The Island of Sea Women

by Lisa See

  The policeman, up so high, pulled sharply on the reins, trying to turn the animal. As a crowd, we realized he wasn’t going to dismount to offer help, even though what had happened was clearly an accident. A chorus of voices called, “Get him! Get him! Get him!” People threw stones, which further startled the horse. The rider kicked the animal’s withers. It danced from side to side, trying to make its way through the crowd.

  “He’s heading to the police station!” someone shouted.

  “Don’t let him get away!”

  The chants turned to “Black dog! Black dog!”

  We came around a corner and into a large square. Police stood on the broad steps leading to the entrance of the station, with their bayonets thrust threateningly before them. They didn’t know what had happened. All they saw was an angry mob rushing toward them. The demonstrators near the front tried to stop, turn around, and flee, but we were in a raging sea, being pushed this way and that. We heard several popping sounds. This was followed by an eerie moment of silence, with everyone frozen in place, assessing. Then the screams began. People scattered in every direction. Amid the chaos, Mi-ja pulled the kids and me into a doorway. As the crowd thinned, we saw little islands of people dotting the square. At the center of each group, lying on the ground, a person. Some wailed in agony from their wounds. Death silence hung over others. An infant’s cries hiccuped through the square. Mi-ja and I looked at each other. We had to help.

  With our children still in our arms, we trotted in the direction of the sound. We reached a woman, who lay facedown. A bullet had entered her back. Her body lay partially atop her baby. We set down Yo-chan and Min-lee next to each other, so Mi-ja could lift the dead woman’s shoulder and I could pull out the infant. Her mouth was a pink hole from which the most pitiable cries squawked out. Her eyes were squeezed so tightly shut that I could see where she’d have wrinkles one day. She was covered in blood.

  Mi-ja and I rose together. I put the baby on my shoulder and patted her, while Mi-ja checked to see if she was injured. We were both concentrating so hard that when Sang-mun grabbed Mi-ja’s arm and jerked her away from me, we were completely startled.

  He screamed in Mi-ja’s face. “How could you put my son in danger?”

  “He wasn’t in danger,” she replied calmly. “I was holding him when the horse bolted—”

  “What about the bullets?” His hands were clenched into fists. His face was as red as if he’d drunk a bottle of rice wine. “Did you not see danger in that?”

  Jun-bu ran into the square. He visibly relaxed when he saw that the children and I were safe. He jogged over just as Mi-ja admitted, “I didn’t expect that the police would fire on us.” After a slight pause, she asked, “Did you?”

  Sang-mun slapped Mi-ja. She staggered back and fell over Yo-chan and Min-lee. I rushed to her side. Jun-bu pulled Sang-mun away. My husband would lose in a fistfight, if it came to that, but he was taller and he carried the authority of a teacher.

  Mi-ja had landed on her bottom. Red welts in the shape of Sang-mun’s hand had already begun to rise on her cheek. Yo-chan seemed scared but not particularly shocked or surprised. That’s when I realized that this couldn’t have been the first time he’d seen his father hit his mother. I felt terrible, sick with worry and horror. My grandmother had made this match—the daughter of a collaborator to the son of a collaborator—but Mi-ja and her husband could not have been more mismatched in their temperaments.

  Sang-mun stuffed his hands in his pockets, whether hiding the weapons he’d used against my friend or keeping them ready for the next time, I couldn’t tell. When he looked away, I leaned in and, not for the first time, whispered to Mi-ja, “You could come live with us. Divorce is not uncommon for a haenyeo.”

  She shook her head. “Where would I go? What would I do? We have a nice house on the base. My son is well fed, and he’s picking up English from the soldiers.”

  She didn’t have to lay out the rest. My husband and I lived in a small house with our children and Yu-ri, and it was clear that we didn’t have enough to eat. If it had been me, though, I would have taken my children as far away as possible. I could work and support us, just as Mi-ja could provide for her son, if she wanted to.

  * * *

  Six people died in front of the police station—all but one of them shot in the back as they’d tried to flee. Another six were taken to the provincial hospital. Police posted there were so agitated—having heard the gunshots from the march—that they fired indiscriminately into the air and killed two passersby. A curfew was declared.

  The next morning, my husband read to me the contradictory reports in the newspaper. “Some onlookers claim the boy was killed instantly by the horse. Others say he died later from his wounds.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “But listen to this,” Jun-bu went on, incensed. “The U.S. Twenty-fourth Corps has taken an entirely different view. They’re reporting that a child was slightly injured when he inadvertently ran into a policeman’s horse.”

  I shook my head, but Jun-bu wasn’t done.

  “Then the police department sent someone out to say the shootings in the square were justified as a matter of self-defense, because people armed with clubs had attacked the station.”

  “But there was no attack, and no one carried anything other than a child or a placard mounted on a bamboo pole!”

  “You don’t have to tell me.” Jun-bu shrugged in disgust. “They’re labeling the shooting ‘unfortunate’ and ‘inconsiderate.’ ”

  It was all very upsetting, but Jun-bu went to the school and I went to the bulteok.

  At the end of the day, when we were rowing back to shore, haenyeo on another boat hailed us. We rowed closer to trade gossip.

  “Police have taken into custody the organizers of the demonstration, as well as twenty-five high school students,” their chief told us. “We’ve heard they’re beating the kids.”

  We couldn’t believe it.

  That night, in violation of the curfew, people pasted posters on walls across Jeju. The South Korean Labor Party was asking all islanders to protest the U.S. military government and fight against American imperialism. They asked for money to help the victims who’d survived and for the families of those who hadn’t. They demanded that the police who’d fired the shots be brought to trial and sentenced to death. They requested the immediate removal of any Japanese sympathizers or collaborators from the ranks of the police. Last, they implored all Jeju people to join a general strike on March 10.

  The leader of this movement was twenty-two years old and a teacher. Jun-bu told me he did not know him.

  * * *

  Farmers, fishermen, factory workers, and haenyeo joined the strike, as did policemen, teachers, and post office workers. Businessmen came out of harbor offices, banks, and transportation companies. Shopkeepers shut their doors. The strike was an immediate and overwhelming success, but people very high up labeled it red-influenced. This caused the American military government to side with the hard-liners and the government on the mainland to send members from the Northwest Young Men’s Association to help maintain order.

  I went to the bulteok not to work but to trade information. Everyone had something to say, none of it good.

  “Most of the men from the Northwest Young Men’s Association escaped from north of the Thirty-eighth Parallel. They’re the worst!” Gi-won seethed.

  Sang-mun had also managed to flee from the communist-held territory, so I had an idea of what that experience could do to a man.

  “A lot of them are delinquents, thugs, and criminals,” Jang Ki-yeong, my neighbor, said. Then she added another set of three almost like a chant. “They’re fierce, violent, and unforgiving.”

  “I heard that too,” Gi-won agreed. “They arrived here with nothing. That’s how quickly they had to leave their homes. Now they’re being told to live off the land. Just you watch. They’re going to be even more ravenous than the Japanese when it comes to stealing our foo
d and other resources.”

  But it was Ki-yeong’s daughter, Yun-su, who relayed what had to be the most frightening piece of information. “A friend told me that they’re like rabid dogs when it comes to communism. They hate Jeju, because they think we’re red in our thinking. I’ve heard they’ve labeled it Little Moscow. They call Jeju the island of nightmares.”

  A few nervous chuckles erupted, then just as quickly disappeared.

  A grandmother-diver, who’d been quiet up to now, spoke. “My daughter married out to a village on the other side of the island. Over there, they have a saying about these new men. Even a baby stops crying when it hears the words Northwest Young Men’s Association.”

  It was a warm day, with the sun shining down on us in the bulteok, but a chill went through me, and it seemed to hit the others as well.

  She went on in a low voice, and I sensed all of us leaning in to hear her. “My daughter says that the people in her husband’s village call those men the shadow of a nightmare.” She tipped her head in Gi-won’s direction. “Our chief says those men will steal our food and other resources. Think about what that might mean. People are already learning the answer on the other side of the island. What’s our most valuable resource? Our daughters. Those of you who have them should quickly arrange marriages. In my daughter’s village, girls are being married out as young as thirteen.”

  This news produced some gasps.

  “We didn’t even do that when the Japanese were here,” Gi-won said.

  The grandmother-diver gave our chief a steely gaze. “This is difficult. Tradition says that Korean men won’t rape a married woman, but what if that’s wrong? What if—”

  A deep silence fell over us as we considered what could happen to us or the unmarried girls in our families.

  That evening when Jun-bu came home, I told him about the gossip from the bulteok. He didn’t try to dismiss any of it. Instead, he said, “I’ve heard some of this too.”

  I didn’t question why he hadn’t told me earlier. Maybe he didn’t want me to worry. The truth is, I wasn’t nervous or scared that someone would attack me. I felt sure I could take care of myself. But what about Yu-ri?

  “Your sister might not be right in her brain, and in ordinary times she might easily be ignored as an old miss past her prime, but we can’t take any chances.” As I stared at him, I realized he needed me to decide what to do. “We will no longer let her roam the village by herself. She will have to stay within our gate or be with Granny Cho at all times.”

  Of course, Yu-ri didn’t like this one bit. She still had the spirit of a haenyeo, and she chafed at being tied to her tether. But that was just too bad.

  Meanwhile, we heard that, high on Mount Halla, four thousand self-defense groups had hidden themselves in old Japanese fortifications. It was rumored that they’d found caches of weapons left by the Japanese and undiscovered by the Americans when they’d first arrived to dump abandoned munitions in the sea.

  When I told Jun-bu what had been repeated in the bulteok, he remarked darkly, “Once more, it is islanders against outsiders.”

  Then, in response to the strike, the police arrested two hundred people in Jeju City in two days. After that, they arrested another three hundred officials, businessmen, Jeju-born policemen, and teachers, including one from the school where Jun-bu taught. Frightened, lots of people went back to work, but not Jun-bu and me. We believed in the power of the strike. That changed, however, when Jun-bu’s colleague came to the house after being released from detention. The two men drank cups of rice wine and spoke in low voices, while I listened.

  “They kept thirty-five of us in a cell just three by four meters,” Jun-bu’s friend recounted. “Policemen from the mainland pulled us out one by one. We heard screaming and begging. A few hours later, they’d drag that person back to the cell—unconscious or unable to walk. Then they’d select someone else. When my turn came, they beat me, and I wailed like all the rest. They wanted me to name the organizers of the strike.”

  “And did you?”

  “How should I know who they are? The policemen beat me some more, but what happened to me was not as bad as what went on elsewhere. They had women too. The way they screamed . . . I will never forget it.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “I’m going back to Japan. My family and I will be safer there.”

  To hear a Jeju person say he would rather live among the cloven-footed ones than on our birth island? It was beyond shocking. The next day, Jun-bu—without speaking to me about his decision—returned to his classroom. His timing was good, because the following morning the teachers who were still on strike were replaced by men who’d defected from North Korea. I begged Jun-bu to be careful. As someone who’d been educated abroad and been exposed to different ideas about equality, land reform, and education for all, he would automatically be suspect.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’re just afraid of communism. They see it everywhere.”

  But how could I not be worried when a sea change was happening all around us, as though a tsunami was washing over our island and sucking all we knew and cherished back out to the ocean? More people were rounded up. Trials were held by U.S. Army officers, which meant that communication between the Koreans accused and the American judges was limited. People went to prison. Clashes between villagers and the police became more frequent and increasingly heated. More posters and leaflets were hung or handed out, and more people were rounded up, while far, far away from us, the United States and the Soviet Union continued to dispute the fate of our homeland. Their squabble felt like it had nothing to do with us, but here on Jeju, the police went on what they called emergency alert.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother’s last moments and the way the bitchang had tightened around her wrist underwater. She had fought to free herself, I’d tried to help, but the outcome had been inescapable. I felt as though a version of that was happening to us now, only on dry land, and yet we just wanted to live our lives. Jun-bu drilled his students on their lessons. Granny Cho took Yu-ri and the children on short walks to the sea when the days seemed long and quiet. I went diving with the collective and began training a baby-diver. I was so busy—and I guess Mi-ja was too—that the three kilometers between Hamdeok and Bukchon now seemed a great distance. After the march, I didn’t see her again for five months.

  And still events closed in around us.

  * * *

  It was August 13. Sweet potato harvest season. Yu-ri, my children, and I went early to our fields. I was eight months pregnant. My stomach was large now with my growing baby, and my back ached from being bent over. Sung-soo had just begun to walk and his sister wasn’t yet old enough to keep him out of trouble, so I had to keep an eye on the three of them as I did my work. By 10:00, it was raining so hard I decided we should go home and wait until the weather settled. I tied Sung-soo to Yu-ri’s back, took Min-lee’s hand, and we headed to the village. My clothes stuck wet and prickly against my skin, and my feet and legs were muddy. Along the way, we ran into my neighbor Jang Ki-yeong; her daughter, Yun-su; and their other female relatives as they walked back to Bukchon from their field.

  “You have many burdens,” Ki-yeong complimented me as I herded my children and Yu-ri.

  “I’m a lucky woman,” I responded. To return her praise, I said, “Your daughter follows in your wake. She’s a good baby-diver.”

  “Your daughter will do the same one day.”

  “That will be the greatest gift she can give me.”

  We entered the village. Up ahead, someone passed out leaflets.

  “Here. Take one,” the young man said.

  “I can’t read,” I said.

  The young man tried to press his wares into the hands of Ki-yeong and Yun-su.

  “We can’t read either,” Yun-su admitted.

  Just then two policemen came around a corner. When they saw the boy, one of them shouted, “Halt!” The other yelled, “Stop right there!”


  The color drained from the boy’s face. Then his eyes hardened. He tossed the leaflets and took off. The policemen sprinted after him—toward us. I picked up Min-lee, put an arm around Yu-ri, who had Sung-soo on her back, and together we moved toward the square. In the confusion, Yun-su came with me instead of with her mother, sisters, and grandmother. Gunfire—the same horrible popping sounds we’d heard in the square during the demonstration—burst around us. Next to me, Yun-su stumbled and fell. She rolled over and stood up. Blood oozed from her shoulder. It looked like a surface wound, but I didn’t wait to examine it.

  “Yu-ri, hold on to me!” My sister-in-law, horrified, grabbed the hem of my tunic in her fist. Min-lee was crying so hard she could barely breathe. I shifted her weight and then wrapped my other arm around Yun-su’s waist. We were five people moving as one. When we got to the square, we collapsed to the ground. Min-lee still screamed. Yu-ri, white with terror, hunkered next to me. Yun-su’s blood dripped everywhere. I ran my shaking hands over Yu-ri, Min-lee, and Sung-soo. They hadn’t been hurt.

  A siren rang through the village. Neighbors burst from their homes—some of them armed with farming tools—to chase the two policemen who’d shot at us. I didn’t stay to see what would happen. I gathered my group, and together we went to Yun-su’s house. Ki-yeong and the other relatives stood in their courtyard, looking frantic. When they saw Yun-su, they leapt into action. One person put water on to boil. Another shook out a length of clean persimmon cloth and ripped it into strips to use for bandages. But when Ki-yeong appeared with a knife, scissors, and tweezers, the poor girl went limp in my arms, her legs collapsing beneath her as she lost consciousness. She was hurt, but her injuries weren’t life threatening. Once the smell of blood was gone from her wound, she’d be able to dive again.