The Island of Sea Women(116)
“I was thinking the same thing. What about this part?” I put my finger on the last paragraph, which seemed to have the fewest characters inked out.
“It says, ‘All mothers worry. I worry about what will happen and how Yo-chan will get by. I wish you . . . Please . . . If I could be home on Jeju . . . You would . . . Always remember I love you, Joon-lee.’?” Min-lee looked at me. “What do you think it means?”
“She sounds homesick.” But the letter was more troubling than that.
“What should I write back?”
“What does it matter what you write back, if the censors are only going to black it out?”
My daughter set her jaw. “I’m going to write to her anyway.”
I nodded. “Do what you must.”
* * *
The next month, we received another letter. Again, the envelope had been opened, the stamp taken, and most of the letter inked out, but the handwriting was different. Min-lee read, “?‘Dear Mother Young-sook, This is Yo-chan. I write for my mother.’?” That’s as far as she got before I rose and walked away. Later, Min-lee told me that there was no real news. Just a word or phrase here and there. “It’s like trying to understand the ocean floor by seeing only ten grains of sand,” she said. This time, Min-lee did not write back.
After that, a letter came around the first of every month. In those days, they always arrived unsealed, but I didn’t pull them from their envelopes. I hid them in a small wooden box. It comforted me to know that whatever lies Mi-ja and her son wished to send me were hidden in the dark, where I wouldn’t have to hear them. It made me feel that I’d won.
In spring, the rapeseed fields bloomed yellow, stretching from the mid-mountain area all the way to the gnarled coastline. The ocean kept its relentless movement. The deep blue waters frothed one moment and became almost serene the next. I did my farming work and went to the sea. When I dove I was able to push my daughter and granddaughter from my mind. Often I was reminded of Dr. Park and his search for the mystery of why the haenyeo could withstand cold better than any other humans on earth. I think I now knew the answer. Not only did I have a coldness at my core that would not thaw but it had become as hard as ice. I could not do what Shaman Kim, Gu-sun, and so many others had told me to do. If I could not forgive, then at least I could wrap my anger and bitterness in an icy shell. Each time I sank into the sea, I stretched my mind outward, away from that shell. Where’s my abalone? Where’s my octopus? I need to make money! I need to make a living! I would continue to strive to be the best haenyeo, even if I knew it wouldn’t last.
Day 4 (continued): 2008
Young-sook doesn’t go back to the memorial hall to find her family or her friends. Instead, she makes her way to the parking lot, waits for a taxi to drop off another group of visitors, and then hires the driver to take her home. Listening to Clara and hearing Mi-ja’s voice on the recording have opened something in Young-sook. What if I was wrong all these years? Or, maybe, not wrong completely, but what if I didn’t understand some of what happened? Her mind returns again and again to the questions posed by the man who spoke earlier today: Who can name a death that was not tragic? Is there a way for us to find meaning in the losses we’ve suffered? Who can say that one soul has a heavier grievance than another? We were all victims. We need to forgive each other.
Young-sook knows she’s old, but for the first time she has a deeper understanding of what that means. Life moves fast, and the sun of her life is setting. She doesn’t have much time left to love or hate or forgive. If you try to live, you can live on well. How often did her mother-in-law recite that aphorism? And it turned out to be true. Young-sook worked all day and had body aches all night, but she would do it all again for her children, because life without them is meaningless. And yet, she’d let Joon-lee slip away. Young-sook’s anger had convinced her she didn’t care what her daughter, Yo-chan, or Mi-ja might have to say to her, but she should have tried to look them up after the guilt-by-association system ended and she’d finally gotten a passport. She’d traveled to Los Angeles to visit her family plenty of times. Just once she should have asked to be driven past the house attached to the return address on the envelopes, if only to peer at the inhabitants from the car window.
The taxi hugs the curves of Hado’s shoreline until it stops at the gate to her beachside compound. She pays the driver—the ridiculous extravagance not registering in her mind—and hurries inside. She pulls out the box with the letters from America and hobbles down to the beach. She looks around, but with the opening of the memorial, there are no haenyeo on the sand, and even the tourists are staying away.
To understand everything is to forgive. With Clara’s words in her mind, she reaches into the box, pulls out the stack of letters from America, and flips them over, so she can start at the beginning. She runs a finger over Joon-lee’s handwriting on the first envelope. She remembers what it said. Then come the ones in Yo-chan’s script. The first group arrived once a month. After six months and up until a year ago, Young-sook had received two letters a year: one on the anniversary of her mother’s death, and the other on the anniversary of the deaths of Jun-bu, Yu-ri, and Sung-soo. In the early years, each had been opened by the censors, but Young-sook’s stubbornness had kept her from pulling out the letters. Now she reaches inside the first envelope and unfolds the letter written by Yo-chan on his mother’s behalf. The censors had been active with this one, so very few characters remain. She wonders how Mi-ja could have thought she’d “understand.” She pulls the letter from the next envelope, unfolds it, and this time finds another piece of paper tucked inside. Again, the letter has writing on it, most of which has been blacked out. The other paper she recognizes right away. It’s a page from Mi-ja’s father’s book. It’s old and yellowed. Young-sook’s hands tremble as she unfolds it. Here is the first rubbing she and Mi-ja made together: the rough impression of a stone they created on the day they met.