The Island of Sea Women(117)
She reaches for the next envelope: again unsealed, with a letter folded around another page from Mi-ja’s father’s book. Toilet, made the day of the big haenyeo march. The next envelope: Sunrise, the name of the boat on their first dives together. Each envelope reveals another rubbing that commemorated for two girls the places they visited and the events of their lives: the surface of a scallop shell from this very beach, a carving they’d liked in Vladivostok, the outlines of their babies’ feet. Maybe the letters that Yo-chan wrote for his mother offer words of apology or regret, but Young-sook doesn’t need to hear them. These treasures of their friendship mean so much more.
When she comes to the last rubbing she remembers making with Mi-ja, she looks at the remaining stack of letters—all of them sealed, marking that they came after censorship ended—and wonders what could be inside. The first one has another letter she cannot read. This time, however, the page from Mi-ja’s father’s book is folded around a photograph. The page from the book shows a baby’s foot. In the photograph, Joon-lee sits propped in a hospital bed, a newborn in her arms. The next letter has a rubbing on a much larger piece of paper. Young-sook can’t read it, but she recognizes the pattern of letters and numbers and realizes that it’s from her daughter’s headstone. Young-sook chokes back a sob.
Once she’s reined in her feelings, she opens the rest of the letters. Each one is accompanied by a rubbing and a photograph, showing some aspect of the life of their shared granddaughter, Janet: smiling, with her hair clipped with brightly colored barrettes, standing on the steps to a house, with a lunch box in her hand, at a holiday sing-along, graduating from elementary school, junior high, high school, and college. A wedding photo. Another baby footprint: Clara. Later, another footprint: Clara’s brother. Mi-ja had tried to tell Young-sook everything that was happening, and everything that she missed.
Young-sook’s concentrating so hard and her emotions are so strong that she’s unaware of the woman and girl who’ve approached.
“She wanted you to know us,” Janet says in her poor Jeju dialect. “And she wanted us to know you.”
Janet and Clara have changed out of the clothes they wore to the opening of the Peace Park and are now dressed almost identically in shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. Clara’s iPhone with the wires and earbuds dangles from her hand.
“She wanted,” Clara says, putting stress on every word, “for us to hear your story, your side. But you must hear her too. I taped Great-Granny Mi-ja for hours—”
“It started as a school project,” her mother explains.
“I’ve set this to the most important part,” Clara says. “Are you ready?”
Yes, finally, Young-sook is ready. She takes the earbuds, puts them in her ears, and nods. Clara pushes a button, and there comes Mi-ja’s old-woman voice.
“Young-sook always said I should divorce my husband, just as she always told the women in her collective who had similar experiences to mine. She was always so understanding of them when they couldn’t leave their husbands, but she could not think the same way when it came to me.”
“That was selfish of her,” Clara says on the recording.
“Not selfish. I loved her, and she loved me, but she never fully understood who or what I was.” Mi-ja gives a knowing snort. “And neither did I. It took me many years to see that I was different from those other women. I mean, of course, I was afraid of Sang-mun, as they were afraid of their husbands. I was in constant terror of what he might do to me. What made me different from the other haenyeo, whose husbands could be violent, was that I deserved Sang-mun and the punishment he gave me.”
“Granny, no one deserves what he did to you.”
“I did. My husband was married to a bad person.”
On the recording, Clara tries to tell her great-grandmother that she isn’t a bad person, and this gives Young-sook time to remember when she too had tried to argue this point with Mi-ja. Why hadn’t she heard what Mi-ja was truly saying? Why hadn’t she asked more questions? Even more painful is that this conversation had happened back when her heart had still been open to Mi-ja, or so she thought.
“I was a bad person,” Mi-ja now insists in Young-sook’s ears. “I killed my mother when I entered the world. I was the daughter of a collaborator. I let Sang-mun ruin me. But my greatest disgrace came when I didn’t stop what happened in Bukchon. From my birth to that moment, I lived a life of shame.”
In the recording, Young-sook hears Mi-ja weeping and Clara comforting her. Again, Young-sook is racked by memories, only they are of her own shortcomings. There’s a click, then another click, and the voices come back. Mi-ja is once again composed.
“To be ruined,” Mi-ja said. “You know what that means.”
“Granny, you’ve told me many times. You forget sometimes—”
“Forget? No! I will never forget. Young-sook and I were so happy. We’d just returned to Jeju from leaving-home water-work. Everything was so different on the dock. Scary. Sang-mun offered to help us. He looked man-beautiful, but he was evil. I don’t know why Young-sook didn’t see that right away, but she didn’t. I hated him from the first moment I saw him, and he must have seen in me the weakness of my bloodline. I was a person who would give in. He knew he could take advantage of that, and I let him. He easily separated us. Once she was out of sight, he took me to his office. When he started touching me, I froze. I let him pull down my pants—”