We had only one newspaper on the island, but by the time a copy reached Bukchon the news might have been old, or it could have been wrong in the first place. Jun-bu also listened to the news on his radio, but one night he said rather glumly, “I think the station is controlled by the rightists, who, in turn, are controlled by the Americans. We have the gossip and rumors that pass from village to village, but can we trust anything we hear?”
I didn’t have an answer.
The Americans announced that on May 10 those of us living south of the Thirty-eighth Parallel would finally have our own elections. My husband’s spirits momentarily lifted.
“The Americans and the United Nations have vowed we will be free to vote as we wish,” he told me. But then reality brought him back to earth. “The Americans support Rhee Syngman as their preferred candidate. His biggest backers are former Japanese collaborators. Anyone who is against him is automatically labeled a red. Anyone who wants to punish former collaborators is labeled a red. That means that just about everyone on Jeju—including us—will be labeled a red.”
I worried about Jun-bu’s increasingly dark frame of mind.
A radio broadcast from a station above the Thirty-eighth Parallel offered an invitation to leaders from the south to go to Pyongyang to discuss reunification and write a constitution that would solve all our problems. In response, the U.S. military government and Governor Yoo strengthened their anti-communist crackdown on Jeju. Former Governor Park, originally appointed by the U.S. military, was the first to be arrested. He was famous, and people were shocked. Then the body of a young man was pulled from a river. He was identified as a protester. A witness to one of the torture sessions reported that the student had been hung from the ceiling by his hair and his testicles pierced with awls. There could not have been a mother on the island who did not imagine the grief she would feel if this boy had been her son.
* * *
In the early hours of April 3, we were roused from sleep by the sounds of gunfire, yelling, and people clattering through the olles. Jun-bu and I protected our children with our bodies. I was terrified. The children whimpered. The commotion seemed to last forever, but maybe it only felt that way because the night was so dark. Finally, Bukchon fell silent. Had arrests been made? How many people were shot, and how many had died? The gloomy shadows revealed no answers. Then we began to hear shouts.
“Hurry!”
“Come quick!”
Jun-bu got up and slipped on his trousers.
“Don’t go out there,” I begged.
“Whatever happened is over. People may be hurt. I must go.”
After he left, I held the children even closer. From outside, I heard men speaking in urgent voices.
“Look at the hills! They’ve lit the old beacon towers!”
“They’re sending a message around the island!”
“But what’s the message?” my husband asked.
The men muttered back and forth about it for a while longer but arrived at no conclusions. Jun-bu returned and lay down next to me. The children fell back asleep, curled around us like piglets. When dawn streaked the sky with pink hues, I quietly got up, changed into day clothes, and went outside. I was about to go to the village well when Jun-bu joined me.
“I’m coming with you. I don’t want you going alone.”
“The children—”
“They’re still asleep,” he said, picking up a water jar. “It’ll be safer to leave them here for a few minutes than to take them with us.”
We went to the front gate and peeked out. The olle was empty except for a few abandoned bamboo spears. We hurried to the main square, where we discovered that rebels had broken into the village’s one-room police station. Furniture littered the cobblestones. Papers drifted across the ground, pushed by the wind. A few uniformed men scrambled to pick them up. One man had a bandage on his head. Another limped. Some villagers had gathered under the tree to peer at a poster tacked to it. Jun-bu and I pushed our way to the front.
“Tell us what it says, Teacher,” someone said.
“Dear citizens, parents, brothers, and sisters,” he read, his eyes moving over the written characters. “Yesterday one of our student-brothers was found killed. Today we come down from the mountains with arms in hand to raid police outposts all over the island.”
The crowd murmured, confused, scared. Some voices of support rose for the rebels. Retribution had been exacted for the boy who’d been tortured and killed.
Jun-bu continued to read: “We will oppose country-dividing elections to the death. We will liberate families who have been separated by a line. We will drive the American cannibals and their running dogs from our country. Conscientious public officials and police, we call on you to rise up and help us fight for independence.”
I didn’t care for the language, but the sentiment was real to all of us. We wanted our own unified country. We wanted to choose our own future.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” men shouted, their arms raised. Soon women’s voices joined in. But Jun-bu and I had learned to be wary. We returned home to continue our own lives as word passed from mouth to mouth. By the time we’d eaten breakfast, gotten Granny Cho settled with the children and Yu-ri, and I’d made my way to the bulteok, every haenyeo seemed to have another piece to add to the night’s story.
“The South Korean Labor Party was behind the attacks,” Gi-won said once we were settled around the fire.
“No! It was rebels, plain and simple,” Ki-yeong said, scratching an ear.
“I heard five hundred insurgents came down Grandmother Seolmundae—”
“It was a lot more than that! Three thousand people joined the rebels as they went from village to village. That’s how they hit so many police stations at once.”
“And that’s not all. They blew up roads and bridges.”
“With what?” someone asked, dubious.
Before an answer could come, another diver exclaimed, “They even cut telephone lines!”
This was serious. None of us had telephones in our homes, so the line in the police station was the only way a village could call for emergency help from Jeju City.
“It looked to me like they were armed with little more than what we take into the sea,” Gi-won said.
“You looked?” Ki-yeong asked in awe.
“You think anyone would dare do something to me?” Gi-won jutted out her chin to make her point. “I went to my front gate. I saw men—and some women—carrying sickles, scythes, shovels, and—”
“They sound like farmers, not haenyeo,” Ki-yeong speculated.
“They are farmers,” her daughter said.
“And some fishermen too.”
“This isn’t about all that leftist and rightist stuff the men on the radio talk about,” Gi-won said. “It’s about not wanting to be told what to do by another country—”
“And reunifying the country. I have family in the north.”
“Who here hasn’t been touched? First, we had the Japanese. Then the war. And now all the problems of living and eating—”
“Was anyone killed?” I asked.
The bulteok quieted. In the excitement, no one had stopped to consider who might have gotten hurt or how badly.
Gi-won knew the answer. “Four rebels and thirty policemen were killed around the island—”
The woman next to me groaned. “Thirty policemen?”
“Hyun!”
“Aigo!”
“And two officers were lost in Hamdeok,” Gi-won added.
That was only three kilometers away. Mi-ja. Maybe I should have been more scared for her, but ever since seeing Sang-mun that day in the police station, I had to figure she was safe.
“Lost? What does lost mean? Did they desert?”
“They were kidnapped!”
Fear played across the faces of the women around me. Attack and retribution had become a way of life for us, and we were all anxious.
“No one died in Bukchon,” Gi-won said. “We can be grateful for that.”
The relief was unmistakable. If no one was killed here, then we might not experience reprisals. We could hope that nothing would happen.