Send a daughter to school? I wasn’t sure I could do that, despite my husband’s passion for education. Even if a girl could attend public school, I wouldn’t want to spend the fees to send her there. And the idea that we would send a daughter to a private school . . . Jun-bu must have sensed my thoughts.
“We can decide together what’s best for our children. The sea is important to you, and education is important to me, but on what I earn, I could never pay the tuition to send five, six, or seven children to school. I’ll need your help.”
“Seven?” I tried to calculate the school fees in my head. Impossible.
We both laughed, and he pulled me toward him.
“Even if we have only our daughter, I want her to have the same opportunities my mother gave me. She’ll go to school and—”
“But not if we have seven children! I’ll need her help to take care of the younger ones and later help put her brothers through school.”
“Brothers and sisters,” he reminded me.
I patted his back. So much wishful thinking, but what else can you expect from a man?
The next morning, I went from door to door, looking for a young girl or a grandmother I could hire to take care of Yu-ri and Min-lee. I found an older woman, who’d recently retired from life in the sea. Granny Cho agreed to work for five percent of what I pulled from the ocean floor for her home eating. That night, I rummaged through my belongings to gather together my water clothes, goggles, tewak, and other harvesting tools.
The following day, Granny Cho arrived early. The baby went to her easily. Yu-ri didn’t seem to care one way or the other that we had a stranger in the house. Every mother must leave her children to work, and every mother suffers, but we do it. After goodbyes, I picked up my gear and walked down to the bulteok.
“We wondered how long it would take you to come,” Gi-won shouted her greeting. “A woman is not meant for the household!”
Sometimes village collectives are unwilling to let a new wife join them. Perhaps their fishing grounds are small or have been overfished through bad management or greed, or they don’t care for the new wife, or her husband’s family has been a source of ill feelings or grudges, or her skills are not good enough to adapt to new waters. This was not the case for me.
“Hey, your husband is my son’s teacher,” a woman yelled. “Come sit here with me!”
“I live very close to you,” another woman called out. “My name is Jang Ki-yeong. That’s my daughter.” The woman pointed across the circle to a young girl, who waved, encouraging me to come over. Ki-yeong just laughed. “Stop it, Yun-su. You and the others are only baby-divers. Young-sook looks to be a small-diver.”
“We will see,” said Gi-won. “For now, sit with Ki-yeong. You’ll dive with her today. She’ll test your skills, and tomorrow I’ll let you know with which group you’ll sit.” As I made my way to Ki-yeong, Gi-won addressed the group. “Now, where shall we dive today? I was thinking . . .”
Later, we rowed out to sea. A long pull through the water’s resistance, then a heave of the oar over the swells, then the dip back into the sea, followed by another hard pull. For the last few years, I’d worked as an itinerant laborer on a boat powered by a motor. I hadn’t lost all the strength in my arms, but I’d surely be sore tomorrow. What a good feeling that was!
We didn’t go too far out, and our dives took us down only ten meters. But even in these relatively shallow waters, the seafloor was abundant with life. For a woman who’d never entered new waters and only knew the wet fields where she’d dived with her mother, sisters, cousins, and haenyeo of her natal village’s collective, the experience might have been daunting. But I’d dived in the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the East China Sea. Every new diving spot is different, because the ocean—while one vast entity—is varied and complex. Just as on land, it has mountains, canyons, sand, and rocks. Also, just as on land, it has different types of animals: some predators, others prey, some loving the sun, others preferring the dark safety of a cave or crevasse. The plants, too, tell us that the land and sea are but mirror images of each other—with forests, flowers, algae, and so much more. I may not have been here before, but I was in my truest home, and it showed. Gi-won was impressed, and she rewarded me with a seat between the small-divers and the granny-divers.
“Even though Young-sook is barely married, her skills are very advanced,” Gi-won explained to the collective. “Young-sook, we welcome your sumbisori.”
Two weeks later, as we rowed to sea, a wave of nausea washed over me. I knew immediately what it meant. My smile was big and wide, and then I had to pull in my oar, lean over the side of the boat, and throw up my breakfast. It was as hot with chilies coming up as it had been going down. The other haenyeo cheered for me.
“Let it be a girl!” Gi-won shouted. “One day she will join our collective!”
“Let it be a son!” Ki-yeong exclaimed. “Young-sook still needs one.”
“Let it be healthy,” my husband said, when I got home.
“No woman can ever underestimate the sentimentality of a man,” Gi-won averred the next day, and we all agreed.
* * *
At the end of September, a group of American officers arrived on Jeju to accept the surrender of those Japanese who’d remained on the island, hidden underground. We were told the Americans would bring democracy and quash communism, but most of us didn’t know the difference between the two. We wanted to be left alone to have control over our own lives. We didn’t even want mainlanders to interfere. Meanwhile, the Americans dumped Japanese rifles and artillery into the sea, exploded tanks, and set aircraft on fire. The booming woke the elderly from their naps. The acrid smoke—blown about by Jeju’s erratic winds—stung our eyes, burned our lungs, and soured our tongues.
“It is not a diving period now. Perhaps you should take a day to visit your friend in the city,” Jun-bu suggested. “The air might be better for you and Min-lee.”
It was a perfect idea, but I didn’t want to leave Jun-bu alone. Still, he insisted. For days, I scavenged for gifts to bring: mushrooms picked on the side of an oreum, mugwort gathered shoreside in case Mi-ja needed to clean glass, and seaweed so she might flavor her husband’s soup. All these things I packed into a basket. Jun-bu gave Mi-ja’s address to the cart driver, and I was off to see my friend.