The Island of Sea Women

by Lisa See

  “I call on all the gods and goddesses of Jeju,” Shaman Kim beckoned. “We welcome Yeongdeung, the goddess of the wind. We welcome all ancestors and spirits who accompany her. Enjoy the peach and camellia that are blooming. Embrace the beauty of our island. Sow the seeds of the five grains on our land. Sow seeds into the sea, which will grow into underwater crops.”

  Offerings of fruit, bowls of rice, dried fish and squid, bottles of homemade liquor, and hard-boiled eggs spilled across the makeshift altar. Every woman and girl from our collective was here. Kang Gu-ja sat in a prominent spot. Her sister, Gu-sun, sat nearby, with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Wan-soon, beside her. Min-lee and Wan-soon had become friends when we moved back to Hado. Min-lee tended toward melancholy, for which I blamed myself, so to see the two girls giggling together was wonderful. Do-saeng and Joon-lee, who would turn twelve in the fall, sat together. Yang-jin, my diving partner, was next to me. At the far end of the gathering, as far as she could be from me, Mi-ja sat with her collective. Everyone had bathed and wore clean clothes, yet she somehow managed to look fresher than the rest of us.

  Shaman Kim swirled in her hanbok. Her helpers had made a new drum from a gourd, since only the sounds from this instrument can reach the ears of spirits, and hammered flat a cooking vessel to use as a gong to waken the spirits of the wind and waters. Shaman Kim rang a bell, which she’d hidden during the raid of her home, to rouse the spirits who live on the earth. Her tassels were now made from shredded pieces of persimmon cloth. We feared for her, because if she was caught with any of these things, she would be arrested.

  “I pray to the goddess of the wind to look after the haenyeo,” Shaman Kim implored. “Don’t let a tewak drift. Don’t let tools break. Don’t let a bitchang get stuck or let an octopus pin a haenyeo’s arms.”

  We knelt and prayed. We bowed. Shaman Kim spat water to keep evil spirits at bay. She commented on the weather and tides, cajoling the goddess of the wind to be gentle in the coming months. “Let our haenyeo be safe all season. Prevent our fishermen from being lost to a typhoon, cyclone, or tempestuous seas.”

  When the ceremony ended, we ate some of the offerings and then threw the rest of the food into the sea for all water and wind goddesses and gods to enjoy in hopes they would show us favor. Then it was time for dancing. Min-lee and Wan-soon held hands as they swayed. They looked free and happy. Last year, when Min-lee turned fifteen, I’d given her a tewak made of Styrofoam. Wan-soon was given one as well. Gu-sun and I had taught our daughters to dive, but their destinies lay elsewhere. I’d thought Jun-bu crazy when he’d said he wanted all our children to be educated, but now I did everything possible to respect his wishes. If you plant red beans, then you will harvest red beans. Min-lee was in high school, Kyung-soo in middle school, and Joon-lee in elementary school. My two eldest children were only so-so students, but Joon-lee was truly her father’s daughter. She was smart, diligent, and studious. Each year, her teachers proclaimed her the smartest person—boy or girl—in class. Gu-sun had also saved money to send Wan-soon, her youngest child, to school, so our daughters only dove with us if their free days corresponded with the right tides. Since they worked so little, Gu-sun and I had told them they could use their earnings to buy school supplies, but they mostly treated themselves with ribbons for their hair or candy bars.

  For the next two weeks, while the goddess of the wind was on Jeju, we’d remain idle. We wouldn’t dive and fishermen wouldn’t board their boats or rafts, since the winds the goddess brought with her were particularly fierce and fickle. No other chores could be done either. It was said that if you made soy sauce at this time, insects would hatch in it. If you repaired your roof, it would leak. If you sowed grains, a drought would come. Hence, this was a time to visit neighbors, talk long into the night, and share meals and stories.

  * * *

  “Mother, come see!” Joon-lee called.

  I peeked out the door as she came into the courtyard with the water she’d drawn from the village well. Through the open gate, I saw men filing past, one right after the other like a string of fish.

  “Hurry here!” I cried, fearful. Joon-lee left the jar on the ground and ran to my side. I pushed her protectively behind me. “Where’s your sister?” I asked.

  Before Joon-lee could answer, Min-lee came through the gate. She set down her water and jogged over to us. “They’re strangers,” she whispered. Of course they were. They wore black trousers with sharp creases. Their shoes were made of leather. Their jackets were unlike any I’d seen before, making them look puffy and awkward. Some of them were Korean. They had to be from the mainland. But there were also Japanese and white men. I automatically took them to be Americans, because they were tall and sandy-haired. Not one of them wore a uniform. They weren’t armed either, as far as I could tell. At least half of them wore glasses. My initial anxiety was replaced by curiosity. The last man strode past. Friends and neighbors, chattering, pointing, and craning their necks to get a better glimpse, trailed behind him.

  “I want to see who they are,” Joon-lee said, grabbing my hand. She was too young to understand terror, but for some reason I wasn’t afraid, and neither was Min-lee. I even called to Do-saeng to join us.

  We stepped into the olle and were swept along the shore road.

  “Who are they?” Joon-lee asked.

  Her older sister asked the more important question. “What do they want?”

  More women came out of their houses. I saw my diving partner, Yang-jin, up ahead, and we rushed to catch up to her.

  “Are they going to the village square?” I asked.

  “Maybe they have business with the men,” she replied.

  But we didn’t turn inland toward the village square. Instead, we spilled onto the beach. Once there, I saw that there weren’t so many of us after all. Maybe about thirty women and children. The strangers turned to us. With their backs to the sea, the frigid wind ruffled their hair and flapped through their trousers. A small, compact man stepped forward. He spoke in standard Korean, but we were able to understand him.

  “My name is Dr. Park. I’m a scientist.” He motioned to the men around him. “We’re all scientists. Some of us are from the mainland, but we also have scientists from around the world. We’re here to study the haenyeo. We’ve just spent two weeks in a village near Busan, where many haenyeo go for itinerant work. Now we’ve come to the native home of the haenyeo. We hope you will help us.”

  We had six haenyeo chiefs—one for each of the sections that made up Hado—but not one of them was with us. I nudged my mother-in-law. “You’re the highest ranked among us,” I said. “You must speak to them.”

  She set her jaw, determined, and then stepped out of the crowd and crossed halfway to the men. “I am Yang Do-saeng. I’m the former chief of the Sut-dong collective. I’m listening.”

  “We understand you have just greeted the goddess of the wind and will be free from activity for the next two weeks—”

  “A woman is never free from activity,” she said.

  Dr. Park smiled at her comment but chose not to address it. “You may not know this, but the cold-water stress that the haenyeo endure is greater than for any other human group in the world.”

  This was met by indifferent looks. We didn’t know about “other human groups” or “cold-water stress.” We only had our own experiences. When Mi-ja and I had dived off Vladivostok in winter, we didn’t see any people in the water with us apart from other haenyeo. We considered our ability a gift that allowed us to help our families.

  “We’re looking for twenty volunteers,” he went on. “We would like ten haenyeo and ten nondivers.”

  “What are they volunteering for?” Do-saeng asked.

  “We’ll be testing women in and out of the water,” Dr. Park answered.

  “We don’t enter the sea when the goddess of the wind is here,” Do-saeng said.

  “You don’t enter the sea, or you don’t harvest?” he inquired. “We aren’t asking you to ha
rvest anything. That’s why we came now—when you aren’t busy. If you aren’t harvesting, the goddess won’t be angry.”

  But what did he know about our goddess or how strong she was? Still, he had a point. No one had ever said it was forbidden to enter the water during this time.

  “We’ll be taking your temperatures,” he continued, so sure of himself. “We’ll—”

  “Can I help?” Joon-lee chirped.

  People on both sides laughed. Those who knew Joon-lee expected something like this from her, while the strangers clearly thought she was cute. She ran to her grandmother. Dr. Park squatted so he was face-to-face with her. “We’re studying the basal metabolic rate of the haenyeo compared to nondiving women. We’ll come in each of the four seasons. Is your mother a diver?” When she nodded, he continued. “We’re going to set up a lab on this beach. We’ll take women’s temperatures before and after they go in the water. We want to study their shiver index. We’re wondering if a breath-hold diver’s ability to withstand cold is genetic or a learned adaptation. We—”

  Joon-lee turned and stared at me with her soot-black eyes. “Mother, you have to do this. Granny too! And you too, Big Sister.” She swung back to Dr. Park. “That’s three. Oh, and Kim Yang-jin will do it too, won’t you?” When my diving partner nodded, Joon-lee gave Dr. Park a resolute look. “I’ll help you find the others. We don’t have many households without haenyeo, but there’s a widow who grinds and sells millet, a woman who makes charcoal, and another who’s known for her weaving.” She cocked her head. “When do you want them to start?” And then she took in the other men’s faces. “Where are you going to put your lab?”

  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.

  “She helped bring you here,” he said. “Let’s see how else she can help.”

  With that, the men went back to conducting their tests. They didn’t let Joon-lee handle a single instrument, but they used her to explain to us—in words we could understand—what they were doing. It turned out our average age was thirty-nine years. We averaged 131 centimeters in height and fifty-one kilos in weight. (Or, as one of the American scientists put it, “A little over fifty-one inches tall and one hundred and twelve pounds.”) About fifteen minutes later, the doctors asked us to remove our land clothes. The haenyeo among us had never been shy about showing our bodies. We’d all seen each other naked, and we’d lived for generations with the stigma of nakedness. Still, despite Dr. Park’s sentiments about the team being doctors and scientists, it was embarrassing to step out of our trousers and jackets in front of them. The women who weren’t divers were the most uncomfortable. They’d probably never worn so few clothes in front of a man apart from their own husbands, and it proved too much for one woman, who decided to drop out of the study. Now the haenyeo and non-haenyeo were equal again, with nine women on each team.