once flat stomachs now ripple with rolls of insulating fat. Hair that was once lustrous black has dulled to white. Hands that have seen a lifetime of work are knobby, wrinkled, and scarred. Next to Young-sook, the Kang sisters yank and stretch their black neoprene pants up and over their sagging bottoms. Then they pull over their heads their regulation orange neoprene tops, which will make them more visible to passing boats.