The Island of Sea Women(52)

The person I most wished to see—my husband—wasn’t there. Jun-bu had returned safely from Japan and had been immediately hired to teach at the elementary school in Bukchon, which was about sixteen kilometers from Hado. He was there now, setting up our new home. I wanted to walk there right away, but Do-saeng told me that they’d agreed I should help her with the sweet potato harvest and then join him at the beginning of September, when classes started. Until then, I needed to settle back into Hado village life.

Of course, we were all terrified. If bombs started dropping from the sky or landing boats filled with foreign soldiers came to shore, we had nothing with which to defend ourselves except for the shovels and hoes we used in our dry fields and the hooks and spears we used in our wet fields. There’s nothing like a baby, however, to remind you that life goes on. While I’d been away, one of the Kang sisters, Gu-sun, had given birth to a baby girl, Wan-soon, who was the same age as my daughter. The four of us spent many hours together. Often Gu-sun would purr about how our babies would be as close as she and her sister were or as Mi-ja and I had always been: “Min-lee and Yo-chan might marry one day, but they can never be friends the way that Min-lee and Wan-soon will be.” I never argued with Gu-sun about this. Instead, I accepted her friendship more out of necessity than out of love or like minds. Our babies needed to be nursed, burped, washed, changed, comforted, and put to sleep. I was happy for Gu-sun’s company.

Fortunately, Min-lee was a good baby, which meant my hands could stay busy. When I was in the little house, I used my foot to rock her cradle, so I could repair my nets, sharpen my knives, and patch my diving outfit. When we went to the sweet potato fields, she stayed in her cradle, which I draped with cloth to protect her from the sun. When I dove with Do-saeng and the collective, my father took care of Min-lee. He met me outside the bulteok when we came back for lunch and at the end of the day so I might nurse her. He’d always been good at caring for babies, and he was drinking less.

All that—the real life of a grown woman, wife, mother, and haenyeo—lasted exactly one week. The men sitting under the village tree heard the news on their transistor radios. That day, August 6, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. We didn’t know what an atomic bomb was, but as we heard the reports of an entire city flattened . . . We thought of my father-in-law, who was in Hiroshima . . . If my husband had come home to perform rites with Shaman Kim, then we would have had to accept my father-in-law was dead. But Jun-bu didn’t come. Still, Do-saeng wept many tears of worry and sadness, not knowing if her husband might have survived but suspecting the worst. Then, two days later, the radio announcer told us that the Soviet Union had officially declared war on Japan. Now another world power might want to use Jeju as a stepping-stone. The day after that, America dropped its second atomic bomb, this one on Nagasaki. If the United States could reach Japan by air, they could very easily reach Jeju, where we had so many Japanese troops. And what would the Soviet Union do?

But a bomb never came and neither did a land-and-sea invasion, because the Japanese emperor surrendered six days later. We had always named historic events by their dates. This one became known as 8.15 Liberation Day. We were free from the Japanese colonists at last! We’d also been liberated from the massive number of deaths an invasion would have caused. We went to bed feeling exhilarated, but the next morning every single Japanese person—whether soldier or civilian—was still on Jeju. On the radio, we heard that Korea would be supervised under a joint trusteeship controlled by four nations: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and China. Another set of men living on the other side of the world had also divided our country along the Thirty-eighth Parallel. This meant—although none of us understood the practicalities—that the USSR would oversee Korea above the line and the United States would oversee Korea below the line as we transitioned to independence and formed our own country. We thought we were free, but so far the only difference in our lives here on Jeju was that the Japanese flag was lowered, and the American flag was raised. One colonizer had been replaced by another.





The Tail of a Skirt


September 1945–October 1946

Two weeks later, I prepared to move to my husband. Do-saeng helped, and after the last of my belongings was packed, she said, “You and my son are newlyweds and you have a baby, who Jun-bu has never seen, but I beg you to take Yu-ri. You have always been good with her, and it will be only for a short while.” I knew Do-saeng worried about her husband’s fate in Japan. To ease her burden, I accepted. So, on September 1, Father led my pig, while Grandmother and Third Brother—who no longer had to hide—carried my sleeping mats, quilts, clothes, and kitchen goods to the olle, where they loaded everything onto the back of the horse-drawn cart I’d hired. Do-saeng, always so strong, walked arm in arm with Yu-ri to the cart with tears running down her cheeks.

“Take good care of her,” Do-saeng said.

“I will,” I promised.

“Come back for the lunar New Year’s Festival,” Father said.

“I’ll come back for more than that,” I replied. “Bukchon is not so far. I’ll be able to return here on occasion.” But I was also thinking about how I might visit Mi-ja in Jeju City, which was about twenty kilometers farther on past Bukchon. These distances I could walk.

The driver was eager to get started, so we had no extra time for tears, but a feeling of unease made the parting hard. As the cart began bumping along the dirt road, I kept my eyes on my family. Even Do-saeng stayed put until we were out of sight.