The first babies began to arrive. Mothers had no one onshore to care for their infants, so each baby was put in a cradle with a single rope securing it to the deck. As soon as we were in the water, the captain would leave us, as was the custom, but go not too far away. Newborns sleep a lot, and the rocking of the boat kept them calm. Nevertheless, as the morning wore on and we came back to the surface after a dive, we would hear not only the individual and unique sounds of each woman’s sumbisori but also the individual and unique cries of each baby. Lunches were lively and busy. The new mothers nursed their infants while shoveling millet and kimchee into their own mouths. The rest of us bragged and gossiped. Then it was back into the water.
In mid-June, Mi-ja went into labor in the sea. She kept working until the final hour, when In-ha and I joined her on the deck for the delivery. After all her foreboding, that baby practically swam out of Mi-ja. A boy! She named him Yo-chan. It was through the ancestral rights he would perform in the future that Mi-ja would be able to stay in contact with her family on earth when she went to the Afterworld. Once we got back to the dormitory, she made offerings to Halmang Samseung and Halmang Juseung—one a goddess who protects babies and one a goddess who can kill them with her flower of demolition—while I prepared a pot of buckwheat noodle soup for her to eat, since it’s known to cleanse a woman’s blood after childbirth. We did not have Shaman Kim here to bless the special protective clothes an infant wears for his first three days of life, but on his fourth morning Mi-ja packed away her worries.
I would have preferred to have gone into labor in the ocean and had my baby born in the field, but eight days after Yo-chan’s arrival, my water broke in the middle of the night. My labor was even easier than Mi-ja’s. What came out was a girl. I liked the name Min and added to that lee for her generational name, which Min-lee would share with her future sisters. I still needed to have a son, but what a blessing it was to give birth to someone who would work for Jun-bu and me and help make money to send our future son or sons to school in the years to come. Mi-ja made me the special mother’s soup, we made offerings, and then we waited three days to make sure Min-lee survived. To honor this most important moment in our lives, we traced the babies’ footprints on pages from Mi-ja’s father’s book.
The four of us were back on the boat within days. The babies lay side by side in their cradles, linked with all the other cradles. When we came back to the boat to warm up, we opened the tops of our water clothes, exposed our breasts, and let our babies latch on to our nipples. I was raised to follow the aphorism A good woman is a good mother. I’d learned how to be a good mother from my mother and then from being a second mother to my siblings, so I loved my baby from the moment of her first breath. Motherhood shouldn’t have come naturally to Mi-ja, but her connection to her son was instant and deep. Whenever she nursed Yo-chan, she whispered into his face, calling him ojini, which means “gentle-hearted person.” “Eat well, ojini,” she’d coo. “Sleep well. Don’t cry. Your mother is here.”
When our contracts ended, at the end of July, our babies were six and five weeks old. We took the ferry to Jeju. Our arrival was both frightening and hopeful. My entire life I’d seen Japanese soldiers, but now there were many more of them on the wharf. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, coming off ships, milling about, marching to and fro. It was stunning enough that Mi-ja, curious as ever, asked a pair of dockworkers, “Why so many?”
“The tide of the war has changed,” one of them answered in a low voice.
“The Japanese might lose!” the other exclaimed, before dropping his eyes so as not to be noticed.
“Lose?” Mi-ja echoed.
We’d all hoped something like this would happen, but our occupiers were so strong it was hard to believe.
“Do you understand the idea of a last stand?” the first dockworker asked. “The colonists say the Allies will have to come through Jeju to reach Japan. This is where the greatest land and sea battles will be! We’ve heard there are over seventy-five thousand Japanese soldiers living underground—”
“And there are more than that aboveground. They say another two hundred and fifty thousand men—”
“The Allies will step on us, crush the Japanese here, and then take one more step to Japan.”
I remembered how Grandmother used to talk about the Mongols using Jeju as a stepping-stone to invade Japan and China. More recently, Japan had used the island as a base for bombing raids on China. If these men were right, then we were to be a stepping-stone again, this time leading to Japan.
“Ten Japanese army divisions are here—many of them hiding! In caves! In lava tubes! And in special bases they’ve built into the cliffs right at the shoreline!” Fear had clearly pushed the second dockworker into his overwrought state. “They’ll charge their torpedo boats directly at the American navy ships. You know how the Japanese are. They’ll defend the island until all are dead. They’ll fight to the last man!”
Mi-ja raised the back of her hand to her mouth. I hugged Min-lee closer to my breast. The idea that the war would come to our island was terrifying.
“What should we do?” Mi-ja asked, her voice quavering.
“There’s nothing any of us can do,” the first dockworker said. He scratched his face. “It’s lucky you weren’t here three months ago—”
“The Japanese were going to move all women to the mainland and use the remaining men to help them fight—”
“But then the Americans started bombing us—”
“They bombed Jeju?” I asked, my concern turning immediately to my family.
“And they have submarines offshore,” the first dockworker said.
“They sank the Kowamaru,” the second one added.
“But that’s a passenger ship!” Mi-ja exclaimed.
“Was a passenger ship. Hundreds of Jeju people died.”
“Now the Japanese want every Jeju person to fight the Americans when they land—”
“Every Jeju person,” Mi-ja repeated.
“You should go home,” the second dockworker said. “Hope for the best.”
The pain of separating from Mi-ja and her son was made harder by the frightening news, because she would return to her husband’s home here in Jeju City, which surely would be the first target in an invasion. Mi-ja, who’d probably come to the same conclusion, had gone white. Sensing his mother’s nerves, Yo-chan began to howl. Urgency propelled us each to hire a boy to help with our things. Once Mi-ja’s boy had her purchases in his wheelbarrow, she turned to me.
“I hope I see you again.”
“You will,” I promised, but I was unsure.
I touched Yo-chan’s cheek. Mi-ja cupped her palm over Min-lee’s head. We stayed that way for a long moment.
“Even when we’re separated,” Mi-ja said, “we’ll always be together.”
She slipped into my hand a folded piece of paper. I opened it and saw some written characters. “Before we left, my father-in-law gave me the address for my married home in case anything happened to me,” she said. “I give it to you now. I hope you will visit me one day.” With that, she flicked a finger at the boy to get him started and then followed him through the banks of soldiers. I watched until she disappeared. She never glanced back.