The Island of Sea Women(68)

This was serious. None of us had telephones in our homes, so the line in the police station was the only way a village could call for emergency help from Jeju City.

“It looked to me like they were armed with little more than what we take into the sea,” Gi-won said.

“You looked?” Ki-yeong asked in awe.

“You think anyone would dare do something to me?” Gi-won jutted out her chin to make her point. “I went to my front gate. I saw men—and some women—carrying sickles, scythes, shovels, and—”

“They sound like farmers, not haenyeo,” Ki-yeong speculated.

“They are farmers,” her daughter said.

“And some fishermen too.”

“This isn’t about all that leftist and rightist stuff the men on the radio talk about,” Gi-won said. “It’s about not wanting to be told what to do by another country—”

“And reunifying the country. I have family in the north.”

“Who here hasn’t been touched? First, we had the Japanese. Then the war. And now all the problems of living and eating—”

“Was anyone killed?” I asked.

The bulteok quieted. In the excitement, no one had stopped to consider who might have gotten hurt or how badly.

Gi-won knew the answer. “Four rebels and thirty policemen were killed around the island—”

The woman next to me groaned. “Thirty policemen?”

“Hyun!”

“Aigo!”

“And two officers were lost in Hamdeok,” Gi-won added.

That was only three kilometers away. Mi-ja. Maybe I should have been more scared for her, but ever since seeing Sang-mun that day in the police station, I had to figure she was safe.

“Lost? What does lost mean? Did they desert?”

“They were kidnapped!”

Fear played across the faces of the women around me. Attack and retribution had become a way of life for us, and we were all anxious.

“No one died in Bukchon,” Gi-won said. “We can be grateful for that.”

The relief was unmistakable. If no one was killed here, then we might not experience reprisals. We could hope that nothing would happen.

Once in the sea, I pushed aside thoughts of dry land. By the time we returned to the bulteok a few hours later to eat and warm up, our worries about last night’s events had diminished. If we could go back to boasting about what we’d caught, then maybe others would shrug off the raids as well.

The U.S. colonel in charge was also dismissive. “I’m not interested in the cause of the uprising,” Colonel Brown told a reporter on the radio that night. “Two weeks will be enough to quash the revolt.” But he was wrong. This day, April 3—Sa-sam—came to be called the 4.3 Incident, although we did not yet know that this date would be so important in our lives.

Two days later, Jun-bu told me that the U.S. military government had created something called the Jeju Military Command. A more stringent curfew was set in place.

“But how am I supposed to stay in our home between sunrise and sunset, when water needs to be hauled, fuel gathered, and pigs cared for?” I asked my husband.

Jun-bu ran his hands through his hair. He had no solution.

On the radio, we heard the commander of the Ninth Regiment of the Korean Constabulary explain that he was trying to negotiate peace: “I’ve asked for the complete surrender of the rebels, but they’re demanding that the police be disarmed, all government officials be dismissed, paramilitary groups—like the Northwest Young Men’s Association—be sent away, and that the two Koreas be reunified.”

Naturally, neither side could agree to those conditions. After that, the constabulary brought in nearly a thousand men to strengthen their force on Jeju. Some of those men were sent to guard villages along the coast like Bukchon, Hado, and Hamdeok, for which, I’ll admit, I was grateful. Then—and all this we heard about either on the radio or through gossip—the constabulary climbed Mount Halla and attacked the rebels. By the end of April, Jeju City was completely cordoned off, and police were conducting house-to-house searches to weed out what they were calling communist sympathizers. But many people in the constabulary and the police were from Jeju. When they could no longer bear what was happening, they defected to the rebels in the mountains. We even had a few people leave Bukchon to join the renegades.

Major General Dean, the U.S. military governor now in charge of Korea, came to our island to “assess the situation.” He repeated a rumor that the North Korean Red Army had landed on Jeju and now commanded the rebels. This was followed by rumors about North Korean naval ships and a Soviet submarine circling the island. These false stories cemented a hard-line policy. Major General Dean sent another battalion to Jeju. And while the order was that the U.S. Army should not intervene, it kept track of Korean operations by using reconnaissance aircraft. When I worked in the dry fields, those planes passed overhead, hunting for their prey. At night, I saw cruisers out at sea using searchlights to scan the horizon. When I went to the five-day market, vegetable peddlers from the mid-mountain area told me they’d come across American officers riding in jeeps or on horseback on Korean-led missions. By the end of six weeks, four thousand people had been arrested.

At the beginning of the seventh week, Jun-bu invited the women from the collective who didn’t know how to read or write to our house to teach us how to vote. Even if the election was rigged, we wanted to take this opportunity to try to have a voice in our government. “You don’t have to recognize the written characters for the candidates’ names,” he explained. “All you need to know is where he comes on the ballot. Is he number one, two, or three? It’s your choice. Then you mark the number of the person you want.”