The Island of Sea Women(55)
Sometimes village collectives are unwilling to let a new wife join them. Perhaps their fishing grounds are small or have been overfished through bad management or greed, or they don’t care for the new wife, or her husband’s family has been a source of ill feelings or grudges, or her skills are not good enough to adapt to new waters. This was not the case for me.
“Hey, your husband is my son’s teacher,” a woman yelled. “Come sit here with me!”
“I live very close to you,” another woman called out. “My name is Jang Ki-yeong. That’s my daughter.” The woman pointed across the circle to a young girl, who waved, encouraging me to come over. Ki-yeong just laughed. “Stop it, Yun-su. You and the others are only baby-divers. Young-sook looks to be a small-diver.”
“We will see,” said Gi-won. “For now, sit with Ki-yeong. You’ll dive with her today. She’ll test your skills, and tomorrow I’ll let you know with which group you’ll sit.” As I made my way to Ki-yeong, Gi-won addressed the group. “Now, where shall we dive today? I was thinking . . .”
Later, we rowed out to sea. A long pull through the water’s resistance, then a heave of the oar over the swells, then the dip back into the sea, followed by another hard pull. For the last few years, I’d worked as an itinerant laborer on a boat powered by a motor. I hadn’t lost all the strength in my arms, but I’d surely be sore tomorrow. What a good feeling that was!
We didn’t go too far out, and our dives took us down only ten meters. But even in these relatively shallow waters, the seafloor was abundant with life. For a woman who’d never entered new waters and only knew the wet fields where she’d dived with her mother, sisters, cousins, and haenyeo of her natal village’s collective, the experience might have been daunting. But I’d dived in the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the East China Sea. Every new diving spot is different, because the ocean—while one vast entity—is varied and complex. Just as on land, it has mountains, canyons, sand, and rocks. Also, just as on land, it has different types of animals: some predators, others prey, some loving the sun, others preferring the dark safety of a cave or crevasse. The plants, too, tell us that the land and sea are but mirror images of each other—with forests, flowers, algae, and so much more. I may not have been here before, but I was in my truest home, and it showed. Gi-won was impressed, and she rewarded me with a seat between the small-divers and the granny-divers.
“Even though Young-sook is barely married, her skills are very advanced,” Gi-won explained to the collective. “Young-sook, we welcome your sumbisori.”
Two weeks later, as we rowed to sea, a wave of nausea washed over me. I knew immediately what it meant. My smile was big and wide, and then I had to pull in my oar, lean over the side of the boat, and throw up my breakfast. It was as hot with chilies coming up as it had been going down. The other haenyeo cheered for me.
“Let it be a girl!” Gi-won shouted. “One day she will join our collective!”
“Let it be a son!” Ki-yeong exclaimed. “Young-sook still needs one.”
“Let it be healthy,” my husband said, when I got home.
“No woman can ever underestimate the sentimentality of a man,” Gi-won averred the next day, and we all agreed.
* * *
At the end of September, a group of American officers arrived on Jeju to accept the surrender of those Japanese who’d remained on the island, hidden underground. We were told the Americans would bring democracy and quash communism, but most of us didn’t know the difference between the two. We wanted to be left alone to have control over our own lives. We didn’t even want mainlanders to interfere. Meanwhile, the Americans dumped Japanese rifles and artillery into the sea, exploded tanks, and set aircraft on fire. The booming woke the elderly from their naps. The acrid smoke—blown about by Jeju’s erratic winds—stung our eyes, burned our lungs, and soured our tongues.
“It is not a diving period now. Perhaps you should take a day to visit your friend in the city,” Jun-bu suggested. “The air might be better for you and Min-lee.”
It was a perfect idea, but I didn’t want to leave Jun-bu alone. Still, he insisted. For days, I scavenged for gifts to bring: mushrooms picked on the side of an oreum, mugwort gathered shoreside in case Mi-ja needed to clean glass, and seaweed so she might flavor her husband’s soup. All these things I packed into a basket. Jun-bu gave Mi-ja’s address to the cart driver, and I was off to see my friend.
When Min-lee and I arrived in Jeju City . . . Hyng! The streets were barely passable. Thousands of Japanese soldiers—as well as Japanese businessmen, merchants, and their families—filed in long lines toward the harbor to board ships; coming the other direction were thousands upon thousands of Jeju people returning home from Osaka and other places in Japan, where they’d done migrant work. Unemployed men and women milled everywhere, because the Japanese-owned factories and canneries had closed. And then there were the refugees, who’d fled south and to our island after the country had been divided at the Thirty-eighth Parallel. The past few weeks had been frightening, but the crowds and chaos deeply unsettled me.
I was still troubled when the driver pulled the cart to a stop in front of a Japanese-style house. I knocked, and Mi-ja greeted me at the door, her baby on her shoulder, his neck wobbling as he lifted his head to look at me. She hadn’t known I was coming, but she didn’t seem excited by my unexpected appearance at her home. I wrote her reaction off as surprise. When she wordlessly glided deeper into the house, I slipped off my shoes and followed her. The house was even bigger and more elegant than I’d imagined. Everything was clean and tidy. A vase of flowers stood on a windowsill. The floors were polished teak instead of the worn planks I’d grown up with. The cushions we sat on were made of silk. The room was eerily quiet even with two babies not yet four months old. We laid them side by side. Mi-ja’s son sucked on his fist. My daughter slept. Mi-ja and I would have to wait a long time before we’d see them play together, let alone negotiate a marriage match. Children are hope and joy. A sense of peace, of everything being right—something I’d never felt, as nice as they were, with Gu-sun and Wan-soon back in Hado—sank into my bones, but when I took in Mi-ja, my perceptions forcibly shifted. She looked as pale and scared as when we’d said goodbye on the dock. I asked the first question that entered my mind.