The Island of Sea Women

Acknowledgments

I would not have been able to write The Island of Sea Women without the help of three extraordinary women: Dr. Anne Hilty, Brenda Paik Sunoo, and Jenie Hahn. I tracked down Anne Hilty, Jeju’s official ambassador of the haenyeo, through her numerous articles in The Jeju Weekly, National Geographic Traveller, and other magazines, as well as her book Jeju Haenyeo: Stewards of the Sea. Beyond her haenyeo expertise, she’s also written extensively about Jeju’s geography, shamans, goddesses, Kim Mandeok, food, the April 3 Incident, and death and burial rituals. We had a lively e-mail correspondence and Skype chats in which she answered every question I threw her way. She helped put together my travel itinerary to Jeju, arranged interviews, and introduced me to numerous people who proved to be extremely helpful: Governor Won Hee-ryung, who gave me a warm welcome to the island; Grand Shaman Kim Yoon-su, whom I visited at the Chilmeoridang shamanistic center; Shaman Suh Sun-sil, who shared her experiences with me in her own home; Song Jung-hee, the publisher of The Jeju Weekly; Kim Jeyon, Jeju government’s international relations coordinator; Professor Lee Byung-gul, director of the Jeju Sea Grant Center; Dr. Choa Hye-gyong, who early on headed a team to study the haenyeo for the Jeju Development Institute and shared with me her recordings and translations of haenyeo songs; Grace Kim, for her translation duties; Kim Hyeryen, who arranged for me to stay at her niece’s traditional house in Hado; and Marsha Bogolin, the manager of a guesthouse in the mid-mountain area.

Dr. Hilty also sent me The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, which outlines the conclusions of the National Committee for the Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju April 3 Incident. From this 755-page document, the result of one of the lengthiest human rights investigations in the world, I garnered details given by survivors and others on both sides of the conflict, as well as from declassified documents provided by the U.S. National Archives and various U.S. and Korean military branches. The report gave me first-person descriptions of the events at the March 1 demonstration, the shooting of the young woman in Bukchon, and how events played out in that village, including the account of an ambulance driver who overheard the plans of what would happen that day. It also provided me with the texts of posters, leaflets, radio broadcasts, speeches, and rallying cries.

Brenda Paik Sunoo, the author of Moon Tides: Jeju Island Grannies of the Sea, is a bighearted woman. She arranged for me to stay in her building in the seaside village of Gwakji. She introduced me to Yang Soonja, a fashion designer who walked me through the persimmon-dyeing process; Cho Oksun, a retired haenyeo and neighbor; Kim Jong Ho, a poet, who shared his memories of being a boy during the April 3 Incident; and Kang Mikyoung, the daughter of a haenyeo and expert on domestic abuse on Jeju. Brenda and I also spent wonderful hours with Youngsook Han, a scholar, who translated for me during an especially moving interview with her haenyeo mother, Kang Hee-jeong, who spoke about the first time she saw electric lights, the Japanese occupation, how she became a haenyeo, and what it meant to send her daughter to college. (I’ll be thanking other haenyeo shortly, but let me say here that together their stories and memories helped me create the bantering conversations in the bulteok about the nature of men, the benefits of widowhood, and so much more.) Along the way, I had several lively discussions with many of these women about the influence of Heidi in their lives and on the island. Last, Brenda and I had a lot of fun with Yim Kwangsook, a nurse visiting from the United States, who translated during various interviews. I won’t forget our visit to the traditional Korean bathhouse any time soon.

I met Jenie Hahn at Jeju National University. She translated the oral histories of several haenyeo, including those of Ko Chun-geum, Kim Chunman, Kwon Youngae, and Jeong Wolseon, in which they spoke of the day-to-day practicalities of recruitment, ferries, food, and dormitory life for itinerant work in other countries. Jenie also sent me A Guide to Jeju Spoken in the Language of Jeju and English by Moon Soon-deok and Oh Seung-hun—which proved to be invaluable with its explanations of food, traditions, and aphorisms—and her translation of Kim Sooni’s “The Goddesses, the Myths and Jeju Island.” When I needed to confirm facts, Jenie graciously checked with Moon Soon-deok (Jeju Development Institute) and Kang Keonyong (a senior researcher at the Haenyeo Museum) for me.

Allow me to gently shift my thanks to more general categories: the island, cultural traditions, haenyeo, and the April 3 Incident. Jeju is thirty times the size of Manhattan. This lush and beautiful island is home to 25 percent of the entire plant species of Korea. It’s the native home of what we commonly call the Christmas tree. The first foreigners believed to visit the island were Hendrick Hamel and his crew of Dutch sailors, who were shipwrecked on Jeju in 1653. They were imprisoned in Seoul, but a few of them, including Hamel, escaped thirteen years later. Once he returned to the Netherlands, he wrote a memoir chronicling his travails, thereby introducing Jeju Island to the West. Hundreds of years later, in 1901, Siegfried Genthe, a German climber, sought and received permission to be the first Westerner to scale Mount Halla. He also wrote of his adventures, and even today Mount Halla is used by many mountaineers as practice for climbing Mount Everest. Jumping to the 1970s, David J. Nemeth did his Peace Corps stint on Jeju. He kept a diary, which was eventually published as Jeju Island Rambling. The island also became the subject of his dissertation, The Architecture of Ideology: Neo-Confucianism Imprinting on Cheju Island, Korea, and later he wrote Rediscovering Hallasan: Jeju Island’s Traditional Landscapes of Sincerity, Mysticism and Adventure. For other general information about Jeju, I relied on Stories of Jeju, published by the Jeju Development Institute. The Kim Mandeok Memorial Hall gave me insights into the legacy of this early female philanthropist. The exhibits at Jeju Hangil Memorial Hall provided details about the island’s anti-Japanese movements. The Folk Village offered a good sense of the varieties of architecture and their purposes on Jeju, while the Jeju Stone Cultural Park was a great place to learn about the many uses of this natural resource.

As stated throughout the novel, Jeju is quite different from the rest of Korea. The language, for example, is unlike standard Korean. The Jeju dialect is heavily nasal, and many words end abruptly, so they won’t disappear into the island’s rough breezes. It’s completely free from those elements of Korean that stratify tenses and grammar, telling people how to address everyone from the emperor down to a chicken. On Jeju, people greet each other as equals. The matrifocal nature of the island is manifested in its being home to ten thousand spirits and deities, with the vast majority of them goddesses. Goddesses and Strong Jeju Women, by Soonie Kim and Anne Hilty, and translated by Youngsook Han, tells the wonderful myths and stories of several of those goddesses. The writings of Chin Song-gi and Gui-Young Hong were also useful as I tried to re-create Jeju’s rich landscape of traditions. Every person I met graciously invited me to sample Jeju’s extraordinary and delicious cuisine. For a more scholarly look at food, however, I turned to Top 20 Jeju Local Dishes for Your Life and Health, published by Jeju National University’s Department of Food Science and Nutrition, and once again translated by Jenie Hahn.

As I begin expressing my gratitude to all those who helped me with additional information about the haenyeo, let me first note that this is not what Jeju’s sea women call themselves. They use jamsu, jamnyeo, or jomnyeo, which are all Jeju words. That said, the Japanese word haenyeo is how sea women are known internationally. This might be a good place to note that in 2004 a large abalone could fetch about 50,000 won or $60. These days, a haenyeo can make approximately $26,000 a year for part-time work.

One of the first articles I found as I began my research was a piece written in 1967 by Suk Ki Hong and Hermann Rahn in Scientific American about a study looking at whether the haenyeo’s ability to withstand cold was genetic or an adaptation. This question fascinated me, and down the rabbit hole I went. Through additional articles in American Headache Society, American Physiological Society, Journal of Sports Sciences, and the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, I learned invaluable details about breath holding, decompression sickness, energy metabolism, and body temperature for both Korea’s haenyeo and Japan’s ama. The following are grouped by research paper: Hideki Tamaki, Kiyotaka Kohshi, Tatsuya Ishitake, and Robert M. Wong; Jay Chol Choi, Jung Seok Lee, Sa-Yoon Kang, Ji-Hoon Kang, and Jong-Myon Bae; William E. Hurford, Suk Ki Hong, Yang Saeng Park, Do Whan Ahn, Keizo Shiraki, Motohiko Mohri, and Warren M. Zapol; and Frédéric Lemaitre, Andreas Fahlman, Bernard Gardette, and Kiyotaka Kohsi. The following collaborated in various groupings on multiple papers: N. Y. An, K. A. Bae, D. S. Han, S. K. Hong, S. Y. Hong, B. S. Kang, D. H. Kang, C. Kim, C. K. Kim, P. K. Kim, Y. W. Kwon, I. S. Lee, S. H. Lee, K. S. Paik, S. C. Park, Y. D. Park, Y. S. Park, D. W. Rennie, S. H. Song, C. S. Suh, D. J. Suh, and C. S. Yoon.

I’d also like to acknowledge Choe Sang-hun, Alison Flowers, Priscilla Frank, Gwi-Sook Gwon, AeDuck Im, Kim Soonie, Joel McConvey, Simon Mundy, Lee Sunhwa, and Catherine Young for their magazine articles and academic essays on the haenyeo, shamanism, and Jeju’s women in general. For current issues related to the sea, I turned to a survey in Marine Policy about production, economics, and management of marine resources conducted by Jae-Young Ko, Glenn A. Jones, Moon-Soo Heo, Young-Su Kang, and Sang-Hyuck Kang. Also informative was a transcript of an interview by Youngmi Mayer with three haenyeo—Jung Won Oh, Ko Jun Ja, and Mun Yeon Ok—for Lucky Peach: The Gender Issue and reprinted in Harper’s magazine, and Ines Min’s interview with diver Kim Jae Youn for COS. I also found articles about the haenyeo on the following websites: Ancient Explorers, The Jeju Weekly, Culture24, and Utne Reader. I have the deepest admiration for scholars who embed themselves in a culture. Haejoang Cho lived on Udo Island, which is part of Jeju, in the 1970s. Her dissertation, An Ethnographic Study of a Female Diver’s Village in Korea, provided me with great details about the lives of haenyeo, their views on men, and translations of rowing songs. I visited the Haenyeo Museum several times. The exhibits allowed me to examine haenyeo tools and diving costumes up close. The videotaped oral histories of elderly haenyeo offered wonderful details. The staff gave me books published by the museum—Mother of the Sea and Jeju Haenyeo—and introduced me to haenyeo who lived nearby.

In addition to the interviews that were arranged in advance, Grace Kim and I also spoke to haenyeo as they waited to be taken to the sea, gathered seaweed on the shore, or were coming out of the water with their catches. Among these were Kang I-suk, Kim Wan-soon, and Kim Won-seok. I’d like to single out Kim Eun-sil, who worked as a haenyeo on Jeju and as an itinerant diver to help her family, and Yun Mi-ja, who, among other things, shared what life was like for her in Vladivostok. To understand the functions and importance of the bulteok, I relied on the research of Eun-Jung Kang, Kyu-Han Kim, Kyeonghwa Byun, and Changgen Yoo. Artist Mikhail Karikis’s video and sound installation about the haenyeo and Hyung S. Kim’s wall-sized photographic portraits of divers helped me to visualize the physical attributes of the older Young-sook, Kang sisters, and others. I was fortunate to meet Barbara Hammer in New York and talk to her about her documentary, Diving Women of Jeju-do. Journal Films’ Families of the World series produced a lovely little documentary about a twelve-year-old girl learning to dive on Jeju in 1975.

If you ever find your way to Jeju, I hope you will visit the April 3 Peace Park. It is a beautiful and very moving place. The final accounting of how many people died on Jeju during the April 3 Incident may never be known. There were 300,000 people living on Jeju when it started. Death estimates have ranged from 30,000 to 60,000, although recent research suggests that as many as 80,000 may have been killed. The early months of 1949 accounted for the highest number of deaths, with some estimates as high as 10 percent of Jeju’s total population. Another 80,000 islanders became refugees, living with relatives or in community halls, elementary schools, or lean-tos in fields. By the time the incident officially ended, seven years later, 40,000 people had fled to Japan. Since for fifty years people on Jeju could not speak about what had happened under threat of death and other reprisals, it was the exiles in places like Osaka who kept the stories of death and destruction from disappearing entirely. Seventy percent of Jeju’s villages had been burned. Many of them were never rebuilt. In the hills, people still come across crumbling ruins of villages, with eighty-four “lost villages” being identified at this date. Today the site of the massacre at Bukchon is a field for growing garlic. It has a small memorial tablet similar to those honoring victims in other villages around the island.

In addition to the aforementioned official report about the April 3 Incident, I found further information in “The Question of American Responsibility for the Suppression of the Chejudo Uprising” by Bruce Cumings; “Crimes, Concealment and South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission” by Do Khiem and Kim Sung-soo; “The Northwest Youth League” by Lauren Flenniken; “Jeju Women’s Lives in the Context of the Juju April 3rd Uprising” by Rimwha Han and Soonhee Kim; The Massacres at Mount Halla as well as other articles written by Hun Joon Kim; “Healing the Wounds of War” by Heonik Kwon; “The Cheju-do Rebellion” by John Merrill; “The Ghosts of Cheju” by the Newsweek staff; “Reading Volcano Island” by Sonia Ryang; and “The 1948 Cheju-do Civil War” by Wolcott Wheeler.

I’m lucky to have many wonderful people who support me as a writer and as a woman. I must thank Ginny Boyce at Altour Travel for once again getting me to where I needed to go, Nicole Bruno and Sara Seyoum for errands and office work, and Mari Lemus for keeping the ship on an even keel. Carol Fitzgerald and her colleagues at the Book Report Network have helped me with my newsletter, while Sasha Stone continues to make my website both beautiful and informative. (Please visit my website at www.LisaSee.com to see videos about the haenyeo, find discussion questions for book clubs, and much more.) My agent, Sandra Dijkstra, and her staff of fabulous women stay attuned to the business side of things. Everyone at Scribner and Simon & Schuster has been kind to me. Kathy Belden edited the novel with a delicate hand. Nan Graham and Susan Moldow encouraged me. Katie Monaghan and Rosie Mahorter carried out publicity duties with abounding energy and kindness. And here’s a shout-out to the many others in marketing and sales who astound me daily with their enthusiasm and creativity.

My sister, Clara Sturak, has read every manuscript, and I trust completely her editorial eye. Chris and Rakhi surround me with love. Alexander and Elizabeth inspire me to work hard. Henry fills me with good cheer. And my beloved Richard makes me laugh, reminds me to have fun, and misses me—while still giving unending support—during the times I’m away on a research trip or book tour. I love you all so much. Thank you.