The Mermaid from Jeju

by Sumi Hahn

When she died, her five hundred sons swore never to allow anyone to disturb their mother’s rest. They kept watch over her body, mourning for a thousand years, their tears blackening into stone. Whenever the winds blow, you can still hear weeping.

  Author’s Note

  This story was born in a Seattle hospital in April 2013. My father had just been admitted after collapsing from what would later be diagnosed as pancreatic cancer. While he dozed, attached to an IV, I settled into a chair beside his bed. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, I saw a woman cough, followed by the sound of crashing waves and the cries of sea gulls, as clear as if I were standing by the sea. After a moment of shock, I began writing as quickly as I could.

  During the following year, I raised my three children while accompanying my father to doctor’s appointments and chemotherapy treatments. I would wake at dawn to work, possessed by these strange images. The more I wrote, the more I began to believe that the tale was a true one, rooted in a reality I knew nothing about.

  As I tried to connect the story to history, it became clear that the events took place in Korea around the time of the Korea War. However, the details were baffling. The only female free divers I had heard about were the pearl divers of Japan. And why were American planes bombing targets in South Korea? Much of the narrative made no sense to someone who had no knowledge of, much less any interest in, the Forgotten War.

  Once the basic bones of the tale were excavated—another year as I grieved for my father—I had to flesh out the details. In October 2015, a year and three months after my father died, I traveled to Korea for further research. The trip would be my first to Korea as an adult since I left Seoul as a one-year-old infant. There had only been one other previous visit, when I was 10 and bedridden by chicken pox.

  I had already connected the story to Jeju Island, home of Korea’s deep-sea diving women, the haenyeo. The tragic events were linked to a bloody period of political unrest, referred to as the April 3 Incident in history books. I thought that I was mostly finished with the writing and that I was only traveling for a bit of local color, to add more authenticity to the tale. When I got to the island, however, that assumption was turned on its head. What I would learn on Jeju over the next three years would change everything—about the story and about my entire life.

  * * *

  An easy one-hour flight from Seoul, Jeju Island is located off the southernmost coast of the Korean Peninsula and is the largest of Korea’s three thousand-some islands. A UNESCO Natural Heritage site, Jeju is a tourist hotspot, popular with Korean honeymooners and Chinese tourists for its mild climate and natural beauty. Gorgeous and massive Mt. Halla, much of which is conservation land, dominates the landscape in every direction. Many Koreans, Jeju residents in particular, regard Mt. Halla as a sacred peak with spiritual significance, much like Peru’s Macchu Picchu, Japan’s Mt. Fuji or Nepal’s Mt. Everest—all tourist attractions as well.

  Jeju’s current sunny reputation, however, belies a darker past. Due to distance, size, and geography, Jeju—called Quelparte by the Dutch—developed a unique history, culture, and even language of its own, distinct from the mainland peninsula. During the Three Kingdoms period (50 B.C.-900), Jeju was known as Tamna, enjoying various degrees of autonomy until it was officially annexed and renamed Jeju in the early 1200s. The puppet-kings of the Goryeo Dynasty (900-1300) would cede to the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty of China later in the century, and Korea would become a vassal-state. The Mongols established a cavalry outpost on Jeju with the hope of using it as a staging ground for an invasion of Japan. Sturdy indigenous ponies, which had existed on the island since the Stone Age, were crossbred with Mongolian imports until the 1400s. To this day, horse meat is still served at speciality restaurants in Jejudo, and a record is kept of all pedigreed heritage stock.

  During the disintegration of the Mongol empire and the establishment of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1897), Jeju transitioned into an island of undesirables, a dust-bin where political prisoners, religious exiles, and former slaves languished alongside crossbred horses. Jeju islanders were considered second-class citizens, easily recognized by their distinctive dialect and often barred from traveling to the mainland.

  With the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, life on Jeju, which had always been difficult, grew even more so, as local men were conscripted onto Japanese ships and taken away to Japan as indentured labourers. Because of the chronic shortage of men, the women of Jeju, who had long been diving for sustenance, assumed the role of primary wage earners. When the close of World War II in 1945 removed the Japanese invaders from the Korean Peninsula, sixty thousand Jeju citizens were able to return to their native land, the vast majority of them men. They thought they were returning to the safe serenity of their island home, but they were wrong.

  * * *

  On my first trip to Korea I landed in Jeju City in the evening, reeling from jet lag. My guide picked me up and took me to a hotel on the beach, where I immediately fell asleep. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a nightmare and the feeling of being icy cold. All the windows of my hotel room had somehow blown open. I closed them and fell back asleep again.

  I was awakened again, this time by voices shouting in panic. I opened the door to see if the noise came from outside, but the hallway was completely silent. I went back to my bed and listened more carefully. The voices were somehow within my room but not—there is no other way to describe it. Shouts of “Gothis way!” and “Runaway!” were interrupted by random panicked screams. Finally, I heard a man screaming a very specific word: “Doguljengi! Doguljengi!” Because of my limited Korean, I had no idea what the word meant. I wrote it down phonetically in English to ask my guide to translate it the next morning. I lay awake until dawn, listening until the voices faded away.

  When my guide finally arrived, I asked him what “doguljengi” meant. Startled, he asked me where I had heard it. I explained what happened the night before. He cringed and backed away, studying me fearfully with his arms over his face. When he was satisfied that I was not possessed, he explained that the expression—“murderous thieves”—had been shouted by victims fleeing their killers during the April 3 Incident. He refused even to say the word. The location of the hotel I was staying in was known to be one of the more notorious massacre sites: so many people had been murdered on the beach that the sharks grew fat from the corpses.

  My guide begged me to consult a shaman. Apparently, I was seeing and hearing ghosts.

  Glossary of Korean Terms

  ahjumma—an older woman, with a dowdy connotation

  aigoo—an expression of frustration or dismay similar to “oh no” or “aargh”

  baksa—scholar. Today, a PhD would make someone a baksa.

  banchan—Korean side dishes that accompany rice

  bangsatap—a pile of stones, like a cairn

  bing-tteok—a buckwheat crepe filled with julienned radishes and other vegetables

  boshintang—dog meat soup, believed to have curative power

  bulteok—fire circle used by haenyeo to warm themselves

  dolchu—stone anchor used by haenyeo to hold their nets and floating gourds in one place

  doldam—the stone walls of Jeju, made from black volcanic rock

  dol hareubang—the stone grandfather statues that once guarded the entrances to traditional villages, they are now a ubiquitous Jeju icon for tourists

  dotchebbi—the Jeju term for goblin. In mainland Korea, the term is dokkebi.

  dwenjang—along with soy sauce (ganjang) and chili pepper paste (gochujang), one of the primary flavorings used in Korean cuisine. Made of fermented soybean, the paste is pungent and salty and resembles Japanese miso.

  eum yang—the Korean version of yin yang. Eum is generally associated with the female while yang is associated with the male.

  gashin—a minor family deity

  gosari—fiddleheads from bracken fern

  gumiho—a nine-tailed fox that would transform itself into a beautiful woman to
entrap men

  gwishin—ghosts or spirits

  haenyeo—the woman free divers of Jeju Island who forage for seaweed and shellfish in the waters around Jeju Island. Once the economic backbone of the island, their numbers are in steep decline.

  halmung—Jeju for grandmother. Mainland Koreans use halmoni.

  Hallasan—Mount Halla

  han—a rather complex term to express a quintessentially Korean sense of angst

  hangul—the Korean phonetic alphabet, created in the fifteenth century by King Sejong the Great.

  hanbok—traditional Korean dress, with a high-waisted tulip skirt and cropped jacket

  hindoongi—a derogatory term for white people

  jeong—A uniquely Korean sense of empathetic connectedness and social obligation between people

  jesa—ceremonial rites for the deceased

  gehsekki—literally a dog’s whelp; figuratively a bastard

  jook—rice porridge

  kimbop—rice roll wrapped in seaweed containing meat and/or vegetables; Korean sushi

  kkaennip—perilla leaf. This broad, serrated herb is mildly astringent, with a slightly peppery taste.

  kut—ceremonial rites conducted by shamans for spiritual purposes of varying kinds, often to communicate with dead relatives

  makgoli—milky white fermented rice wine made with cultures

  manggeon—headband worn by boys and men around their foreheads

  noonah—a younger boy’s term for an older sister

  ohmanah—an exclamation of surprise like “oh my!’ or “whoa!”

  ohrabang—Jeju term for big brother, as said by a younger sister

  olle—the old trails and walkways that once crisscrossed Jeju. Some coastline olle have been renovated and are now maintained as walking trails for tourists.

  omija—a type of magnolia vine whose medicinal berries are described as tasting of all five flavors at once: salty, sweet, sour, earthy, bitter

  Sim Cheong—In Korea’s famous Cinderella tale of filial piety, an impoverished girl is sacrificed to the sea king, which results in her becoming queen and restoring her blind father’s eyesight.

  soju—a clear vodka-like spirit so popular with Koreans that it is, by volume, the most highly consumed liquor in the world

  sollani—Jeju word for okdom, a delicious type of tilefish

  soondae—Korean pork sausage

  sunnim—monk

  sumbisori—the whistling exhalation made by haenyeo as they come up for air

  ummung—Jeju term for mom or mommy

  yangban—Korean noble class

  yobo—term of endearment used by married couples

  Readers Club Guide Questions

  Junja cannot help feeling guilty about her mother’s death. Do you think that she would have inevitably felt some form of survivor’s guilt regardless of the circumstances? How does the death of a parent change a person? At what age do you think that kind of loss is felt most keenly?

  Many kinds of love are featured in this story. Who would you consider to be Junja’s first love? Are all first loves doomed to end? What kind of love appeals to you more: the lightening strike of first attraction or a love that endures over a lifetime? Can a person have both kinds with one person? How does our ability to love change over time and as we mature?

  Junja eventually leaves the water, despite it being a major part of her. Have you ever had to leave something that was integral to your identity behind in order to survive or evolve? How difficult was that transition?

  Readers tend to split into two camps: Those who prefer the first part of the book (Junja’s story) and wish that the story had continued in that time frame and those who found the change in perspective to Dr. Moon a pleasant surprise. How does your group divide?

  Junja’s grandmother is a master storyteller who meets her match in Lieutenant Lee, a master manipulator of appearances. Do you think that the unique abilities of these two scheming plotters gives them additional insight into the perils of their historical moment? Does reading historical fiction like this story offer insight into the present political situation?

  A crisis can make or break a person (even an entire society). Junja experiences a crisis of faith that causes her to change her religious beliefs. What causes her crisis, and how is it resolved? Can you think of a crisis in your life or in society that had a transformative effect? Was this effect negative or positive?

  It’s a commonly held belief that the telling the truth is always the best path forward. And yet the white-haired shaman believes that “not all truths were meant to be told.” Similarly, the beautiful shaman holds back information because “this truth was not theirs to know.” Can telling the truth sometimes cause more harm than good? Might this harm be justified in the end? Is knowing the truth indeed a “right” that should be granted universally?

  The term synesthesia describes how the stimulation of one sense can trigger sensations in another area of perception. The word “nice,” for example, is often associated with light blue, pink, or yellow. Junja ultimately concludes that “love tasted necessary, like salt.” What does love taste like for your group? What is its color? Does it have a sound? A tactile feel?

  Ghosts appear everywhere in this novel, both literally and metaphorically. Do you have any personal experience with ghosts?

  This is a war novel, and there are five death scenes in it, with the protagonist dying in the first two pages of the story. But is this a violent story? How does depicted violence in language and in visual images affect you as a person and how you receive the story?

  Author Biography

  Sumi Hahn was born in Korea and immigrated to the United States when she was a year old. A former English teacher, she got her Bachelor’s in English literature from Harvard University and her Master’s from UC Berkeley. She was a columnist for the Times Picayune in New Orleans and has written on food and music for various publications in Seattle. Sumi and her family now live in New Zealand but divide their time between Korea and New Zealand. The Mermaid from Jeju is her first novel.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Sumi Hahn

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Alcove Press, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Alcove Press and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-440-3

  ISBN(ebook): 978-1-64385-441-0

  Cover design by Melanie Sun

  Printed in the United States.

  www.alcovepress.com

  Alcove Press

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: December 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1