The Island of Sea Women(28)

PART II


Love


Spring 1944–Fall 1946





Leaving-Home Water-Work


February 1944

“Did my mother give birth to me only so I would have callused hands?” Mi-ja sang.

“Did my mother give birth to me only to have future prosperity?” we sang back to her.

“Look at how well our boatman goes!” Mi-ja trilled.

“Money, money that doesn’t speak,” we responded, matching her rhythm. “Money, money that I take home. Go, boatman, go.”

I much preferred this type of song to the usual laments the Kang sisters led about mothers missing their children or how difficult it was to live under a mother-in-law. Those two girls had changed since they’d become wives and mothers, and they weren’t nearly as much fun. They seemed to have erased from their minds that once they used to whisper about how they met boys in underground lava tubes or kissed someone atop a volcanic cone. They’d forgotten what joy it was to sing for pleasure. Every one of us could complain, but would that make our situation emotionally easier or physically more comfortable?

It was February, and the morning was still dark. The boat bumped over choppy waves off the coast of Vladivostok. The four of us huddled around a brazier, but its heat wasn’t enough to reach that place at the core of my body that shivered. None of us wanted to waste our earnings on tea, so we sipped hot water. I was hungry, but I was always hungry. The work combined with constant shivering—whether on land, on the boat, or in the sea—ate whatever stores I had in my body faster than I could replenish them.

I wished I could be home on my island, but that wasn’t possible. When I turned sixteen, my youngest brother died from a fever that took him after three nights. Four times my father had been able to tie a golden rope strung with dried red chilies across our doorway to signal that a son had been born, and twice he’d tied pine branches to alert our neighbors that daughters—providers—had been born. If the family had been whole, Mother would have overturned Fourth Brother’s cradle before Halmang Samseung’s shrine to symbolize her release of him. But with Mother gone from us, this ritual was left to me. After Fourth Brother’s death, the faces of my remaining siblings went slack with grief and hopelessness. My sister, just eleven, was still too young to help. Without school to attend, my brothers lazed about the house or ran through the village and got into trouble. My father kept the house, visited men under the village tree, and refrained from bringing in a new wife, which meant only I could do something to change our destinies.

After watching my mother die, I never wanted to see the ocean again, and I certainly didn’t want to dive in it, but I couldn’t avoid it either. Do-saeng had been elected head of the collective. No one could have felt guiltier than I already did for what happened to my mother, but Do-saeng made her views about me and the roles I assume she suspected I’d played in my mother’s death and Yu-ri’s accident known by assigning me to barren areas of a cove or reef. And still I needed to bring home money for us to buy food and other necessities. Fortunately, I had options. By now, a quarter of Jeju’s population had moved to Japan. The men worked in iron and enamel production; the women worked in spinning and sewing factories. Some, of course, were students. The only other legitimate way to leave the island was for women to work as haenyeo, diving from boats in other countries. I wasn’t a student and I didn’t think I could adapt to indoor factory work, so five years ago, when the recruiter came to the village in a flatbed truck looking for haenyeo to hire for a season of “summer earning,” I signed up for leaving-home water-work.

“I’m coming too,” Mi-ja announced.

I begged her not to do it. “The trip will mean hardship for you.”

“But what would I do on Jeju without you?”

We joined the Kang sisters, Gu-ja and Gu-sun, who had sons at home and had labored away from home for two seasons already. The four of us climbed onto the back of a truck—a first for me—and were driven to other villages until the recruiter hired enough haenyeo to fill many boats. Then we went to the Jeju City port, boarded a ferry, and chugged across five hundred kilometers of rolling seas to China. The following year, we traveled three hundred kilometers east over monster waves to reach Japan. The year after that, we bumped and rolled through the Strait of Jeju one hundred kilometers to the Korean mainland, where we boarded another ferry to take us to the Soviet Union. We’d heard it was the best for earnings. The last two years, Mi-ja and I had hired out for “summer earning” and “winter earning” in Vladivostok, which meant that we were gone for nine months and returned to Jeju for the August sweet potato harvest.

So, for a total of five years Mi-ja had signed her name and I’d placed my thumbprint on contracts saying we agreed to be away from home. During that time, the world—and not just our island—was shaken. For decades, Japan had been a stable—if wholly hated—power on Jeju. Korea had been an annexed colony for thirty-four years. Yes, we had tensions. Yes, the Japanese colonists could abuse us without consequence. Yes, they could take advantage of us. Our only recourse had been strikes and marches, but the Japanese always triumphed in the end. Then, three years ago, Japan—not content with Korea as a colony or with invading China—had launched attacks across the Pacific. America entered the war and fighting erupted all around us.