“My father-in-law received a letter from Sang-mun, who says he’s learning a lot and won’t be coming home for longer than we expected. I can’t dive in the city, so I’m just another mouth to feed while my husband is on the mainland.”
Sending Mi-ja away for leaving-home water-work didn’t make a lot of sense to me, because Sang-mun hadn’t married my friend for her diving skills or her ability to earn money for him and his family, but so what? We were going to be together again. She started to laugh, and I joined in.
Over the next couple of days, we got to know the other girls. They were nice enough, although most of them had come less to earn money than to leave the dangers of where they lived on Jeju.
“I was diving with my collective when bloated bodies, like a school of fish, drifted into our field,” a girl with round cheeks recounted. She shivered in disgust. “They’d been in the water a long time, and their eyes, tongues, and faces had been eaten.”
“Were they fishermen?” I asked.
“Sailors, I guess,” the girl answered. “Their corpses were burned. From the war.”
“Japanese?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Not their uniforms.”
Another girl, whose eyes were set so far apart she looked disconcertingly fishlike, had lost three sisters. “They went to gather firewood one morning, and they never came home,” she told us.
It was said Japanese troops wouldn’t dare kidnap a haenyeo to take her to be a comfort woman, but who knew? If a haenyeo or any woman from Jeju was abducted and used for sex by Japanese soldiers, the loss of face and the depth of shame would be so great that she would never be able to return to our island home.
“At least we’ll be in Vladivostok and away from the Japanese occupiers,” someone said. “The USSR is fighting in Europe and has ignored Japan.”
“It’s more like the Japanese have ignored the Soviets,” the girl with the round cheeks responded knowingly.
Mi-ja and I never talked about the war; it cut too close to her family’s past. We never considered why we’d always felt safe in Vladivostok, but our haenyeo senses told us we were safe enough not to question what might be lurking behind every corner. We’d learned from our husbands more about world conferences, battle strategies, and the plans being made about our country in rooms far from our influence. Even so, we seemed less informed than these girls.
* * *
Mi-ja and I had our favorite boardinghouse in Vladivostok, but this time all twenty of us, plus In-ha, stayed in a dormitory. The room was long and narrow, with a lone dingy window smeared with soot and port grime at the far end. Some of the girls claimed beds on the three-tiered bunks. Mi-ja and I preferred to lay sleeping mats on the floor, so we could be next to each other.
The following morning, we rose, gathered our gear, and made our way to the dock. The boat wasn’t terribly big—there wasn’t enough room for us all to sleep on the deck or gather inside if bad weather befell us—but the captain was Korean and seemed reliable. Beyond the protection of the port, the boat rode up a wave before slapping down on the other side. My stomach rose and fell. The engine was strong, but the sea is infinite and powerful. Up . . . Down . . . Up . . . Down . . . I felt a little seasick, but I couldn’t have been as pale as Mi-ja. Neither of us complained, however. Rather, we put our faces into the wind and let the salty mists spray our faces.
When the captain shut down the motor and the boat bobbed in the whitecaps, we stripped out of our street clothes. Mi-ja tightened the ties on my water clothes, and I checked hers. We put on our tool belts, wedged our small-eyed goggles into place, threw our tewaks overboard, and then jumped into the water feetfirst. Bracing cold swallowed me. I kicked my feet beneath me to stay afloat. Still, the water was rough enough to smack my face. A breath, a breath, a breath, then straight down. Enveloping silence. My heart beat in my ears, reminding me to be careful, stay alert, remember where I was, and forget absolutely everything else. I wouldn’t be greedy. I’d take my time. For now, I simply looked around. I counted, one, two, three turban shells I could easily harvest on my next breath. I would make a lot of money today! I was just about to go back to the surface when I spotted a tentacle creeping sucker over sucker out of its rocky den. I held that spot in my head, then swam quickly to the surface. My sumbisori—aaah! I detached my net from my tewak, took some quick breaths, and went back down. When I got to the crevice, I saw not one but two octopuses, roiling together. I jabbed one and then the other in the head to stun them. Before they could waken, I stuffed them in my net and kicked to the surface. Aaah! Triumphant on my second dive!
* * *
Mi-ja discovered she was pregnant first. I expected her to cry and worry, and she did.
“What if I have a son who’s like his father?”
“If there’s a son inside you, he’ll be perfect, because you’ll be his mother.”
“What if I die?”
“I won’t let you die,” I vowed.
But no matter what I said, Mi-ja remained gloomy and apprehensive.
A week later . . . Joyous! That’s how I felt, even though I was hanging my head over the boat’s railing and throwing up. I too had a baby growing inside me. And Mi-ja and I weren’t the only ones on the boat. Most of us had been married for a year or less. And look! Eight of us were pregnant. Surrounded by so much happiness, Mi-ja’s spirits lifted. She was one of many. Of course In-ha wasn’t too thrilled.
Children bring hope and joy, but naturally every single one of us wished for a son. A couple girls had secretly known they were pregnant when they left home. This meant that babies would start to arrive within five months. Mi-ja and I figured we’d have our babies—if we were right in our counting—in mid-June. But we had to get through the first rough weeks of morning sickness. Each dawn, as we went to sea, all we needed was one haenyeo to throw up to trigger the rest of us. The boat captain didn’t mind if what came out of our stomachs went directly into the sea, while In-ha changed course and decided that each woman with a child growing in her belly would be even more motivated to have a large daily harvest.
We ate abalone porridge with all the organs nearly every day, knowing this was the most nutritious meal we could eat and that it would also train our babies to love the taste. Soon our stomachs began to swell, and we loosened the ties that closed the sides of our suits. We hoped our babies would be born “right in the field,” meaning they would take their first breaths on the boat or slip out when we were in the sea.
Pregnancy brings changes not only to a woman’s body but also to her mind. Things Mi-ja and I had once done in Vladivostok seemed silly now. We no longer dashed from place to place to make rubbings. We’d already captured those memories. Instead, we were growing our babies. By the time the bitter months of winter arrived, Mi-ja’s morning sickness was completely gone. It lingered for me, but I found the frigid waters brought instant relief. The moment of submersion into that cold seemed to calm my baby, put him to sleep, freeze him in place. As the months passed and our bellies grew, water offered new comforts. As soon as I was submerged, my aches were massaged, and the weight of my baby was buoyed. I felt strong. Mi-ja did too.