“Very lucky,” Gu-sun agreed. “Now you have the security of another generation of boys to provide for you in the Afterworld.”
We left the bulteok together but parted ways almost immediately. I headed to my home perched on the shore. Do-saeng, now sixty-nine, still lived in the little house, but I found her in the kitchen of the big house preparing Joon-lee’s welcome-home meal. A wall was stacked with earthenware jars, filled with homemade pickled radishes, sauces, and pastes. To me, those jars were like stacks of gold bars, representing how far I’d brought my family.
“Joon-lee has always liked pork sausage,” Do-saeng said. “I’ve sliced this thin, so each person can have several pieces.”
After so many years, I knew my mother-in-law very well, and she wasn’t speaking a pure truth. Having Joon-lee return home from her first year at university was a big occasion, and I’d agreed to slaughter one of our pigs. We’d use every part of the animal for the celebration tonight, but the sausage wasn’t for Joon-lee. It was for the twins. Do-saeng loved to spoil her great-grandsons.
“What else have you made?” I asked. “And how can I help?”
“I used pork bones, bracken, and spring onions to start the broth for the stew. You can stir in the powdered barley to thicken it, if you’d like. Just remember to—”
“Keep stirring to keep it from getting lumpy. I know.”
“Min-lee should be here soon. She’s promised to bring tilefish for us to grill. And you brought things from the sea too, I hope.”
“I have a basket of baby abalones to grill. This I know Joon-lee loves.”
“She is our greatest hope,” Do-saeng said with a smile.
But, aigo, for the past seven years I’d never had a day when I hadn’t missed her. When she was at the all-girls middle and high schools in Jeju City, I only got to see her on special occasions. She even stayed in the city for summer school. “I want to improve my chances of getting into a better college,” she’d often repeated on those few days she visited. I thought perhaps the city had twisted her mind to have such a big dream, because to me it was miraculous enough that she was going to her special private schools. I should have known better, because whenever she came to Hado, she showed no desire to join me in the sea. Instead, she wanted to visit the new Village Fishery Association! The government on the mainland had sent books to create small libraries for each association so that a haenyeo like me could “improve her level of literacy.” But I wasn’t literate to begin with, so this gift felt like another insult. Joon-lee, however, loved those books. She systematically read every one. When the time came, she did so well on the entrance exam that she won a scholarship to Seoul National University—the top school in the country. I was stunned and very proud. Her attitude about it was different.
“During the war, half the students went missing,” she’d said when she received the acceptance letter. “They were either killed in battle or moved to the north. Just like here on Jeju, the mainland has fewer men. They need girls like me to fill the slots.”
Her older sister said what I felt. “You worked hard for this. Don’t dismiss it by acting like you didn’t earn your spot.”
I couldn’t predict what would happen in the future, but even now twice as many boys as girls went to middle and high school. Competition would become ever fiercer as those boys moved forward, but I would make sure all my grandchildren would go to high school, and maybe even college or university, even if it meant their parents and I would be separated from them for most of the year. Sometimes you must experience heartache to have a treasured result.
I heard Min-lee call, “Mother! Granny!”
Do-saeng and I ran outside.
“Look who I found in the olle,” Min-lee said. She carried her sister’s suitcase in one hand and a basket in the other. Next to her was my younger daughter, who looked completely different than when I’d waved goodbye to her on the dock nine months ago. That day Joon-lee had worn a skirt that came midcalf and a long-sleeved blouse—both made from persimmon cloth. Her hair had hung down in two braids. Now she wore a sleeveless dress with a hem many centimeters above her knees. She’d cut her hair in such a way that her new bangs hid her eyebrows. The rest of her hair had grown several inches and it swung loose and straight almost to her waist. Her twin four-year-old nephews held her hands. Her smile was big. She did not have a big butt. I’d been wrong about that, for which we were all thankful.
* * *
“No, Mother, I can’t go with you to the sea,” Joon-lee told me two weeks later, when the next diving cycle arrived.
“Don’t worry about the law—”
“I’m not worried about that. I can’t go, because I have to study.”
“Can’t I even get you into the sea to cool off?”
“Maybe later,” she said. “I need to finish this chapter.”
Maybe later. I already knew what that meant. Never. It was always the same two excuses. Either she had to study, or she needed to write letters.
This was the longest she’d been home since she was twelve, and it wasn’t going well. I loved my daughter, but she couldn’t stop complaining. She didn’t like to go in the ocean, because she didn’t have a shower to rinse the salt from her skin. She didn’t like to wash her hair in the bathing area, because her conditioner didn’t work well with salt water. She was unaccustomed to chores and didn’t get up early to help me or her grandmother haul water or gather firewood, but she would go by herself to the well to bring back a bucket or two of water to wash her hair. (I had her do it behind the little house so our neighbors wouldn’t see how wasteful she was.) She saved her worst complaints for the latrine: “It stinks! The pigs are groveling around right under me. And the bugs!”
We still had another two and a half months to go before she returned to Seoul.
“Tell me about the book,” I said, trying to find a way to connect. “Remember when you read Heidi to me. Maybe you could read this one—”
She looked at me with annoyance that turned to sadness. “Mother, you wouldn’t understand it. I’m trying to read ahead for the sociology class I’m taking next semester.”
Sociology. It wasn’t the first time I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“All right,” I said, turning away. “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you again.”
“Oh, Mother, don’t take it that way.” She put the book down, crossed the room, and put her arms around me. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”
She stared into my face, and I was taken aback, as I always was, by how much her delicate features reminded me of her father. I smoothed tendrils of hair behind her ears.
“You’re a good girl,” I said. “And you make me proud. Go back to your studying.”
But inside, I hurt. I thought of her like seafoam—drifting farther and farther from me—and I couldn’t figure out how to change its course.
* * *
Gu-ja, of all people, told me what sociology was. “It’s the study of how people get along. Gu-sun and I have a second cousin who does that work in Jeju City.”
That the Kang sisters had an educated relative in the city surprised me, but this also told me that I needed to adapt better to the changing conditions around me as I did, without thinking, to those in the sea.
“Do you mean how friends or family get along?” I asked.
“I suppose,” she answered, “but I think it’s more like what happens in our bulteok.”