The Island of Sea Women

by Lisa See

  At the beginning of the seventh week, Jun-bu invited the women from the collective who didn’t know how to read or write to our house to teach us how to vote. Even if the election was rigged, we wanted to take this opportunity to try to have a voice in our government. “You don’t have to recognize the written characters for the candidates’ names,” he explained. “All you need to know is where he comes on the ballot. Is he number one, two, or three? It’s your choice. Then you mark the number of the person you want.”

  But when we went to the polling place, a group of men barred us from entering. “Turn around. Go home,” they told us.

  Once again, my news came from the bulteok as the haenyeo jabbered like chickens the next morning. In Bukchon, we hadn’t been allowed to vote, but that was nothing compared to what had happened elsewhere.

  “The police, the constabulary, and the Northwest Young Men’s Association blocked—”

  “Jeju’s main road going east—”

  “And west—”

  “So rebels wouldn’t be able to pass.”

  Not for the first time, Ki-young’s daughter, Yun-su, seemed to have a clearer sense of what had transpired. “None of that mattered,” she said, and I heard something like pride in her voice. “Nothing stopped the rebels. They raided polling places and burned ballot boxes. They kidnapped election officials. They cut more telephone lines—”

  And then the others were off again.

  “Destroyed bridges—”

  “And blocked the very roads they weren’t supposed to pass.”

  In the end, no votes were counted from Jeju, and the Americans’ choice, Rhee Syngman, was elected president, although we hadn’t yet officially become a country.

  The next morning, when I returned to the bulteok, yesterday’s nervous twittering had been replaced by anxiety. Surely, the government would punish us for the troubles of election night.

  “I’m chief of our collective,” Gi-won said, “but as a woman, I have no choice in what happens next.”

  “No woman has a say.”

  “No child has a say. And the elderly?”

  “They have no authority either,” Gi-won answered for all of us.

  Most of our fathers and husbands had spent their days thinking grand thoughts and taking care of babies, so they were powerless too. But everyone—even the innocent, even the young and the elderly, even those who did not have a husband to read the propaganda to them from the newspaper, or those, like Yu-ri, with no comprehension of what was happening—was forced to take a side.

  * * *

  In late May, Mi-ja arrived one day at my door. She was alone. She’d lost weight and her color was bad. I invited her in, but I couldn’t help being apprehensive. While I made citrus tea, she visited with Yu-ri. “Have you been good?” she asked. “I’ve missed you.” Yu-ri smiled, but she didn’t recognize Mi-ja.

  “I’ve missed you too,” she said when I came with the tea.

  “You stopped coming to the olle,” I replied.

  “You could have visited me.”

  “I have the children—”

  “A girl this time?” She scooted toward the cradle, where Kyung-soo slept.

  I held up a hand. “A boy.” As she slid back to her original spot, I finished my excuse. “The children and Yu-ri are too much for me to take to Hamdeok. It’s not easy—”

  “Or safe.”

  “Or safe most of all,” I agreed.

  Silence hung between us. I couldn’t fathom what she wanted. She took a breath and let it out slowly. “Sang-mun planted a baby in me not long after the march. I was sick, so I couldn’t come to see you.”

  A pang of guilt. Of course, there had to be a reason.

  “A boy or a girl?” I asked.

  She lowered her eyes. “A girl. She lived two days.”

  “Aigo. I’m so sorry.”

  She regarded me, hurt. “I needed you.”

  Whatever caution I’d felt disappeared. I’d failed my deep-heart friend.

  “Your husband,” I ventured. “Has he been good to you?”

  “He was gentle when I was pregnant.” Before the true meaning of her words could sink in, she went on. “You can’t know how hard it is for him. He goes from meeting to meeting and from place to place all over the island. The Second Regiment’s Third Battalion is now stationed in Sehwa nearby, but they’re headquartered in Hamdeok. It’s a lot of pressure.”

  “That must be difficult—”

  She sighed and looked away. “Many people, when they envision being faced with hardship, believe they will fight back. But when I was a child and had to live with Aunt Lee-ok and Uncle Him-chan, I learned what really happens. They didn’t feed me, as you know. By the time I wanted to fight back, I was too weak.”

  I struggled to find something to say to boost her spirits. “That terrible situation brought us together. For me, it will always be a happy result.”

  But her mind was not on friendship. “Some women imagine committing suicide, but how can that be a path for a mother?” Her eyes glistened with tears. “I have Yo-chan. I must live for him.”

  I’d known Mi-ja a long time, and I’d never seen her so melancholy. Not only was she experiencing the turmoil around us but she’d also had the cataclysm of losing her child. And then there was her husband. She didn’t look bruised, but I wasn’t seeing her naked or in her water clothes. I put a hand on her arm.

  “Women live quietly,” I said. “However angry or broken a woman might get, she does not think about beating someone, does she?”

  “My husband is married to a bad person.”

  Her comment baffled me. “How can you say that?”

  “I failed him. I lost the baby. I don’t bring home food. I don’t keep the house the way his mother did—”

  I cut her off. “Don’t defend him or justify his actions as though what he does to you is your fault.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “No wife asks to be hit.”

  “Your mother was more understanding of men than you are. She said we should have sympathy for them. She said they have nothing to do and no purpose to push them through the day. They’re bored and—”

  “But your husband can’t use those reasons! He works. He has his own life.”

  This didn’t stop Mi-ja from continuing to make excuses for him. “He went through so much to come home.” Then she set her jaw. “His violence and cruelty are the way of the island these days.”

  But he’d been violent long before our current troubles . . .

  Helplessness settled over me. “I wish we could go back to the way things were when we visited in the olle every day—”

  “But it’s not safe. We both need to protect our children.” So, we’d circled back to the beginning of the visit. After a moment, she added, “I hope our separation doesn’t last so long this time.”

  “And I hope the next time I see you, a baby will be suckling at your breast.”

  I walked her to the gate. Even as we said our goodbyes, I suspected I didn’t know just how bad things were for her.

  * * *

  On August 15, the Republic of Korea was formally established in the south. One month later, Kim Il-sung, with help from the USSR, founded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. Although the armies of neither the Americans nor the Soviets left completely, the division of our country appeared to be settled. It seemed like life had calmed down, and I’d be able to see Mi-ja again. But all through early fall, the different factions continued to fight on Jeju. The military was armed with machine guns and other modern weapons supplied by the U.S. Army, while the rebels protected themselves with Japanese swords, a handful of rifles, and bamboo spears. Then, on November 17, 1948, President Rhee placed Jeju under martial law and issued the first order:

  ANYONE FOUND NOT WITHIN FIVE KILOMETERS OF THE COAST WILL BE UNCONDITIONALLY SHOT TO DEATH.

  It was to be called the ring of fire. Anything and anyone found violating the order would suffer a
scorched-earth policy.

  When I went to the bulteok, we discussed what this might mean for us.

  “Where will all the mountain people go?” one of the women asked.

  “They’re being sent to the shore,” Gi-won told us.

  “But there’s nowhere to put them,” another diver said.

  “That’s the point,” Gi-won replied. “No one can hide at the sea’s edge.”

  I asked the question I felt sure we were all thinking. “Are we in danger?”

  Gi-won shrugged. “We already live on the safe side of the ring of fire.”

  The next day, the rain poured down as though the heavens were weeping. Men in the Korean Constabulary, Jeju police, and U.S. military troops herded the first few hundred mountain refugees to the outskirts of Bukchon. The women and children did not look like troublemakers to me. Apart from little boys and a few old men who walked with their heads bent, I saw few males in the trail of anguish. I could only come to one conclusion: most men were already dead. The children did not talk or sing to make the burden of their situation less heavy. Families carried whatever they’d been able to salvage from their homes—quilts, sleeping mats, cooking utensils, bags of grain, earthenware jars filled with pickled vegetables, dried sweet potatoes—but they’d been forced to abandon their livestock. They made camp as best they could, building lean-tos from reeds and pine branches.

  In Bukchon, we were ordered to use the stones that lay in our fields to build a wall around the village. Men, so unused to hard labor, suffered. Jun-bu came home with blisters on his hands, and his back ached. The job also pulled women from working in either their wet or their dry fields. Even children had to help. Once the wall was finished, we were forced to stand guard day and night, armed with homemade spears.

  “If you let someone in who is proven to be a rebel,” a police officer warned us, “then you’ll all be punished.”

  The refugees soon ran out of the food they’d brought with them. At night, moans of hunger drifted over the moonlit fields, through the rocky walls, and into my house. Whenever the wind shifted, the bad odors of unwashed bodies and no sanitation soured our nostrils, eyes, and throats.

  One day as I was walking past the camp a woman beckoned to me.

  “I’m a mother. You look like a mother too. Will you help me?”

  Although mid-mountain people had always looked down on the haenyeo, our hurt feelings had moved to pity as we witnessed what had happened to them. So of course I asked what I could do.

  “I’m not a diver,” the woman said. “I don’t know how to harvest from the sea. Can you teach me?”

  I was willing, but when I learned she didn’t even know how to swim, I had to decline. When she started to weep, I whispered, “Come to my field tonight. I will leave a basket for you with sweet potatoes and some other things.”

  As I gave her directions, she wept even harder. Soon I heard about other women in Bukchon who left food in their fields or by the wall to the camp. But after one of my neighbors was caught doing this, taken away, tortured, and killed for her charity, I did not take the risk again.

  The refugees living outside Bukchon and other seaside villages had obeyed and come to the shore, but others—some fearful, some obstinate, and some rebels—fled inland and tried to hide in remote mountain villages or make new homes in caves or lava tubes. This was the worst thing they could have done. Grandmother Seolmundae couldn’t protect them, and the ring of fire became literal as entire villages were burned. Soldiers set fire to Gyorae. When people tried to escape, they were shot and thrown into the flames to destroy the evidence. Some of the victims were babies and children. In Haga, soldiers killed twenty-five villagers, including a woman in her last month of pregnancy. Then they burned the village. Nearly every day, when we rowed to the day’s diving spot, we saw plumes of smoke wafting from our great mountain and out over the sea.

  I went to the five-day market, but there was nothing to buy. The woman in the dry-goods stand passed along what she knew. “U.S. ships have blockaded the island,” she said. “No supplies can be brought in to help those in hiding or provide food to the tens of thousands of refugees now living inside the ring of fire.”

  She was clearly knowledgeable, so I asked, “What about food for us?”

  The woman grunted. “No one on the island—not even those of us on the right side of the ring of fire—will be able to buy goods anymore.”

  Worse—so much worse—there came a day when we were told that haenyeo could no longer dive. Japanese soldiers had once stolen our food and horses, but now our own countrymen were starving us. My husband and I each got by on a single sweet potato a day, so we could give more food to our children. But they lost weight, their hair turned dull, and their eyes began to sink into their heads.

  When someone told me that the haenyeo collective in Gimnyongree had gotten permission to open a restaurant to serve police and army troops, I passed the information on to Gi-won. She called for a meeting in the bulteok.

  “The haenyeo in Gimnyongree are hoping to prevent police violence, but we will not dive for the very people who are killing our own,” Gi-won said, adamant. “Wouldn’t we be truer to our island if we offered shelter, food, and clothing to the insurgents? These are our people. They could be our sons, brothers, or cousins.”

  “We’d be killed if we were caught!” Jang Ki-yeong exclaimed.

  “It’s better to go hungry together than to die,” Yun-su added.

  “Why should we help them?” someone else asked. “The rebels steal food and kill those who try to protect what they grew. I’m afraid of bears as well as tigers.”

  This saying had recently sprung up, and it meant that the police and the constabulary were to be feared as much as the rebels and insurgents.

  “I don’t care who started what or when,” Ki-yeong said. “I just want peace.”

  Not one person agreed to Gi-won’s suggestion. It was the first time we’d turned against our leader, and it showed that we’d lost all sympathy for the rebels.

  * * *

  More news filtered through the stone wall that protected Bukchon. In Tosan, soldiers killed all men between the ages of eighteen and forty. One hundred and fifty died. In Jocheon, two hundred villagers turned themselves in to the military to prevent being killed in a battle against the insurgents. All but fifty of them were executed anyway. We tried to tell ourselves that none of this could be happening, but it was. A third of Jeju’s population had been forced to relocate to the shore, and so many people had been killed that no one could guess the count. The skies were black with crows, who flew from one scene of death to the next. Picking at the dead made them stronger; they mated, and hatched even more crows. The flocks grew bigger and blacker. I couldn’t look at them without feeling ill.

  American soldiers found nearly one hundred bodies in a mountain village, while another group of their soldiers stumbled across the execution of seventy-six men, women, and children in a different village. The Americans may not have actively participated in the atrocities, but they did nothing to prevent them either.

  “Is not doing something their way of sending us a message about their real intentions?” Jun-bu asked.

  Once again, I had no answer.

  After men and young boys were killed in yet another set of mountain villages, the survivors—women, children, and the elderly—were housed in military tents set up by American soldiers in the playground of Hamdeok Elementary School. When there was no more room, the Korean Constabulary executed the surplus of people at the edge of a cliff, so they’d fall into the sea.

  I was able to anticipate my husband’s question before he asked it. “Did the Americans with their tents and surveillance planes not see that?”

  It worried me to see my husband’s frustrations growing, but the person I thought about most when I heard what had happened in Hamdeok was Mi-ja. She lived there.

  We’d grown up with the Three Abundances, but we weren’t prepared for the Three-All Strategy�
��kill all, burn all, loot all—of the scorched-earth policy. The impact was hard for us to absorb. You hear about an incident but don’t see a mother, a child, a brother. You don’t feel the individual suffering, but we began to hear those stories too: A family was dragged from its home. The daughter-in-law was made to spread her legs so her father-in-law could mount her. When he couldn’t finish the deed, both were killed. I heard of a soldier who heated his revolver in a fire, then shoved it inside a pregnant woman just to see what would happen. Widows and mothers of sons who’d been killed often went mad and threw themselves off cliffs, sailing to their loved ones in the Afterworld. In one village, the girls were kidnapped, gang-raped for two weeks, and then executed, along with all the young men from that village. Wives were forced to marry policemen and soldiers, because marriage was a way to seize property legally. Some haenyeo sold off their dry fields to buy a husband or son out of jail. The most unfortunate women agreed to marry police officers in exchange for the release from jail of a husband, brother, son, or other male relative. Too often, those loved ones were killed anyway. These things I wished I could erase from my mind, but they would never, ever, go away.

  I wanted our family to return home to Hado, where we could be with Do-saeng, my father, and my brother, but Jun-bu felt we should stay in Bukchon. “I need to keep teaching,” he said. “We need the money.”