But her mind was not on friendship. “Some women imagine committing suicide, but how can that be a path for a mother?” Her eyes glistened with tears. “I have Yo-chan. I must live for him.”
I’d known Mi-ja a long time, and I’d never seen her so melancholy. Not only was she experiencing the turmoil around us but she’d also had the cataclysm of losing her child. And then there was her husband. She didn’t look bruised, but I wasn’t seeing her naked or in her water clothes. I put a hand on her arm.
“Women live quietly,” I said. “However angry or broken a woman might get, she does not think about beating someone, does she?”
“My husband is married to a bad person.”
Her comment baffled me. “How can you say that?”
“I failed him. I lost the baby. I don’t bring home food. I don’t keep the house the way his mother did—”
I cut her off. “Don’t defend him or justify his actions as though what he does to you is your fault.”
“Maybe it is.”
“No wife asks to be hit.”
“Your mother was more understanding of men than you are. She said we should have sympathy for them. She said they have nothing to do and no purpose to push them through the day. They’re bored and—”
“But your husband can’t use those reasons! He works. He has his own life.”
This didn’t stop Mi-ja from continuing to make excuses for him. “He went through so much to come home.” Then she set her jaw. “His violence and cruelty are the way of the island these days.”
But he’d been violent long before our current troubles . . .
Helplessness settled over me. “I wish we could go back to the way things were when we visited in the olle every day—”
“But it’s not safe. We both need to protect our children.” So, we’d circled back to the beginning of the visit. After a moment, she added, “I hope our separation doesn’t last so long this time.”
“And I hope the next time I see you, a baby will be suckling at your breast.”
I walked her to the gate. Even as we said our goodbyes, I suspected I didn’t know just how bad things were for her.
* * *
On August 15, the Republic of Korea was formally established in the south. One month later, Kim Il-sung, with help from the USSR, founded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. Although the armies of neither the Americans nor the Soviets left completely, the division of our country appeared to be settled. It seemed like life had calmed down, and I’d be able to see Mi-ja again. But all through early fall, the different factions continued to fight on Jeju. The military was armed with machine guns and other modern weapons supplied by the U.S. Army, while the rebels protected themselves with Japanese swords, a handful of rifles, and bamboo spears. Then, on November 17, 1948, President Rhee placed Jeju under martial law and issued the first order:
ANYONE FOUND NOT WITHIN FIVE KILOMETERS OF THE COAST WILL BE UNCONDITIONALLY SHOT TO DEATH.
It was to be called the ring of fire. Anything and anyone found violating the order would suffer a scorched-earth policy.
When I went to the bulteok, we discussed what this might mean for us.
“Where will all the mountain people go?” one of the women asked.
“They’re being sent to the shore,” Gi-won told us.
“But there’s nowhere to put them,” another diver said.
“That’s the point,” Gi-won replied. “No one can hide at the sea’s edge.”
I asked the question I felt sure we were all thinking. “Are we in danger?”
Gi-won shrugged. “We already live on the safe side of the ring of fire.”
The next day, the rain poured down as though the heavens were weeping. Men in the Korean Constabulary, Jeju police, and U.S. military troops herded the first few hundred mountain refugees to the outskirts of Bukchon. The women and children did not look like troublemakers to me. Apart from little boys and a few old men who walked with their heads bent, I saw few males in the trail of anguish. I could only come to one conclusion: most men were already dead. The children did not talk or sing to make the burden of their situation less heavy. Families carried whatever they’d been able to salvage from their homes—quilts, sleeping mats, cooking utensils, bags of grain, earthenware jars filled with pickled vegetables, dried sweet potatoes—but they’d been forced to abandon their livestock. They made camp as best they could, building lean-tos from reeds and pine branches.
In Bukchon, we were ordered to use the stones that lay in our fields to build a wall around the village. Men, so unused to hard labor, suffered. Jun-bu came home with blisters on his hands, and his back ached. The job also pulled women from working in either their wet or their dry fields. Even children had to help. Once the wall was finished, we were forced to stand guard day and night, armed with homemade spears.
“If you let someone in who is proven to be a rebel,” a police officer warned us, “then you’ll all be punished.”
The refugees soon ran out of the food they’d brought with them. At night, moans of hunger drifted over the moonlit fields, through the rocky walls, and into my house. Whenever the wind shifted, the bad odors of unwashed bodies and no sanitation soured our nostrils, eyes, and throats.
One day as I was walking past the camp a woman beckoned to me.
“I’m a mother. You look like a mother too. Will you help me?”
Although mid-mountain people had always looked down on the haenyeo, our hurt feelings had moved to pity as we witnessed what had happened to them. So of course I asked what I could do.
“I’m not a diver,” the woman said. “I don’t know how to harvest from the sea. Can you teach me?”
I was willing, but when I learned she didn’t even know how to swim, I had to decline. When she started to weep, I whispered, “Come to my field tonight. I will leave a basket for you with sweet potatoes and some other things.”
As I gave her directions, she wept even harder. Soon I heard about other women in Bukchon who left food in their fields or by the wall to the camp. But after one of my neighbors was caught doing this, taken away, tortured, and killed for her charity, I did not take the risk again.
The refugees living outside Bukchon and other seaside villages had obeyed and come to the shore, but others—some fearful, some obstinate, and some rebels—fled inland and tried to hide in remote mountain villages or make new homes in caves or lava tubes. This was the worst thing they could have done. Grandmother Seolmundae couldn’t protect them, and the ring of fire became literal as entire villages were burned. Soldiers set fire to Gyorae. When people tried to escape, they were shot and thrown into the flames to destroy the evidence. Some of the victims were babies and children. In Haga, soldiers killed twenty-five villagers, including a woman in her last month of pregnancy. Then they burned the village. Nearly every day, when we rowed to the day’s diving spot, we saw plumes of smoke wafting from our great mountain and out over the sea.
I went to the five-day market, but there was nothing to buy. The woman in the dry-goods stand passed along what she knew. “U.S. ships have blockaded the island,” she said. “No supplies can be brought in to help those in hiding or provide food to the tens of thousands of refugees now living inside the ring of fire.”
She was clearly knowledgeable, so I asked, “What about food for us?”
The woman grunted. “No one on the island—not even those of us on the right side of the ring of fire—will be able to buy goods anymore.”
Worse—so much worse—there came a day when we were told that haenyeo could no longer dive. Japanese soldiers had once stolen our food and horses, but now our own countrymen were starving us. My husband and I each got by on a single sweet potato a day, so we could give more food to our children. But they lost weight, their hair turned dull, and their eyes began to sink into their heads.