She gives herself a small shake, looks around, hurries to catch up to the rest of the Hado group, and together they enter the memorial hall. Here, on a long, curved marble wall, are engraved the names of at least thirty thousand dead. Offerings of flowers, candles, and small bottles of liquor are heaped on a ledge that serves as an altar and runs the entire length of the room. Young-sook splits off from her haenyeo friends when her family approaches. She has enough flowers and offerings for them to present as a family, but she’s pleased that they’ve each brought something too. Min-lee, Young-sook’s oldest daughter, holds a bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane. Kyung-soo—paunchy and dull, Young-sook must admit—carries a bottle of rice wine for his father, a bag of dried squid for Yu-ri, and a bowl of cooked white rice for his older brother. These were things Young-sook’s husband, sister-in-law, and son liked six decades ago, but have their tastes changed in the Afterworld?
Min-lee’s eyes are swollen from crying. Young-sook takes her daughter’s arm. “It will be all right,” she says. “We’re together.”
The hall is packed, and people push and shove, eager to find the names of those they lost. People yell at each other to make room or get out of the way. Min-lee doesn’t shy away from using an elbow to jab those blocking their passage. They reach the wall. The rest of the family is right behind them. If this weren’t so important, Young-sook would feel desperate to escape the crush of bodies, the lack of oxygen, her sense of claustrophobia. Edging along the wall, Min-lee searches for the Bukchon section. Some villages have only a handful of victims. Others list name after name in row after row. People around them shout their discoveries. Others wail laments.
“Bukchon!” Min-lee cries. “Let’s find Father first.” Min-lee is sixty-three now. She was three and a half the day her father, brother, and aunt died. She’s strong by any measure, but she’s now so pale that Young-sook worries her daughter might faint. “Mother! Here!” Min-lee exclaims, her index finger resting on the engraved marble. The family parts to let Young-sook through. She reaches up to meet the spot her daughter has marked. Her fingers graze over the etched characters. Yang Jun-bu.
“Look, here are Auntie Yu-ri and First Brother.” Min-lee is crying hard now, and her children stare at her in concern.
Young-sook feels strangely calm. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a piece of paper and a nub of charcoal. It’s been decades since she made a rubbing, but she hasn’t forgotten what to do. She places the paper over the names of those she lost and rubs the charcoal back and forth. She’s about to tuck the paper inside her blouse next to her heart when she feels the eerie chill of people—strangers—staring at her. Suddenly self-conscious, she glances around. Her children and grandchildren are occupied making their offerings. But as they bow together, she sees that foreign family . . .
She sends a message with her face. Leave me alone. Then, without saying a word to Min-lee or the others, she dips back into the crowd, loses herself in the sea of people as she makes her way to the exit, and then hobbles down a path. She comes to a platform set above something that looks a bit like a bulteok with a low wall built of stones. Looking down into it she finds a bronze statue of a woman hovering protectively around her baby. A length of white cloth is draped around her legs and pulled to the side of the pit. Young-sook recognizes the image from all the memorials for lost or dead haenyeo she’s attended over the years. None of those ceremonies was more important to her than the one for her mother, and she remembers the way Shaman Kim tossed the long cloth into the water to bring Young-sook’s mother’s soul back to shore. Young-sook is so lost in her pain—with so many deaths and tragedies on her mind—that she startles when she hears a voice speaking the Jeju dialect in an accent tinged by Southern California and the luxury and benefits of limitless freedoms.
“My mom asked me to follow you. She wants me to make sure you’re all right.”
It’s that girl. Clara. She’s dressed suitably, for a change, in a dress, but of course she still has wires leading to her ears, feeding her music.
PART IV
Blame
1961
Years of Secrecy
February 1961
Jeju had always had a surplus of women, but with so many men and boys killed—with entire posterity lines wiped out—the imbalance was even greater. For the last eleven years, we women had forced ourselves to do even more than we had in the past. Those of us who ran our own households learned we could gather more wealth without husbands to drink or gamble it away. We contributed funds to rebuild schools and other village structures. We donated money to repair old roads and construct new ones. None of this would have been possible if we hadn’t been completely free to dive again. And to dive, we needed to remain safe, which was why on the second day of the second lunar month we washed our minds of all trivialities, and then met Shaman Kim for the annual ceremony to Welcome the Goddess.
We gathered on the beach, totally exposed, and the back of my neck prickled. What we were doing was against the law. Although the Japanese colonists had sought to ban Shamanism, the new leader of our country decided to end it once and for all. President Park Chung-hee had come to power during a military coup, and he approached his new job in the same manner. There were more kidnappings and instances of torture, disappearances, and deaths. He ordered all shrines to be dismantled. Shaman Kim had been forced to break her drums and burn her tassels. Things that were difficult to destroy—her cymbals and gongs—were confiscated. This came at a time when we all needed—wanted—to be cleansed of the blame and guilt we felt for being survivors. Some turned to the Catholic missionaries for help. Others sought comfort in Buddhism and Confucianism. But even though Shamanism had been outlawed, Shaman Kim, and so many like her across the island, did not abandon us.
We typically took precautions and hid our activities as best we could, but this annual event was too large to be held in private. Not just my collective but all the collectives from the different villages that made up Hado had come together. Unlike the Jamsu rite, which was for haenyeo alone and honored the Dragon King and Queen of the Sea, this ceremony included fishermen. The women wore padded jackets, scarves, and gloves. The handful of men stamped their feet, seeking warmth in movement.
“I call on all the gods and goddesses of Jeju,” Shaman Kim beckoned. “We welcome Yeongdeung, the goddess of the wind. We welcome all ancestors and spirits who accompany her. Enjoy the peach and camellia that are blooming. Embrace the beauty of our island. Sow the seeds of the five grains on our land. Sow seeds into the sea, which will grow into underwater crops.”
Offerings of fruit, bowls of rice, dried fish and squid, bottles of homemade liquor, and hard-boiled eggs spilled across the makeshift altar. Every woman and girl from our collective was here. Kang Gu-ja sat in a prominent spot. Her sister, Gu-sun, sat nearby, with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Wan-soon, beside her. Min-lee and Wan-soon had become friends when we moved back to Hado. Min-lee tended toward melancholy, for which I blamed myself, so to see the two girls giggling together was wonderful. Do-saeng and Joon-lee, who would turn twelve in the fall, sat together. Yang-jin, my diving partner, was next to me. At the far end of the gathering, as far as she could be from me, Mi-ja sat with her collective. Everyone had bathed and wore clean clothes, yet she somehow managed to look fresher than the rest of us.
Shaman Kim swirled in her hanbok. Her helpers had made a new drum from a gourd, since only the sounds from this instrument can reach the ears of spirits, and hammered flat a cooking vessel to use as a gong to waken the spirits of the wind and waters. Shaman Kim rang a bell, which she’d hidden during the raid of her home, to rouse the spirits who live on the earth. Her tassels were now made from shredded pieces of persimmon cloth. We feared for her, because if she was caught with any of these things, she would be arrested.
“I pray to the goddess of the wind to look after the haenyeo,” Shaman Kim implored. “Don’t let a tewak drift. Don’t let tools break. Don’t let a bitchang get stuck or let an octopus pin a haenyeo’s arms.”