Lab. I didn’t know what that was. That’s how far my daughter had come already.
Finding volunteers was not easy, though. These were still the years of secrecy, and we had reasons to be cautious. On September 21, 1954—after seven years and six months—the last of the insurgents were caught or killed, and the shoot-on-sight order for Mount Halla was finally lifted. The 4.3 Incident—although how something that lasted more than seven years could qualify as an “incident” didn’t make sense to me—was officially over. We pieced together information in a variety of ways. What we learned was staggering. Three hundred villages had been burned or razed, forty thousand homes destroyed, and so many people killed that not one family on Jeju had escaped untouched. On the mainland, Koreans were told not to believe stories about the massacre. The people of Jeju had always been suspicious of outsiders. Now we were even more so. As a result, our island had become more closed off. It was as if Jeju had once again turned into an island of exiles, all of us wandering souls.
Reminders of what had happened were everywhere. The man who walked on crutches because his knee had been shattered by a pickax. The girl, with burns on most of her body, who grew to marriageable age but received no proposals. The young man who’d survived months of torture roamed the olles, his hair uncut, his face unshaven, his clothes uncleaned, and his eyes unfocused. We all suffered from memories. Nor could any of us forget the throat-choking smell of blood or the crows that had swarmed in great clouds over the dead. These things haunted us in our dreams and during every waking moment. But if someone was foolish enough to speak a single word of sadness or was caught shedding a tear over the death of a loved one, then he or she would be arrested.
The list of restrictions was long, but none were more terrifying for me than those that limited access to education. No matter how bad things got, I had to do my best to make sure Jun-bu’s dreams for our children became real. This meant that while the idea of total strangers poking and prodding me had no appeal, I agreed to participate—and made my older daughter and mother-in-law participate too—because Joon-lee was interested in the project, and those men might help her in some way I couldn’t conceive.
* * *
We were told to eat a light supper, wear our diving clothes under our land clothes, and report to the laboratory the next morning without having eaten breakfast. Wan-soon and Gu-sun picked up my mother-in-law, two daughters, and me. The six of us walked down to the beach, where two tents had been set up. Between my daughter’s efforts and the team’s inquiries, they’d managed to find ten haenyeo—including the Kang sisters and my diving partner, Yang-jin—and ten women who did not work in the sea.
Dr. Park introduced us to the others on his team: Dr. Lee, Dr. Bok, Dr. Jones, and so on. Then he told us, “You will begin the day with thirty minutes of rest.”
Do-saeng and I exchanged glances. Rest? What an idea. But that was exactly what happened. We were escorted into the first tent, where we lay down on cots. Joon-lee stayed at my side, but her eyes darted from cot to cot, table to table, man to man. Although I could understand their Korean words, much of the meaning was lost on me.
“I’m using a nine-liter Collins spirometer to measure oxygen and convert that to kilocalories to establish a basal metabolism rate as a percent deviation from the DuBois standard,” Dr. Lee intoned, speaking into a tape recorder.
It sounded like gibberish, but Joon-lee seemed to soak up every word and action.
The next step was conducted by Dr. Bok, who put a glass tube in my mouth. He reported that I had a normal temperature of 37 degrees Centigrade and 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Across the aisle, my older daughter giggled when one of the white doctors placed something on her chest that had tubes running up to his ears. I did not like that one bit, nor did I like the idea that he would do the same to me. I was about to take my girls and walk out of there when Dr. Park cleared his throat.
“Yesterday I told you something you must know already. You have a greater tolerance for hypothermia than any other humans on the planet. In Australia, aborigines walk naked, even in winter, but their temperatures rarely fall below thirty-five degrees Centigrade. Men and women who swim across wide channels lose a lot of body warmth, but even they rarely drop below thirty-four point four degrees Centigrade. Gaspé fishermen and British fish filleters spend their days with their hands immersed in cold salt water, but it is only their hands. And then there are Eskimos. Their temperatures stay within the normal range. We believe that’s because they have a diet high in protein, and they wear so many clothes.”
The way he spoke was strange, but his animated bearing was even more foreign. Still, I wasn’t a fool, and I suspected he was using his energetic manner to distract us from what the other doctors were doing to us. One of them put a band around my upper arm and squeezed a rubber ball, which caused the band to swell and press into my flesh. What happened next was so swift that none of us had the time to process it fully. Gu-ja had the same type of band around her arm, but the scientists didn’t like what they were seeing. “Her blood pressure is too high to qualify her to be in the study,” I overheard one of the men say. Before anyone could object, our collective’s chief was escorted from the tent.
Dr. Park didn’t acknowledge what to me seemed stunning. He just kept talking. “We want to see how long you can stay in the water and what that immersion does to your body temperatures. We hypothesize that your shiver index is a latent human adaptation to severe hypothermia that is rarely, if ever, experienced in modern man or, in this case, woman.”
Of course, we had no idea what he was talking about.
“Could this ability have something to do with your thyroid function?” he asked, as though we might actually know the answer. “Does something in your endocrine system allow you to perform in the cold as well as small animals do on land and in water? Could you be like the Weddell seal that—”
“Tell that man to stop touching my daughter!” Gu-sun sat up on her cot and glowered so fiercely at a white doctor that he raised his hands and backed away from Wan-soon. “You need to tell us exactly what you’re doing or we’re leaving.”
Dr. Park smiled. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You and the others here are helping to create science—”
“Are you going to answer my question?” Gu-sun asked as she swung her legs off the cot. A few others did as well. Haenyeo or non-haenyeo, we didn’t like these men touching our daughters.
Dr. Park clasped his hands together. “I don’t think you understand. We respect what you do. You’re famous!”
“Famous to whom?” Gu-sun asked.
He ignored the question and went on. “All we’re asking is that you go in the water, so we can measure your shiver threshold.”
“Shiver threshold,” Gu-sun echoed. She snorted and jutted her chin, but I could tell she didn’t plan on leaving. By staying in the study, she had something over her sister, who’d been dismissed. None of this was to say I was comfortable. My desire to protect myself and Min-lee fought against my desire to help my younger daughter.
“Is there a way you can do the tests without . . .” I was a widow and hadn’t been touched by a man since the Bukchon massacre.
Dr. Park’s eyes widened in understanding, and his enthusiasm disappeared. “We’re doctors and scientists,” he said stiffly. “You are our subjects. We don’t look at you like that.”
But every man looked at women like that.
“And even if we did, we have this little girl here,” he added. “We need to protect her from anything improper. Her presence protects you too.”
Joon-lee blushed, but it was obvious she enjoyed being singled out.