When someone told me that the haenyeo collective in Gimnyongree had gotten permission to open a restaurant to serve police and army troops, I passed the information on to Gi-won. She called for a meeting in the bulteok.
“The haenyeo in Gimnyongree are hoping to prevent police violence, but we will not dive for the very people who are killing our own,” Gi-won said, adamant. “Wouldn’t we be truer to our island if we offered shelter, food, and clothing to the insurgents? These are our people. They could be our sons, brothers, or cousins.”
“We’d be killed if we were caught!” Jang Ki-yeong exclaimed.
“It’s better to go hungry together than to die,” Yun-su added.
“Why should we help them?” someone else asked. “The rebels steal food and kill those who try to protect what they grew. I’m afraid of bears as well as tigers.”
This saying had recently sprung up, and it meant that the police and the constabulary were to be feared as much as the rebels and insurgents.
“I don’t care who started what or when,” Ki-yeong said. “I just want peace.”
Not one person agreed to Gi-won’s suggestion. It was the first time we’d turned against our leader, and it showed that we’d lost all sympathy for the rebels.
* * *
More news filtered through the stone wall that protected Bukchon. In Tosan, soldiers killed all men between the ages of eighteen and forty. One hundred and fifty died. In Jocheon, two hundred villagers turned themselves in to the military to prevent being killed in a battle against the insurgents. All but fifty of them were executed anyway. We tried to tell ourselves that none of this could be happening, but it was. A third of Jeju’s population had been forced to relocate to the shore, and so many people had been killed that no one could guess the count. The skies were black with crows, who flew from one scene of death to the next. Picking at the dead made them stronger; they mated, and hatched even more crows. The flocks grew bigger and blacker. I couldn’t look at them without feeling ill.
American soldiers found nearly one hundred bodies in a mountain village, while another group of their soldiers stumbled across the execution of seventy-six men, women, and children in a different village. The Americans may not have actively participated in the atrocities, but they did nothing to prevent them either.
“Is not doing something their way of sending us a message about their real intentions?” Jun-bu asked.
Once again, I had no answer.
After men and young boys were killed in yet another set of mountain villages, the survivors—women, children, and the elderly—were housed in military tents set up by American soldiers in the playground of Hamdeok Elementary School. When there was no more room, the Korean Constabulary executed the surplus of people at the edge of a cliff, so they’d fall into the sea.
I was able to anticipate my husband’s question before he asked it. “Did the Americans with their tents and surveillance planes not see that?”
It worried me to see my husband’s frustrations growing, but the person I thought about most when I heard what had happened in Hamdeok was Mi-ja. She lived there.
We’d grown up with the Three Abundances, but we weren’t prepared for the Three-All Strategy—kill all, burn all, loot all—of the scorched-earth policy. The impact was hard for us to absorb. You hear about an incident but don’t see a mother, a child, a brother. You don’t feel the individual suffering, but we began to hear those stories too: A family was dragged from its home. The daughter-in-law was made to spread her legs so her father-in-law could mount her. When he couldn’t finish the deed, both were killed. I heard of a soldier who heated his revolver in a fire, then shoved it inside a pregnant woman just to see what would happen. Widows and mothers of sons who’d been killed often went mad and threw themselves off cliffs, sailing to their loved ones in the Afterworld. In one village, the girls were kidnapped, gang-raped for two weeks, and then executed, along with all the young men from that village. Wives were forced to marry policemen and soldiers, because marriage was a way to seize property legally. Some haenyeo sold off their dry fields to buy a husband or son out of jail. The most unfortunate women agreed to marry police officers in exchange for the release from jail of a husband, brother, son, or other male relative. Too often, those loved ones were killed anyway. These things I wished I could erase from my mind, but they would never, ever, go away.
I wanted our family to return home to Hado, where we could be with Do-saeng, my father, and my brother, but Jun-bu felt we should stay in Bukchon. “I need to keep teaching,” he said. “We need the money.”
Schools had remained open to keep boys and young men occupied. Jun-bu had struggled with his part in this, but he was right that we needed the money when we haenyeo weren’t allowed to dive. We were all hungry and getting weaker every day. My children didn’t have the energy to cry, but they whimpered at night. All I could do was make meager offerings to Halmang Samseung in the hope she would prevent my breast milk from drying up. If it did, I wasn’t sure how I would nourish Kyung-soo.
Life-Giving Air
January 16–17, 1949
Winters can be long and dreary on Jeju, and the January of 1949 was particularly so. One night, the wind seemed to blow worse than ever through cracks in the walls of the house. My children could barely move, because their clothes were so padded that their arms and legs stuck out from their bodies like branches. Jun-bu and I laid out our sleeping mats, all of them touching. Min-lee and Sung-soo crawled off their mats and snuggled close to us, seeking extra warmth. I held Kyung-soo in the crook of my arm. Even with the oil lamps off and the room in utter darkness, the children fidgeted from cold and hunger. We didn’t know how to explain our misfortune to them when we were having a hard time understanding it ourselves, but I knew that if I could calm Min-lee, then Sung-soo would quiet as well. A story might help.
“We’re lucky that our island has so many goddesses to watch over us.” I spoke softly, hoping my lowered voice would bring tranquillity. “But we have one real-life woman, who was as brave and persistent as any goddess. Her name was Kim Mandeok, and she lived three hundred years ago. She was the daughter of an aristocrat, who’d been exiled here. Her mother was . . .” I was not going to say prostitute. “Her mother worked in Jeju City. Kim Mandeok did not follow in her mother’s wake.”
Jun-bu smiled at me in the darkness and squeezed my hand.
“Kim Mandeok opened an inn and became a merchant. She sold the great specialties of Jeju—horsehair, sea mustard, abalone, and dried ox gallstones. Then came the Most Horrendous Famine. People ate every dog. Soon, only water was left over, and our island doesn’t have much water. Kim Mandeok had to help. She sold everything she owned and then paid one thousand gold bars to buy rice for the people. When the king heard what she’d done, he offered to repay her, but she refused. He said he would give her whatever she desired, but her single request was bigger than the moon. She asked to make a pilgrimage to the mainland to visit sacred sites. The king kept his word, and she became not only the first native-born islander but also the first woman in two centuries to leave Jeju to go to the mainland. It is through Kim Mandeok that the inconceivable became conceivable. She paved the way for your father and so many others to leave Jeju.”
“Kim Mandeok was a woman with a generous heart,” Jun-bu whispered to Min-lee. “She was selfless and only thought of others. She was, little one, like your own mother.”
The children drifted off to sleep. I placed the baby between his sister and brother and moved into my husband’s arms. It was too cold to remove all our clothes. He pulled his pants down over his rump. I wiggled out of mine. Our hunger and desperation—and all the death and destruction around us—drove us to do the very thing that created life, that said there would be a future, that reminded us of our own humanity.
* * *