The Island of Sea Women

Swallowing Water Breath

My first day of sea work started hours before sunrise when even the crows were still asleep. I dressed and made my way through the dark to our latrine. I climbed the ladder to the stone structure and positioned myself over the hole in the floor. Below, our pigs gathered, snuffling eagerly. A big stick leaned against the wall in the corner in case one of them became too enthusiastic and tried to leap up. Yesterday I’d had to hit one pretty hard. They must have remembered, because this morning they waited for my private business to drop to the ground to fight among themselves for it. I returned to the house, tied my baby brother to my back, and went outside to draw water from the village well. Three round trips, carrying earthenware jugs in my hands, were required to get enough water to satisfy our morning needs. Next, I gathered dung to burn for heating and cooking. This also had to be done early, because I had a lot of competition from other women and girls in the village. My chores done, my baby brother and I headed home.

Three generations of my family lived within the same fence—with Mother, Father, and us children in the big house and Grandmother in the little house across the courtyard. Both structures were built from stone and had thatch roofs weighed down with additional stones to keep the island wind from blowing them away. The big house had three rooms: a kitchen, the main room, and a special room for women to use on their wedding nights and after they’d given birth. In the main room, oil lamps flickered and sputtered. Our sleeping mats had already been folded and stacked against the wall.

Grandmother was awake, dressed, and drinking hot water. Her hair was covered by a scarf. Her face and hands were bony and the color of chestnuts. My first and second brothers, twelve and ten years old, sat cross-legged on the floor, knees touching. Across from them, Third Brother squirmed as only a seven-year-old boy can. My little sister, six years younger than I was, helped our mother pack three baskets. Mother’s face was set in concentration as she checked and double-checked that she had everything, while Little Sister tried to show she was already training to be a good haenyeo.

Father ladled the thin millet soup that he’d prepared into bowls. I loved him. He had Grandmother’s narrow face. His long, tapered hands were soft. His eyes were deep and warm. His callused feet were almost always bare. He wore his favorite dog-fur hat pulled down over his ears and many layers of clothes, which helped to disguise how he sacrificed food, so his children could eat more. Mother, never wasting a moment, joined us on the floor and nursed my baby brother as she ate. As soon as she was done with her soup and the feeding, she handed the baby to my father. Like all haenyeo husbands, he would spend the rest of the day under the village tree in Hado’s central square with other fathers. Together, they’d look after infants and young children. Satisfied that Fourth Brother was content in Father’s arms, Mother motioned for me to hurry. Anxiety rattled through me. I so hoped to prove myself today.

The sky was just beginning to turn pink when Mother, Grandmother, and I stepped outside. Now that it was light, I could see my steamy breath billowing then dissipating in the cold air. Grandmother moved slowly, but Mother had efficiency in every step and gesture. Her legs and arms were strong. Her basket was on her back, and she helped me with mine, securing the straps. Here I was, going to work, helping to feed and care for my family, and becoming a part of the long tradition of haenyeo. Suddenly I felt like a woman.

Mother hoisted the third basket, holding it before her, and together we stepped through the opening in the stone wall that protected our small piece of property from prying eyes and the relentless wind. We wended our way through the olle—one of thousands of stone-walled pathways that ran between houses and also gave us routes to crisscross the island. We stayed alert for Japanese soldiers. Korea had now been a Japanese colony for twenty-eight years. We hated the Japanese, and they hated us. They were cruel. They stole food. Inland, they rustled livestock. They took and took and took. They’d killed Grandmother’s parents, and she called them chokpari—cloven-footed ones. Mother always said that if I was ever alone and saw colonists, whether soldiers or civilians, I should run and hide, because they’d ruined many girls on Jeju.

We came around a corner and into a long straightaway. Ahead in the distance, my friend Mi-ja danced from foot to foot, to keep warm, from excitement. Her skin was perfect, and the morning light glowed on her cheeks. I’d grown up in the Gul-dong section of Hado, while Mi-ja lived in the Sut-dong section, and the two of us always met in this spot. Even before we reached her, she bowed deeply to show her gratitude and humility to my mother, who bent at her waist just enough to acknowledge Mi-ja’s deference. Then Mother wordlessly strapped the third basket to Mi-ja’s back.

“You girls learned to swim together,” Mother said. “You’ve watched and learned as apprentices. You, Mi-ja, have worked especially hard.”

I didn’t mind that Mother singled out Mi-ja. She’d earned it.

“I can never thank you enough.” Mi-ja’s voice was as delicate as flower petals. “You have been a mother to me, and I will always be grateful.”

“You are another daughter to me,” Mother replied. “Today, Halmang Samseung’s job is done. As the goddess who oversees pregnancy, childbirth, and raising a child to the age of fifteen, she is now fully released from her duties. Many girls have friends, but the two of you are closer than friends. You are like sisters, and I expect you to take care of each other today and every day as those tied by blood would do.”

It was as much a blessing as a warning.

Mi-ja was the first to voice her fears. “I understand about swallowing water breath before going beneath the waves. I must hold as much air within me as possible. But what if I don’t know when to come up? What if I can’t make a good sumbisori?”

Swallowing water breath is the process all haenyeo use to gather enough air in their lungs to sustain them as they submerge. The sumbisori is the special sound—like a whistle or a dolphin’s call—a haenyeo makes as she breaches the surface of the sea and releases the air she’s held in her lungs, followed by a deep intake of breath.

“Sucking in air shouldn’t be troublesome,” Mother said. “You breathe in every day as you walk about the earth.”

“But what if I run out of it in the watery depths?” Mi-ja asked.

“Breathing in, breathing out. Every beginning haenyeo worries about this,” Grandmother blurted before my mother could answer. She could be impatient with Mi-ja.

“Your body will know what to do,” Mother said reassuringly. “And even if it doesn’t, I will be there with you. I’m responsible for every woman’s safe return to shore. I listen for the sumbisori of all women in our collective. Together our sumbisori create a song of the air and wind on Jeju. Our sumbisori is the innermost sound of the world. It connects us to the future and the past. Our sumbisori allows us first to serve our parents and then our children.”

I found this comforting, but I also became aware of Mi-ja staring at me expectantly. Yesterday we’d agreed to tell my mother of our worries. Mi-ja had volunteered hers, but I was hesitant about revealing mine. There were many ways to die in the sea, and I was scared. My mother may have said that Mi-ja was like a daughter—and I loved her for loving my friend—but I was an actual daughter, and I didn’t want her to see me as less than Mi-ja.

I was saved from having to say anything when Mother started walking. Mi-ja and I trailed after her, with Grandmother following us. We passed house after house—all made of stone with thatch roofs. The main square was deserted except for women, who were being pulled to the sea by the scent of salt air and the sound of waves. Just before reaching the beach, we stopped to pick a handful of leaves from a bank of wild mugwort, which we tucked into our baskets. We turned another corner and reached the shore. We stepped over sharp rocks, making our way to the bulteok—the fire space. It was a round, roofless structure made of stacked lava rocks. Instead of a door, two curved walls overlapped to prevent those outside from seeing in. A similar structure sat in the shallows. This was where people bathed and washed their clothes. And just offshore, where the water reached no higher than our knees, was an area walled with stone. Here, anchovies washed in at high tide, were trapped at low tide, and then we waded through with nets to catch them.

We had seven bulteoks in Hado—one for each neighborhood’s diving collective. Our group had thirty members. Logic would say that the entrance should face the sea, since haenyeo go back and forth from it all day, but having the entrance at the back gave an added barrier against the constant winds blowing in from the water. Above the crash of waves, we could hear women’s voices—teasing, laughing, and shouting well-worn gibes back and forth. As we entered, the gathered women turned to see who’d arrived. They all wore padded jackets and trousers.

Mi-ja set down her basket and hurried to the fire.

“No need for you to worry about tending the fire now,” Yang Do-saeng called out good-naturedly. She had high cheekbones and sharp elbows. She was the only person I knew who kept her hair in braids at all times. She was a little older than my mother, and they were diving partners and best friends. Do-saeng’s husband had given her one son and one daughter, and that was the end. A sadness, to be sure. Nevertheless, our two families were very close, especially since Do-saeng’s husband was in Japan doing factory work. These days about a quarter of all Jeju people lived in Japan, because a ferry ticket cost half the price of a single bag of rice here on our island. Do-saeng’s husband had been in Hiroshima for so many years that I didn’t remember him. My mother helped Do-saeng with ancestor worship, and Do-saeng helped my mother when she had to cook for our family when we performed our rites. “You’re no longer an apprentice. You’ll be with us today. Are you ready, girl?”

“Yes, Auntie,” Mi-ja responded, using the honorific, bowing and backing away.

The other women laughed, causing Mi-ja to blush.

“Stop teasing her,” my mother said. “These two have enough to worry about today.”

As chief of this collective, Mother sat with her back against the part of the stone wall that had the best protection from the wind. Once she was settled, the other women took spots in strict order, according to each one’s level of diving skill. The grandmother-divers—those like my mother, who’d achieved top status in the sea even if they had yet to become grandmothers on dry land—had the best seats. The actual grandmothers, like mine, didn’t have a label. They were true grandmothers, who should be treated with respect. Although long retired from sea work, they enjoyed the companionship of the women with whom they’d spent most of their lives. Now Grandmother and her friends liked to sort seaweed that had been washed ashore by the wind or dive close to the beach in the shallows, so they could spend the day trading jokes and sharing miseries. As women of respect and honor, they had the second most important seats in the bulteok. Next came the small-divers, in their twenties and early thirties, who were still perfecting their skills. Mi-ja and I sat with the baby-divers: the two Kang sisters, Gu-ja and Gu-sun, who were two and three years older than we were, and Do-saeng’s daughter, Yu-ri, who was already nineteen. The three of them had a couple years’ diving experience, while Mi-ja and I were true beginners, but the five of us were ranked the lowest in the collective, which meant that our seats were by the bulteok’s opening. The cold wind swirled around us, and Mi-ja and I scooted closer to the fire. It was important to warm up as best we could before entering the sea.

Mother began the meeting by asking, “Does this beach have any food?”

“More food than there are grains of sand on Jeju,” Do-saeng trilled, “if we had an abundance of sand instead of rocks.”

“More food than on twenty moons,” another woman declared, “if there were twenty moons above us.”

“More food than in fifty jars at my grandmother’s house,” a woman who’d been widowed too young joined in, “if she’d had fifty jars.”

“Good,” Mother said in response to the ritual bantering. “Then let us discuss where we will dive today.” At home, her voice always seemed so loud. Here, hers was just one of many loud voices, since the ears of all haenyeo are damaged over time by water pressure. One day I too would have a loud voice.

The sea doesn’t belong to anyone, but every collective had assigned diving rights to specific territories: close enough to the shore to walk in, within twenty- to thirty-minutes’ swimming distance from land, or accessible only by boat farther out to sea; a cove here, an underwater plateau not too far offshore, the north side of this or that island, and so on. Mi-ja and I listened as the women considered the possibilities. As baby-divers, we hadn’t earned the right to speak. Even the small-divers kept quiet. Mother struck down most proposals. “That area is overfished,” she told Do-saeng. Another time, she came back with, “Just as on land, our sea fields also follow the seasons. To honor spawning times, conch can’t be picked from the ocean floor from July to September, and abalone can’t be harvested from October through December. It is our duty to be keepers and managers of the sea. If we protect our wet fields, they will continue to provide for us.” Finally, she made her decision. “We’ll row to our underwater canyon not far from here.”

“The baby-divers aren’t ready for that,” one of the grandmother-divers said. “They aren’t strong enough, and they haven’t earned the right either.”

Mother held up a hand. “In that area, lava flowed from Grandmother Seolmundae to form the rocky canyon. Its walls provide something for every ability. The most experienced among us can go as deep as we want, while the baby-divers can pick through those spots close to the surface. The Kang sisters will show Mi-ja what to do. And I’d like Do-saeng’s daughter, Yu-ri, to watch over Young-sook. Yu-ri will soon become a small-diver, so this will be good training for her.”

Once Mother explained, there were no further objections. Mothers are closer to the women in their diving collective than they are to their own children. Today, my mother and I had begun to form that deeper relationship. Observing Do-saeng and Yu-ri together, I could see where my mother and I would be in a few years. But this moment also showed me why Mother had been elected chief. She was a leader, and her judgment was valued.

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.”

These traditional words were often repeated on Jeju, but we all nodded somberly as though hearing them for the first time.

“When we go to the sea, we share the work and the danger,” Mother added. “We harvest together, sort together, and sell together, because the sea itself is communal.”

With that final rule stated—as though anyone could forget something so basic—she clapped her hands twice on her thighs to signal that the meeting had ended and we needed to get moving. As my grandmother and her friends filed outside to work on the shore, Mother motioned to Yu-ri to help me get ready. Yu-ri and I had known each other our entire lives, so naturally we were a good match. The Kang sisters didn’t know Mi-ja well and probably wanted to keep their distance from her. She was an orphan, and her father had been a collaborator, working for the Japanese in Jeju City. But whether or not the Kangs liked it, they had to do what my mother ordered.

“Stand close to the fire,” Yu-ri told me. “The faster you get undressed and ready, the faster we’ll be in the water. The sooner we go into the water, the sooner we’ll return here. Now, follow what I do.”

We edged closer to the flames and stripped off our clothes. No one showed any inhibitions. This was like being together in the communal bath. Some of the younger women were big with babies growing in their bellies. Older women had stretch marks. Even older women had breasts that sagged from too much living and giving. Mi-ja’s and my bodies showed our age too. We were fifteen years old, but the harshness of our environment—little food, hard physical work, and cold weather—meant that we were as skinny as eels, our breasts had not yet begun to grow, and just a few wisps of hair showed between our legs. We stood there, shivering, as Yu-ri, Gu-ja, and Gu-sun helped us put on our three-piece water clothes made from plain white cotton. The white color would make us more visible underwater, and it was said to repel sharks and dolphins, but, I realized, the thinness of the fabric would do little to keep us warm.

“Pretend Mi-ja is a baby,” Yu-ri told the Kang sisters, “and tie her into her suit.” Then to me, she explained, “You can see that the sides are open. You fasten them together with the strings. This allows the suit to tighten or expand with pregnancy or other types of weight gain or loss.” She leaned in. “I long for the day when I can tell my mother-in-law that my husband has put a baby in me. It will be a son. I’m sure of it. When I die, he’ll perform ancestor worship for me.”

Yu-ri’s wedding was set for the following month, and of course she was dreaming of the son she would have, but her sense of anticipation seemed unimportant to me right then. Her fingers felt icy against my skin, and goosebumps rose on my flesh. Even after she’d tied the laces as tight as possible, the suit still bagged on me. Same on Mi-ja. These suits have forever marked the haenyeo as immodest, for no proper Korean woman, whether on the mainland or here on our island, would ever bare so much skin.

The whole time, Yu-ri continued talking, talking, talking. “My brother is very smart, and he works hard in school.” My mother may have been the head of the collective, but Do-saeng had a son who was the pride of every family in Hado. “Everyone says Jun-bu will go to Japan to study one day.”

Jun-bu was the only son, and the gift of education was bestowed on him alone. Yu-ri and her father contributed to the family’s income, although they still didn’t earn as much as Do-saeng, while my mother had to raise all the money to send my brothers to school without any assistance from my father. They would be lucky to go beyond elementary school.

“I’ll need to work extra hard to help pay for Jun-bu’s tuition and provide for my new family.” Yu-ri called across the room to her mother and future mother-in-law. “I’m a good worker, eh?” Yu-ri was known throughout our village as a chatterbox. She seemed worry free, and she was a good worker, which was why it had been easy to find a match for her.

She turned her attention back to me. “If your parents love you greatly, they’ll arrange a marriage for you right here in Hado. You’ll maintain your diving rights, and you’ll be able to see your natal family every day.” Then, realizing what she’d said, she tapped Mi-ja’s arm. “I’m sorry. I forgot you don’t have parents.” She didn’t think long enough before she spoke again. “How are you going to find a husband?” she asked with genuine curiosity.

I glanced at Mi-ja, hoping she hadn’t been hurt by Yu-ri’s thoughtlessness, but her face was set in concentration as she tried to follow the Kang sisters’ instructions.

Once we had on our suits, we put on water jackets. These were for cold weather only, but I couldn’t see how, since they were the same thin cotton as the rest of the outfit. Last, we tied white kerchiefs over our hair to conserve body heat and because no one would wish for a loose tendril to get tangled in seaweed or caught on a rock.

“Here,” Yu-ri said, pressing paper packets filled with white powder into our hands. “Eat this, and it will help prevent diving sickness—dizziness, headaches, and other pains. Ringing in the ears!” Yu-ri scrunched up her face at the thought. “I’m still a baby-diver, and I already have it. Ngggggg—” She imitated the high-pitched sound that apparently buzzed in her head.

Following the examples of Yu-ri and the Kang sisters, Mi-ja and I unfolded the paper packets, tilted our heads back like baby birds, poured the bitter-tasting white powder into our mouths, and swallowed. Then Mi-ja and I watched as the others spat on their knives to bring good luck in finding and harvesting an abalone—a prized catch, for each one fetched a great price.

Mother checked to make sure I had all my gear. She focused particularly on my tewak—a hollowed-out gourd that had been left to dry in the sun, which would serve as my buoy. She then did the same with Mi-ja. We each had a bitchang to use for prying creatures from their homes and a pronged hoe to pick between the cracks and embed in the sand or on a crag to help pull us from place to place. We also had a sickle for cutting seaweed, a knife for opening sea urchins, and a spear for protection. Mi-ja and I had used these tools for practice while playing in the shallows, but Mother made a point to say, “Don’t use these today. Just get accustomed to the waters around you. Stay aware of your surroundings, because everything will look different.”

Together we left the bulteok. We’d return several hours later to store and repair our equipment, measure the day’s harvest, divvy up the proceeds, and, most important, warm up again. We might even cook and share a little of what we’d brought back in our nets, if the harvest was bountiful. I looked forward to it all.

As the other women boarded the boat, Mi-ja and I lingered on the jetty. She rummaged through her basket and pulled out a book, while I brought out a piece of charcoal from my basket. She ripped a page from the book and held it over the written character name for the boat. Even tied up, it bobbed in the waves, making it nearly impossible for Mi-ja to keep the paper steady and for me to rub it with the charcoal. Once I was done, we took a moment to examine the result: a shadowy image of a character we couldn’t read but knew meant “Sunrise.” We’d been commemorating our favorite moments and places this way for years. It wasn’t our best rubbing, but with it we’d remember today forever.

“Hurry along,” Mother called down to us, tolerant but only up to a point.

Mi-ja tucked the paper back in the book to keep it safe, then we scrambled aboard and took up oars. As we slowly rowed away from the jetty, my mother led us in song.

“Let us dive.” Her gravelly voice cut through the wind to reach my ears.

“Let us dive,” we sang back to her, our rowing matching the rhythm of the melody.

“Golden shells and silver abalones,” she sang.

“Let us get them all!” we responded.

“To treat my lover…”

“When he comes home.”

I couldn’t help but blush. My mother didn’t have a lover, but this was a much-beloved song and all the women liked it.

The tide was right, and the sea was relatively calm. Still, despite the rowing and singing, I began to feel sick to my stomach and Mi-ja’s usually pink cheeks turned an ashen gray. We brought up our oars when we reached the diving spot. The boat dipped and swayed in the light chop. I attached my bitchang to my wrist and grabbed my net and tewak. A light wind blew, and I began to shiver. I was feeling pretty miserable.

“For a thousand years, for ten thousand years, I pray to the Dragon Sea God,” Mother called out across the waves. “Please, ocean king spirit, no strong winds. Please no strong currents.” She poured offerings of rice and rice wine into the water. With the ritual completed, we wiped the insides of our goggles with the mugwort we’d picked to keep them from fogging up and then positioned them over our eyes. Mother counted as each woman jumped into the water and swam away in twos and threes. With fewer women on board to help weigh down the boat, it rocked even worse. Yu-ri steadied herself before finally leaping over a swell and into the water. The Kang sisters held hands when they jumped. Those two were inseparable. I hoped their loyalty would now expand to include Mi-ja, and they’d watch out for her in the same way they did each other.

Mother gave some final advice: “The sea, it is said, is like a mother. The salt water, the pulse and surges of the current, the magnified beat of your heart, and the muffled sounds reverberating through the water together recall the womb. But we haenyeo must always think about making money… and surviving. Do you understand?” When we nodded, she went on. “This is your first day. Don’t be greedy. If you see an octopus, ignore it. A haenyeo must learn how to knock out an octopus underwater, or else it could use its arms against you. And stay away from abalone too!”

She didn’t have to explain more. It can take months before a beginning haenyeo is ready to risk prying an abalone from a rock. Left alone, the creature floats its shell off a rock, so that the sea’s nourishing waters can flow in and around it. When surprised—even if it’s only by the shift in current caused by a large fish swimming past—it will clamp itself to a rock so that the hard shell protects the creature inside from all predators. As a result, an abalone must be approached carefully and the tip of the bitchang inserted under the shell and flipped off the rock in one swift movement before the abalone can clamp down on the tool attached to a diver’s wrist, thereby anchoring her to the rock. Only years of experience can teach a woman how to get loose and still have enough time left over to reach the surface for air. I was in no hurry to attempt such a hazardous activity.

“Today you follow in my wake as I once followed in my mother’s wake,” Mother went on, “and as one day your daughters will follow in your wakes. You are baby-divers. Don’t reach beyond your abilities.”

With that blessing—and warning—Mi-ja took my hand and together we jumped feetfirst into the water. Instant, shocking cold. I hung on to my buoy, my legs kicking back and forth beneath me. Mi-ja and I looked into each other’s eyes. It was time for swallowing water breath. Together we took a breath, a breath, a breath, filling our lungs to capacity, expanding our chests. Then we went down. Light filtered turquoise and glittery close to the surface. Around us, others descended—with their heads directed to the ocean floor—through the canyon Mother had described, their feet pointed to the sky. Those women were quick and powerful, plunging a body length, another body length, deeper and deeper into darker blue water. Mi-ja and I struggled to achieve that straight angle. For me, the worst part was my goggles. The metal frames, responding to the water pressure even at this shallow depth, cut into my flesh. They also limited my peripheral vision, creating yet another danger and forcing me to be even more vigilant in this ghostly environment.

As baby-divers, Yu-ri, the Kangs, Mi-ja, and I could only go down about two body lengths, but I watched as my mother disappeared into the inky chasm of the canyon. I’d always heard she could reach twenty and sometimes more meters on a single breath, but already my lungs burned and my heart thumped in my ears. I kicked to go up, my lungs feeling like they were about to explode. As soon as I broke the surface, my sumbisori erupted and scattered on the air. It sounded like a deep sigh—aaah—and I realized it was just as Mother had always said it would be. My sumbisori was unique. And so was Mi-ja’s, which I learned when she split the water beside me. Wheeee. We grinned at each other, then swallowed more water breath and dove again. Nature told me what to do. The next time I surfaced, I had a sea urchin in my hand. My first catch! I put it in the net attached to my tewak, took another series of deep breaths, and went back down. I stayed within sight of Yu-ri, even if we resurfaced at different intervals. Every time I looked for Mi-ja, I found her not more than a meter away from one of the Kang sisters, who themselves stayed close together.

We repeated this pattern, pausing occasionally to rest on our buoys, until it was time to return to the boat. When I reached it, I easily hoisted my net—noticeably light compared to those of others—and carried it across the deck so that the woman behind me and her catch could board. Mother oversaw everything and everyone. One group of women secured their nets, tying the tops so nothing precious could escape, while Do-saeng and some others gathered around the brazier, sending warmth into their bones, drinking tea, and bragging about what they’d caught. Four stragglers still paddled toward the boat. I could sense Mother counting to make sure everyone was safe.

Yu-ri giggled at our shivering, telling us that eventually we’d get used to being cold all the time. “Four years ago, I was just like you, and now look at me,” she boasted.

It was a beautiful day, and everything had gone perfectly. I felt proud of myself. But now that the swells were rising, and the dipping and swaying of the boat was getting worse, all I wanted to do was go home. Not possible. Once our arms and legs were rosy with heat, we went back in the water. The five baby-divers stayed together—with one or another of us popping back up for air. Never before had I concentrated so hard—on my form, on the beating of my heart, on the pressure on my lungs, on looking. I can’t say that either Mi-ja or I found many sea creatures. Our main goal was not to embarrass ourselves as we tried to perfect the head-down dive position. We were pathetic. Acquiring that skill would take time.

When Mother sounded the call that the day was done, I was relieved. She looked in my direction, but I wasn’t sure if she saw me or not. I glimpsed Mi-ja and the Kangs swimming to the boat. They’d be the first three on board, so they’d get to listen as the other women breached the waters and let out their sumbisori. I was about to start paddling when Yu-ri said, “Wait. I saw something on my last dive. Let’s go get it.” She glanced around, taking in how far the grandmother-divers were from the boat. “We can do it before they get here. Come on!”

Mother had said I was supposed to stay with Yu-ri, but she’d also called for us to return to the boat. I made a split-second decision, took a few deeps breaths, and followed Yu-ri. We went to the same shelf where we’d been harvesting sea urchins. Yu-ri dragged herself along the craggy surface, pulled out her bitchang, jabbed it in a hole, and yanked out an octopus. It was huge! The arms must have been a meter long. Such a catch! I would get some credit for it too.

The octopus reached out and looped an arm around my wrist. I wrenched it loose. By the time I’d done that, some of its other limbs had grabbed on to Yu-ri. One had latched on to my thigh and was drawing me toward it, while another was slithering sucker over sucker up my other arm. I struggled to pull them off. The octopus’s bulbous head moved toward Yu-ri’s face, but she was so busy fighting the other arms that were reeling her closer into its grip that she didn’t notice. I wanted to scream for help, but I couldn’t. Not underwater.

Before another moment passed, Yu-ri’s face was covered. Instead of fighting or resisting, I swam closer, linked my arms around the octopus and Yu-ri, and kicked as hard as I could. As soon as we breached the surface, I yelled, “Help! Help! Help us!”

The octopus was strong. Yu-ri’s face was still covered. The creature was trying to pull us back under. I kicked and kicked. Suckers loosened from Yu-ri and came to me, sensing I was now the greater threat. They creeped along my arms and legs.

I heard splashing, then arms grabbed me. Knives flashed in the sun as suckers were pried from my skin, chunks of the octopus cut off and tossed through the air, discarded. Buoyed by the others, I lifted a leg so they could remove the suckers. When I caught a glimpse of my mother’s face, fierce in concentration, I knew I’d be safe. Women worked on Yu-ri too, but she didn’t seem to be helping them. Do-saeng pulled her arm back, her knife in her fist. If I were her, I would have used all my strength to stab the octopus’s head, but she couldn’t. Yu-ri was under there. Do-saeng went up under the octopus’s head, running the blade parallel to her daughter’s face. Despite the support from the women surrounding us, I could feel in my legs that I was the one keeping Yu-ri afloat even as the octopus continued to try to drag us under. The limpness of Yu-ri’s body in my arms told me something the others hadn’t yet realized. As strong as I wanted to be, I began to cry inside my goggles.

The women worked their way up to the thicker parts of the octopus’s appendages. That, combined with the repeated jabs and pokes to the octopus’s head from the tip of Do-saeng’s knife, thoroughly weakened the creature. It was either dead or close to it, but like that of a lizard or a frog, its body still had impulses and strength.

Finally, I was free.

“Can you swim to the boat?” Mother asked.

“What about Yu-ri?”

“We’ll take care of her. Can you make it alone?”

I nodded, but now that the battle was over, whatever had caused me to fight so hard was dissipating fast. I made it about halfway to the boat before I had to flip onto my back to float and rest for a moment. Above me, clouds traveled quickly, pushed by the wind. A bird flew overhead. I closed my eyes, trying to draw on deeper strength. Waves lapped against my ears—submerging them one moment, then exposing them to the worried sounds of the women still with Yu-ri. I heard a splash, then a second, and a third. Arms once again supported me. I opened my eyes: Mi-ja and the Kang sisters. Together they helped me to the boat. Gu-ja, the strongest of us, heaved herself up and over the side. I placed my arms on the side of the boat and began to hoist myself up, but the ordeal had left me too weak. Mi-ja and Gu-sun each placed a hand under my bottom and pushed me up. I slipped onto the deck like a caught fish. I lay there panting, my limbs like rubber, my mind exhausted. I pulled my goggles from my eyes, and they clattered to the deck. The whole while, the three girls babbled nonstop.

“Your mother said we should stay in the boat—”

“She didn’t want us to help—”

“Baby-divers would only cause more problems—”

“In a rescue—”

I could barely take in what they said.

Other women began to arrive. I forced myself to sit up. Mi-ja and the Kangs went to the edge of the boat and reached down their arms. I joined them and helped grab Yu-ri. She felt heavy—a deadweight. We pulled her up and over, and we fell back to the deck. Yu-ri lay on top of me, not moving. The boat pitched, and she rolled to the side. Do-saeng came next, followed by my mother. They knelt next to Yu-ri. As the other haenyeo clambered aboard, Mother lowered her cheek to Yu-ri’s mouth and nostrils to feel if any breath escaped.

“She’s alive,” Mother said, sitting back on her heels. Do-saeng and some of the other haenyeo began to rub Yu-ri’s limbs, seeking to bring life back into them. Yu-ri didn’t respond. “We should try to empty her of water,” Mother suggested. Do-saeng edged out of the way. Mother pressed hard on Yu-ri’s chest, but nothing came out of her mouth. Unsuccessful, Mother said, “We must consider that the octopus saved her life by covering her face. Otherwise she would have inhaled water…”

The other women circled back in for their massaging.

Mother suddenly turned her attention to Mi-ja, the Kang sisters, and me. She regarded us, considering our actions. We were supposed to stay together. Mi-ja and the Kangs had, but they looked embarrassed. Mother didn’t have to say a word before the excuses began to sputter out.

“I saw her the last time I came up for air,” Gu-sun stammered.

“We were never out of Yu-ri’s sight,” Mi-ja choked out. “She watched over us all day.”

“She said she saw something big,” I mumbled.

“And the two of you went. I saw you go, even though I’d sounded the call.”

I couldn’t bear that Mother would think I’d been partly responsible for what had happened to Yu-ri, so I said, “We didn’t hear you.” I lowered my gaze and shivered—from shock, sadness, and now shame that I’d lied to my mother.

Mother shouted for everyone to take her place. We picked up our oars. The boat lurched as it began moving over and through the white-capped waves. Do-saeng remained by her daughter’s side, pleading with her to wake up. Yu-ri’s future mother-in-law took responsibility for leading our song. “My shoulders on this icy night shake along with the waves. This small woman’s mind shivers with the grief of a lifetime.” It was so mournful that soon we all had tears running down our cheeks.

Mother placed a blanket over Yu-ri and another over Do-saeng’s shoulders. Do-saeng wiped her face with a corner of the rough cloth. She spoke, but her words were carried away by the wind. First one woman then another stopped singing, each of us needing to hear Do-saeng. Yu-ri’s future mother-in-law kept our rowing rhythm going by beating the wooden handle of a diving tool on the edge of the boat.

“A greedy diver equals a dead diver,” Do-saeng lamented. We all knew the saying, but to hear it from a mother about her own daughter? That’s when I learned just how strong a mother must be. “This is a haenyeo’s worst sin,” she went on. “I want that octopus. I can sell it for a lot of money.”

“Many things exist under the sea that are stronger than we are,” Mother said.

She wrapped an arm around Do-saeng, who then expressed her worst fear. “What if she doesn’t wake up?”

“We have to hope she will.”

“But what if she remains like this—suspended between this world and the Afterworld?” Do-saeng asked, gently lifting her daughter’s head and placing it in her lap. “If she’s unable to dive or work in the fields, wouldn’t it be better to let her go?”

Mother pulled Do-saeng in closer. “You don’t mean that.”

“But—” Do-saeng didn’t finish her thought. Instead, she smoothed strings of wet hair away from her daughter’s face.

“None of us yet know what the goddesses have planned for Yu-ri,” Mother said. “She may wake up tomorrow her usual chatterbox self.”

Yu-ri didn’t wake up the next morning. Or the morning after that. Or the week after that. In desperation, Do-saeng sought help from Shaman Kim, our spiritual leader and guide, our divine wise one. Although the Japanese had outlawed Shamanism, she continued to perform funerals and rites for lost souls in secret. She was known to hold rituals for grandmothers when their eyesight began to fade, mothers whose sons were in the military, and women who had bad luck, such as three pigs dying in a row. She was our conduit between the human world and the spirit world. She had the ability to go into trances to speak to the dead or missing, and then transmit their messages to friends, family, and even enemies. Do-saeng hoped Shaman Kim would now reach Yu-ri’s soul and bring her mind back to her body and her family.

The ritual was held in Do-saeng’s home. Shaman Kim and her helpers wore colorful hanboks—traditional Korean gowns from the mainland—instead of Jeju’s usual drab trousers and jackets. Her assistants banged on drums and cymbals. Shaman Kim spun, her arms raised, calling out to the spirits to return the young haenyeo to her mother. Do-saeng openly wept. Jun-bu, Yu-ri’s brother, who was just beginning to develop peach fuzz on his cheeks, tried to hold in his emotions, but we all knew how much he loved his sister. Yu-ri’s future husband was pale with grief, and his parents did their best to comfort him. It was painful to see their sorrow. Still Yu-ri didn’t open her eyes.

That night, I told Mi-ja my secret—that Yu-ri had asked me to disobey my mother, and I had. “If I hadn’t agreed to go down one more time, Yu-ri wouldn’t be the way she is now.”

Mi-ja tried to comfort me. “It was Yu-ri’s duty to watch over you. Not the other way around.”

“I still feel responsible, though,” I admitted.

Mi-ja mulled that over for a few moments. Then she said, “We’ll never know why Yu-ri did what she did, but don’t tell anyone your secret. Think of the pain it will bring to her family.”

I also thought of the agony that would be added to my mother’s heart. Mi-ja was right. I had to keep this a secret.

After another week, Do-saeng asked Shaman Kim to try again. This time the ceremony was held in our bulteok—hidden from the prying eyes of the Japanese. In fact, no men attended. Not even Yu-ri’s brother. Do-saeng carried her daughter to the bulteok and laid her next to the fire pit. An altar had been set up against the curved stone wall. Offerings of food—so scarce—sat in dishes: a pyramid of oranges, bowls holding the five grains of Jeju, and a few jars of homemade alcohol. Candles flickered. Mother had offered to pay Jun-bu to write messages for Yu-ri on long paper ribbons. He did it for free. “For my sister,” he told me when I went to his family’s house to pick them up. Now the ends of the ribbons had been tucked into the wall’s rocky crevices, their tails flapping in the breeze that squeezed through the cracks.

Shaman Kim wore her most colorful silk hanbok. A sash the tint of maple leaves in spring tied closed the bright blue bodice. The main part of the fuchsia gown was so light that it wafted about her as she moved through the ceremony. Her headband was red, and her sleeves gleamed the hue of rapeseed flowers.

“Given the dominance on Jeju of volcanic cones, which are concave at the top like a woman’s private parts, it is only natural that on our island females call and males follow,” she began. “The goddess is always supreme, while the god is merely a consort or guardian. Above all these is the creator, the giant Goddess Seolmundae.”

“Grandmother Seolmundae watches over us all,” we chanted together.

“As a goddess, she flew over the seas, looking for a new home. She carried dirt in the folds of her skirt. She found this spot where the Yellow Sea meets the East China Sea and began to build herself a home. Finding it too flat, she used more of the dirt in her gown, building the mountain until it was high enough to reach the Milky Way. Soon her skirt became worn and tiny holes formed in the cloth. Soil leaked from it, building small hills, which is why we have so many oreum. In each one of these volcanic cones, another female deity lives. They are our sisters in spirit, and you can always go to them for help.”

“Grandmother Seolmundae watches over us all,” we chanted.

“She tested herself in many ways, as all women must,” Shaman Kim told us. “She assessed the waters to see how deep they were, so that haenyeo would be safe when they went to sea. She also searched ponds and lakes, looking for ways to improve the lives of those who worked the fields on land. One day, attracted to a mysterious mist on Muljang-ol Oreum, she discovered a lake in its crater. The water was deep blue, and she could not begin to guess its depths. Taking one big breath, she swam straight down. She has never returned.”

Several of the women nodded appreciatively at the good telling of this story.

“That’s one version,” the shaman continued. “Another says Grandmother Seolmundae, like all women, was exhausted by all she did for others, especially for her children. Her five hundred sons were always hungry. She was making them a cauldron of porridge when she became drowsy and fell into the pot. Her sons looked everywhere for her. The youngest son finally found all that remained of her—just bones—at the bottom of the pot. She had died from mother love. The sons were so overcome that they were instantly petrified into five hundred stone outcroppings, which you can see even today.”

Do-saeng silently wept. The story helped one suffering mother to hear of another suffering mother.

“The Japanese say if Grandmother Seolmundae existed and if that oreum was the water pathway to her underwater palace,” Shaman Kim went on, “then she abandoned us, as have all our goddesses and gods. I say she never left us.”

“We sleep on her every night,” we recited. “We wake on her every morning.”

“When you go into the sea, you dive among the underwater ripples of her skirt. She is the great volcano at the center of our island. Some people call it Mount Halla, the Peak That Pulls Down the Milky Way, or the Mountain of the Blessed Isle. To us, she is our island. Anywhere we go, we can call to her and weep out our woes, and she will listen.”

Shaman Kim now directed her attention to Yu-ri, who had not once stirred.

“We are here to help Yu-ri with her traveling-soul problem, but we must also worry about those of you who’ve suffered soul loss, which happens any time a person receives a shock,” she said. “Your collective has experienced a terrible blow. None has suffered more than Yu-ri’s mother. Do-saeng, please kneel before the altar. Anyone else who is in anguish, please join her.”

My mother knelt next to Do-saeng. Soon the rest of us were on our knees in a circle of anguish. The shaman held ritual knives in her hands from which white ribbons streamed. As she sliced through negativity, the ribbons swirled around us like swallows through the air. Her hanbok ballooned in clouds of riotous color. We chanted. We wept. Our emotions flowed from us accompanied by the cacophony of cymbals, bells, and drums played by Shaman Kim’s assistants.

“I call upon all goddesses to bring Yu-ri’s spirit back from the sea or wherever it is hiding,” Shaman Kim implored. After making this request another two times, her voice changed as Yu-ri inhabited her. “I miss my mother. I miss my father and my brother. My future husband… Aigo…” The shaman turned to my mother. “Diving Chief, you sent me here. Now bring me home.”

The way Yu-ri’s voice came out of Shaman Kim’s mouth sounded more like blame than an entreaty for help. This was not a good portent. Shaman Kim seemed to acknowledge this. “Tell me, Sun-sil, how would you like to respond?”

My mother rose. Her face looked taut as she addressed Yu-ri. “I accept responsibility that I sent you into the sea, but I gave you a single duty that day: to stay with my daughter and help the Kang sisters as they looked after Mi-ja. You were the eldest of the baby-divers. You had an obligation to them and to us. Through your actions, I could have lost my daughter.”

Perhaps only I could see how deeply affected Mother was by what had happened. I was both awed and humbled. I hoped one day I could prove to her that I loved her as much as she loved me.

Shaman Kim swiveled to Do-saeng. “What do you wish to tell your daughter?”

Do-saeng spoke sharply to Yu-ri. “You would blame another for the results of your greed? You embarrass me! Leave greed where you are and come home right now! Don’t ask someone else to help you!” Then she softened her tone. “Dear girl, come back. Your mother and brother miss you. Return home and we will drench you in love.”

Shaman Kim chanted a few more incantations. The helpers banged their cymbals and drums. After that, there was nothing left to say or do.

The next morning, Yu-ri woke up. She was not the same girl, though. She could smile, but she could not speak. She could move, but she limped and sometimes jerked her arms. Both sets of parents agreed that a marriage was no longer possible. Mi-ja and I hung on to my secret, which made us closer than ever. In the weeks that followed, after we’d worked in the dry or wet fields, we visited Yu-ri. Mi-ja and I talked and giggled, so Yu-ri would have the sense she was still a young girl with no worries. Sometimes Jun-bu joined us and read aloud the essays he was writing for school or tried to tease us as he had once teased his sister. On other days, Mi-ja and I helped Do-saeng wash Yu-ri’s body and hair. And when the weather grew warm, Mi-ja and I took her to the shore, where we sat in the shallows to let the smallest wavelets lap against her. We told stories, we patted her face, we let her know we were there, and she would reward us with a beautiful smile.

Every time I visited, Do-saeng bowed and expressed her gratitude. “If not for you, my daughter would have died,” she’d say as she poured buckwheat tea or presented me with a dish of salted smelt, but her eyes sent a darker message. She may not have known exactly what part I’d played in Yu-ri’s accident, but she certainly suspected that it was more than I’d let on, either to her or to my mother.

How Do We Fall in Love?

When Mi-ja and I first met, we were such opposites. I was like the rocks of our island—jagged, rough, all edges, but useful and no-nonsense. She was like clouds—drifting, melting, impossible to catch or fully understand. Even though we both became haenyeo, I would forever be of the earth in the sense that I was practical and concerned always for my family. Mi-ja was more like the sea—ever changing and occasionally tempestuous. I was tied closely to my mother and longed to follow her into a life in the sea; Mi-ja had no memory of her mother but missed her father terribly. I had the love and respect of my brothers and sister, while Mi-ja had only an aunt and uncle who didn’t care for her. I worked hard, hauling water, carrying my baby brother on my back, doing farmwork, and gathering dried manure for heating, but Mi-ja worked harder still, completing chores for her aunt and uncle, in our fields, and for the collective. I could not read or write my name. Mi-ja could write her name and still remembered a few Japanese characters. And, as steady as I appeared to others, inside I was often fearful; as evanescent as she seemed from the outside, her inner fortitude seemed to be as strong as bamboo—able to withstand almost any force or weight. On Jeju, we had a saying: If there is happiness at age three, it will last until you reach eighty. I believed this to be true. Mi-ja, on the other hand, often said, “I was born on a day with no sun and no moon. Did my parents know how hard my life would be?” We could not have been more different, and yet we were very close.

How do we fall in love? The first time you see your husband’s face on your engagement day, you don’t know how your emotions will evolve over time. The moment your baby is wrenched from your insides, love may not be what you feel. Love must be nurtured and tended to in the same way we haenyeo care for our fields under the sea. With arranged marriages, many wives fall in love with their husbands quickly. For some, it can take years. And for others, decades of marriage will always be filled with loneliness and sadness, because we never grow the connection to that person with whom we share our sleeping mat. As for children, every woman knows the fears and sorrows. Joy is a delicious luxury that we experience most cautiously, for tragedy conceals itself around every corner. How different it is with friendship. No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son; we tie ourselves together through moments. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one else ever will.

I remember clearly the first day I saw Mi-ja. I had recently turned seven. I lived a happy, if simple, life. We were poor, no better or worse than our neighbors. We had our wet fields in the ocean and our dry fields on land. We also had a small home garden next to our kitchen, where Mother grew white radishes, cucumbers, sesame leaf, garlic, onions, and peppers. While the vastness of the sea would suggest endless bounty, it was an unreliable source of food. The island had no natural harbors. The seas were rough. Our Korean kings had long barred our men from fishing in any significant way, and now, under Japanese rule, fishermen were allowed only rafts, with a single seat and a sail. (Or they could work on the large Japanese fishing vessels or in their canneries.) Many Jeju men were lost to rough tides, high waves, and strong winds. Long ago, Jeju’s men had been divers, but the Korean monarchs imposed such a high tax on their work that it was eventually given to women, who were taxed at a lower rate. It turned out that women had an aptitude for the work. Women, like my mother, were patient. Women understood suffering. Women had more fat, so they were better suited to endure the cold. Still, it was hard for Mother—or any woman—to make a meal hearty enough for a large family from sea urchin roe, turban shell, sea snails, and abalone alone. Besides, those creatures were not for us. They were for the wealthy—or, at least, wealthier—people on the mainland, or in Japan, China, and the USSR. All this meant that for most of the year my family lived on the millet, cabbage, and sweet potatoes that we grew in our dry field, while the money Mother earned from diving paid for clothes, house repairs, and anything else that required cash.

It was a wife’s social and familial duty to birth a son, who would lengthen her husband’s lineage. But every family in the seaside villages of Jeju was most grateful for the birth of a daughter, because she would always be a provider. In this regard, our family was not so fortunate, because we only had four females in our household: Grandmother, Mother, me, and Little Sister, who, back then, was only eleven months old and too young to help. Still, one day, she would work with me to help our parents pay their debts, chip in to build a better home for their old age, and possibly even contribute to sending our brothers to school.

On the summer day eight years ago when I first met Mi-ja, Father stayed home, as he usually did, to take care of my siblings. Mother and I set out to our dry field to weed. She looked like a misshapen melon. Her stomach bulged with what would soon be my third brother, while her back was bent under the weight of a basket stuffed with tools and fertilizer. I carried a basket filled with drinking water and lunch. Together we walked through the olles. In the village, the stone olles around houses were high enough to prevent neighbors from peeking inside. Once outside the village, the olles were about waist-high. Each plot of land was also surrounded by stone walls, which had less to do with limning a family’s property than with blocking the relentless wind, which could snap long-stemmed crops in two. No matter what their use, the olles were made from volcanic rocks so large they must have required at least two of our ancestors to put each one in place.

Just as we reached our land, Mother stopped so abruptly that I bumped into her. I feared we’d stumbled upon Japanese soldiers, but then she yelled, “You! There! What are you doing?”

I stood on my tiptoes to peer over the stone wall and saw a little girl crouched among our sweet potato plants, her hands digging into the earth. If Jeju was known for its Three Abundances of wind, stones, and women, it was also acknowledged for lacking three other things: beggars, thieves, and locked gates. But here was a thief! Even from afar, I could see her making calculations. She couldn’t escape through the opening in the wall, because that would put her in the olle with us. She leapt up and galloped to the far side of the field. Mother pushed me and yelled, “Catch her!”

I dropped my basket and dashed along the olle that edged the field. I turned left into the neighboring plot, galloped across it, scrambled over the far stone wall, and dropped to the other side. When I reached the next wall, I climbed to the top, and there she was on the opposite side below me, scurrying like a rat. Before she could sense me, I jumped on top of her and wrestled her to the ground. She fought hard, but I was far stronger. Once I’d pinned her wrists, I could see her face. Clearly, she was not from our village, because no one here was that pale. It was as if she’d been kept inside her entire life. Or she was a hungry ghost—a type of spirit who restlessly roams the earth and causes trouble for the living. Under any other circumstances, I would have been petrified. Instead, my heart thumped in my chest. The chase. The capture.

“Let me go,” she cried piteously in Japanese. “Please let me go.”

That’s when I got scared. We all had to speak Japanese for the colonists, but this girl’s tones were perfect. What if I’d tackled a Japanese girl? Then I registered the tears that ran down her cheeks toward her ears. What if I was caught torturing a Japanese girl?

I was about to free her when Mother’s voice floated down from above us. “Bring her to me.”

I looked up and saw Mother gazing down at us from over the stone wall. I carefully lifted myself off the girl, but I kept a firm grip on her arm. I pulled her to her feet and pushed her ahead of me. She didn’t have a choice but to climb over the wall. Once we were both on the other side, Mother slowly scanned the girl from head to toe and back again. Finally, she asked, “Who are you? Who do you belong to?”

“My name is Han Mi-ja,” she said, wiping away her tears with the heels of her hands. “I live with my aunt and uncle in the Sut-dong section of Hado.”

Mother sucked air in through her teeth. “I think I know your family. You must be Han Gil-ho’s daughter.”

Mi-ja nodded.

Mother stayed silent. I could tell she was upset, but I had no idea why. At last, she spoke. “Go ahead then. Tell me why you would steal from us.”

The words flooded out of Mi-ja’s mouth. “My mother died when I came out of her. My father died two months ago. Heart attack. Now I live with Aunt Lee-ok and Uncle Him-chan, and—”

“And they don’t feed you,” Mother interrupted. “I understand why—”

Defiance skittered across Mi-ja’s features. “My father was not a traitor. He worked for the Japanese in Jeju City, but that doesn’t mean—”

Mother cut her off to recite a familiar aphorism. “If you plant red beans, then you will harvest red beans.” This meant that a child’s character and behavior came from what the parents planted. “No one likes a collaborator,” she said matter-of-factly. “The people in all seven villages of Hado were ashamed when your mother and father chose that life. And consider your given name. Mi-ja. So Japanese.”

Even at my young age, I knew my mother was taking a risk speaking so openly against the Japanese and those who supported them.

Mi-ja’s hands and face were smudged with dirt. Her clothes were finer than any I’d seen before, but they were filthy. At some point during her escape, she’d lost her scarf, and her hair looked matted, as though no one had put a comb through it in weeks. But what struck me most was how thin she was. She was pitiful, but Mother didn’t let up.

“Let’s see what’s in your pockets,” she demanded.

Mi-ja searched through her clothes, making sure she showed Mother everything. She held up a lump of coal, then she put it back in her pocket. She carefully wiped her dirty hand on her shirt, reached up under her sleeve, and pulled out a book. It was the first one I’d seen, so I couldn’t be impressed or unimpressed, but Mother’s eyes widened. In her nerves or out of fear, Mi-ja dropped it. Mother bent to pick it up, but Mi-ja grabbed it first. She gave Mother another defiant look.

“Please. It’s mine,” she said, quickly secreting the book back up her sleeve. She reached into her last pocket, pulled out a closed fist, and then dropped a handful of baby sweet potatoes barely bigger than pebbles into Mother’s palm. Another long silence hung over us as Mother rolled them back and forth, examining them for damage. When she next spoke, her tone was still loud, as it always was, but kinder.

“You’re a lucky girl,” she said. “If I were someone else… But I’m not. You’re coming back to our field, and you’re going to replant these. When you’re done, you’re going to help us. If you do a good job, we’ll share our lunch with you. If you don’t run away, if you obey, if you follow my orders, I’ll let you come again tomorrow. Do you understand?”

I didn’t fall in love with Mi-ja on that first day—not when I was riled from the chase, confused by my mother’s reaction to her, and mad that I had to share part of our lunch with a thief. Here’s what did happen: Mi-ja listened to everything Mother told her to do, but she followed what I did. I showed her how to plant the tubers, then stomp on the soil to keep it from flying away in the wind. We spent the rest of the time pulling weeds and aerating the soil with a three-pronged tool. As the light changed and the sky began to glow crimson, she helped us pack.

Mother said, “I will see you tomorrow. No need to tell your aunt and uncle.”

Mi-ja bowed very low, several times. With that acknowledgment, Mother set off. I was about to follow her when Mi-ja held me back.

“I want to show you something.” She pulled the book out from under her sleeve. Her eyes met mine. With two hands and a formality I’d only seen during ancestor worship, she offered it to me. “You can hold it if you want.” I wasn’t so sure I wanted to do that, but I took it anyway. It was a slim volume, bound in leather. “It’s all I have left of my father,” she said. “Open it.”

I did. The pages were made from rice paper. I assumed the writing was Japanese, but it could have been Korean. A couple of pages in the middle of the book stuck out unevenly. I turned to that section and discovered that they’d been torn out. That seemed disrespectful, but I noticed Mi-ja was smiling.

“Look what I’ve done,” she said, taking back the book. “Here is a rubbing I did of a carving we had in our apartment in Jeju City. This one I made of the ironwork hinges on Father’s coffin. I made this one the day Auntie Lee-ok picked me up. It’s the pattern of the floor in my old room. It was the only way to save my memories.”

The whole time I was trying to imagine what her life must have been like, living in the city, with a room of her own, surrounded by books.

“Auntie sold our things. She said no one in Hado wanted to see reminders of my father. She also said she would use the money to feed me and send me back to school. Now that I’m here…” She jutted her chin. “You don’t have a school for girls. Auntie had to know that. She thinks my father was a bad man, so she only gives me seaweed and kimchee to eat. My father’s money has gone to buy pigs and… I don’t know…” After a long pause, her darkness evaporated. “You and your mother are the nicest people I’ve met since coming here, and this is the best day I’ve had since Father died. Let us, you and me, make a memory of it. Of this place. So we will always remember today.”

Without waiting for me to agree, she tore a page from the book, placed it on one of the rocks at the entrance to our field, pulled out her lump of coal, and rubbed it on the paper. Rocks were nothing special to me. They were everywhere I looked. But when she put the rubbing in my hand, I saw the rough stone pattern of my birthplace, while the unintelligible words beneath the picture were part of a world I would never know or understand. Tiny pinholes where the coal and rock had punctured the paper seemed like the endless possibilities that the stars in the night sky promised. I felt like I’d been given something too special for me to keep, and I said so.

Mi-ja considered that, and then pursed her lips, gave a tiny nod, and tucked the page in the book with the others she’d made. “I’ll keep it,” she said, “but it’s our memory. No matter what happens, we’ll always know where to find it.”

When you’re seven, you can say you’ll be best friends forever. It rarely turns out that way. But Mi-ja and I were different. We grew closer with each passing season. Mi-ja’s aunt and uncle continued to treat her terribly. To them, she was like a slave or a servant. She slept in their granary—barely bigger than a meter in diameter—between the main house and the latrine, with its pigs and smells. I showed her how to do chores and taught her the songs for grinding millet, knitting horsehair hats, netting anchovies, gathering pig excrement for our fields, and plowing, planting, and pulling weeds, and she rewarded me with her imagination.

We have many sayings on Jeju Island. One of them is Wherever you are on Jeju, you can see Grandmother Seolmundae. But we also say, Grandmother Seolmundae watches over all of us. No matter where Mi-ja and I went—going to the fields, walking to the shore, running the few minutes between her neighborhood and my neighborhood within the larger confines of Hado—we could see her reaching for the sky. Her peak was covered with snow in winter. Chores were hardest then: hauling water in the bone-cold mornings, walking on ground white with frost or snow, wind so sharp it cut through our clothes as if we were wearing nothing.

In the first and second months, Mi-ja and I helped Mother weed our millet and rapeseed crops, because it’s a well-known fact that men’s knees are too stiff for this work, and they are shy around sickles and hoes. Jeju was known for its five grains—rice, barley, soybean, millet, and foxtail millet. Rice was for the New Year celebration, but only if Mother had saved enough money to buy it. Barley was for the rich, who lived in Jeju City and in the mid-mountain area. Millet was for the poor. It was the food that filled our stomachs, while we could extract oil from rapeseed, so both crops were extremely important to us.

That first winter, Mother also hired Mi-ja to work in the collective. “I’ll allow you to share the communal meal after the other haenyeo and I return from the sea,” Mother said. “Keep the fire hot and your mouth shut, and the others won’t bother you.” So Mi-ja entered the bulteok long before I did. She gathered firewood, kept the flames in the fire pit steady, and helped sort sea urchins, conch, and the agar-agar and kelp that the haenyeo brought to shore.

This did not sit well with Grandmother, who said, “No one can ever remove the stain of her father’s activities for the Japanese, which is why no one other than you will hire her to do chores as they might another orphan.”

But on this matter, Mother took a strong stand. “When I look at that girl,” she said, “I see someone who will always eke by on her wits and the hunger that drives her.”

In spring, azaleas beamed magenta, purple, and crimson even from afar on Grandmother Seolmundae’s flanks. Fields of rapeseed gleamed as yellow as the sun. We harvested our crop of grain, plowed the field by hand, and planted red beans and sweet potatoes. At the end of spring, every family across the island stripped the thatch off their roofs. Mi-ja’s aunt and uncle made her haul away the old thatch, bring in new thatch, and do the best she could to pass stones up to the men to weigh down the thatch and keep it in place. When she was done, she came to my house, where Mother allowed her to help me sort through our old thatch to search for insect larva, which Mother boiled for us to eat.

Summer brought the coolness of green to Grandmother Seolmundae’s slopes, but everything else was hot, humid, and rainy. Mother gave me my first tewak, which she’d made herself. I was so proud of it, and I didn’t mind sharing it with Mi-ja one bit. Since she’d lived in Jeju City, and without a mother’s wake to follow, she didn’t know how to swim. I took her to the tide pools where I’d played when I was three and four. We went on the very hottest days of summer to a shallow cove to splash and frolic with other Hado children. The Kang sisters were always there, and we loved to listen to them fight and make up. Yu-ri used to come with her brother, Jun-bu, who joined other boys his age to dive over the protective wall of rocks into the open and unprotected sea. We loved watching those boys. Especially Jun-bu. We wondered how someone so studious could laugh in such a carefree way.

Sometimes Mother and the other haenyeo returned to shore at midday to nurse their babies. They would watch us, calling out to tell us to kick harder or to take a deeper breath to build our lungs. But mostly the mothers didn’t have time to come to shore during their workday, and the afternoon air was filled with the sounds of babies yowling in hunger and fathers murmuring soothing, but useless, words, for only a mother has the milk. By the end of our second summer, Mi-ja was swimming well, and we were beginning to practice diving down a meter or so to hide something under a rock for the other one to find or to touch an anemone to watch it close in on itself.

Of course, summers were not just for play. During the sixth month in the lunar calendar, we harvested barley and dried it in the courtyard between the big and little houses. We helped Mother slaughter a rooster in a special ceremony; then we cooked it and served it to Grandmother so she would remain free of old-age illnesses. We learned how to mix ashes with seaweed to make fertilizer, which we carried to our field. We planted buckwheat, and weeded, weeded, weeded. And always, around 7.7 in the lunar calendar and August in the Western calendar, we made gal-ot, a special kind of cloth dyed in unripe persimmon juice. The tannin from the fruit prevented the cloth from holding odors or giving off sour smells, which meant we could wear it for days and weeks at a time without it stinking. It was also water resistant and worked as a mosquito repellent. Barley bristle didn’t stick to this type of cloth, and, because the persimmon juice strengthened it, our clothes didn’t rip, not even when we brushed against thorns. We used gal-ot for everything. Even Mi-ja, who’d outgrown her fancy city clothes, wore trousers, shirts, and jackets made from it. My clothes were passed down to my brothers and sister, but Mi-ja saved hers. “When I have children,” she said, “I’ll use the softened cloth for blankets and diapers.” The thought had not yet occurred to me that I might have a baby one day.

Every fall, Grandmother Seolmundae’s slopes were aflame with leaves in yellow, orange, and red. At this time of year, Mi-ja and I liked to climb oreum, the smaller parasitic cones Grandmother Seolmundae had given birth to when she erupted. We’d sit together—walled-in fields spreading out below us like a quilt, the sky cloudless, the ocean glittering in the distance, the taller oreum topped by ancient watchtowers, where beacon fires once warned islanders of approaching pirates. We’d talk and talk and talk. I loved hearing about Jeju City. To me, every story seemed more fantastic than the last.

One day she mentioned that Jeju City had electricity. When I admitted that I didn’t know what that was, she laughed. “It lights up the room without burning pinesap or oil. There are lights on the streets. Colored bulbs brighten shop windows. It’s…” The space between her eyebrows creased as she thought about how best to describe the intangible to me. “It’s Japanese!”

Mi-ja and her father had also owned a radio. She said it was a box with voices coming out of it, made in Japan. I couldn’t imagine that either. And it confused me to think that the cloven-footed ones could have so many marvelous creations.

She talked about her father’s car—car!—and how he drove all over the island on roads that the Japanese had built, when all I had ever seen were pony-pulled carts and the occasional truck that came to our village to pick up haenyeo for leaving-home water-work in other countries. “Father managed road construction crews for the Japanese,” Mi-ja explained. “With his help, they connected the four parts of the island for the first time!”

All I knew was Hado.

“My father was well respected,” she told me. “He loved me. He took care of me. He bought me toys and pretty clothes.”

“And he fed you.” I egged her on, because I loved to hear about all the dishes she’d eaten that I’d never tasted—buckwheat noodles with pheasant or spiced and grilled horsemeat from the mid-mountain area. To a little girl who had only tasted pig meat and sea creatures, it all sounded preposterous but delicious. And then there was sugar…

“Imagine eating something that makes you smile so hard your face aches. That’s what it’s like to eat candy, ice cream, and pastries, or wagashi and anmitsu.”

But when would I ever have a Western or Japanese dessert? Never.

In Jeju City, Mi-ja had “playmates,” which were another thing I could not comprehend, not even when she described tag and hide and go seek. Who had interest in games that weren’t teaching you something practical like how to dive for top shell or gather seaweed? It was hard to imagine, as well, living in a house with its own attached garden with fruit trees and a pond in which the servants raised fish for the household, making it an impossibility that Mi-ja could ever go hungry.

Mi-ja was aware of all she’d lost, so while talking about her past was fun for me, sometimes it made her feel low. That’s when I would suggest she bring out her father’s book. We’d sit side by side, turning the pages. It was a manual that her father had used in his travels around the island. In the beginning, Mi-ja could still remember the meaning of a character here and there—oil, east, road, mountain, bridge—but as the months passed, with no one to remind her, her ability to read waned. Still, there was something mysterious, magical even, about the characters on the page, and she liked to run a finger down a vertical line and “read” to me stories of goddesses and mothers that she made up.

The saying You aren’t aware your clothes are getting wet in the rain suggests a gradual change and can be interpreted in two ways, one positive, the other negative. A positive story might involve friendship, which grows over time. First you are acquaintances, then friends, then a closer relationship develops, until you realize that you love each other. A darker example might be about a criminal. A person steals a small thing, then a larger thing, until finally he’s become a thief. The point is, you’re not aware just how wet you’re getting when the drizzle starts. Unlike most people, though, Mi-ja and I had physical proof that we were growing closer, because, as she had said on that first day, we were capturing moments with our rubbings. As precious as her father’s book was to her, she was never shy about ripping out one of the pages so we could make a rubbing together. One of us would hold the piece of paper and the other would rub the lump of coal over it so we could capture the ridged outline of a shell won in a swimming contest, the pattern of the wooden door to my house the first time she was allowed to spend the night, the surface of her first tewak, which Mother made for her, as though she were an actual daughter.

When we turned nine, the haenyeo of Hado helped plan an island-wide anti-Japanese demonstration. Mother had started attending the Hado Night School. As far as I could tell, she didn’t acquire much in the way of reading or writing, but she and her friends learned how to weigh their catches so they wouldn’t be cheated. She also learned about her rights. Inspired by a young male teacher—an intellectual and a leftist, Mother called him—a group of five haenyeo banded together to fight against rules that were being forced upon women divers by the Japanese. My mother wasn’t part of that core group, but she repeated what she’d picked up from them.

“The Japanese don’t pay us a fair price. They take too high a percentage for themselves. Forty percent! How are we supposed to live with that? And some of their officials—collaborators—sneak our harvest of agar-agar through Jeju City’s port for their own gain.”

Collaborators. Mi-ja shrunk into herself, pulling her shoulders up around her ears. Mother put a hand on the nape of Mi-ja’s neck to reassure her.

“Resist,” she went on. “We have to resist.”

News passed from one woman’s mouth to another woman’s ear, from one collective to the next, all around the island. Hearing so many complaints, the Japanese said they would make changes.

“Except they lied to us!” Mother spat out. “Months have gone by—”

Grandmother, who hated the Japanese more than anyone I knew, warned, “You must be careful.”

But it was too late for that, because a plan had already been set. On a morning when the village of Sehwa held its five-day market, the haenyeo from Hado would march to the market, where they would gather even more haenyeo. From there, they would continue on to the district office in Pyeongdae to present their demands. Everyone was excited but nervous too, because no one could guess how the Japanese would respond.

The night before the march, Mi-ja stayed at our house. It was early January and too cold to be outside gazing at stars, but Father had taken Third Brother out to see if he could walk him to sleep. Mother asked us to join her and Grandmother in the main room.

“Do you want to come tomorrow?” Mother asked me.

“Yes! Please!” I was thrilled to be asked.

Mi-ja kept her eyes cast down. Mother liked Mi-ja and had done many things for her, but maybe an invitation to an anti-Japanese rally was too much to expect.

“I spoke to your aunt,” Mother informed Mi-ja. “What a disagreeable woman.”

Mi-ja looked up, pathetically hopeful.

“I told her that if you accompany us it might do much to bleach the stain you carry of your father’s past actions,” Mother went on.

“Ieeee,” Mi-ja squealed with joy.

“Then all is settled. Now listen to Grandmother.”

Mi-ja nestled next to me. Grandmother often told us stories she’d heard from her grandmother, who’d heard from her grandmother, and so on. It was through her that we learned about the past but also about what was happening in the world around us. Mother must have wanted to remind us of some of these things before the march.

“In the long-ago days,” Grandmother began, “three brothers—Ko, Bu, and Yang—bubbled out of the earth to become the founders of Jeju. They worked hard, but they were lonely. One day, three sisters—all princesses—arrived in a boat heavy with horses, cattle, and the five seed grains, which had been given to them by Halmang Jacheongbi, the goddess of love. Together, these three couples created the Kingdom of Tamna, which lasted one thousand years.”

“Tamna means ‘Island Country,’ ” Mi-ja recited, showing how much she’d absorbed from past tellings.

“Our Tamna ancestors were seafarers,” Grandmother continued. “They traded with other countries. By always looking outward, they taught us to be independent. They gave us our language—”

“But my father said the Jeju language also has words from China, Mongolia, Russia, and from other countries too,” Mi-ja interrupted again. “Like Japan. Fiji and Oceania too. We even have Korean words from hundreds, maybe thousands, of years ago. That’s what he said…”

Mi-ja’s voice trailed off. She could be enthusiastic, and she sometimes liked to show off the knowledge she had learned in Jeju City, but Grandmother never liked being reminded of Mi-ja’s father. Tonight, instead of hissing her disapproval, Grandmother simply went on. “The Tamna taught us that the outside represents danger. For centuries, we’ve been in a struggle against the Japanese, who’ve had to pass by us on their way—”

“To loot China,” I said. I hadn’t heard of Fiji or Oceania, but I knew some things.

Grandmother nodded, but her look of irritation made me decide to keep my mouth shut from then on. “Around seven hundred years ago, the Mongols invaded Jeju. They raised and bred horses in the mid-mountain area. They called the island the Star Guardian God of Horses. That’s how much they loved our pastures. The Mongols also used Jeju as a stepping-stone to invade Japan and China. We can’t hate them too much, though. Many of them married Jeju women. Some say it is from them that we gained our strength and perseverance.”

Mother poured hot water into cups for us to drink. Once everyone was served, she picked up where Grandmother had left off. “Five hundred years ago, we became part of Korea and were ruled by kings. We were mostly left alone, because every king saw this as a place to exile aristocrats and scholars who opposed him. They brought with them Confucianism, which taught that social order is maintained through—”

“The self, the family, the country, and the world,” Mi-ja recited. “They believed that every person on earth lives under someone else—all people beneath the king, children beneath their parents, and wives beneath their husbands—”

“And now we have the Japanese.” Grandmother snorted. “They’ve turned us into a stepping-stone again, building airfields on our island so their planes can take off to bomb China—”

“We can’t stop everything they do,” Mother interrupted, “but maybe we can force some change. I want you girls to be a part of that.”

The next morning, Mi-ja was waiting for us in her usual spot in the olle. The air was frosty, and steam mushroomed from our mouths. We continued walking through the olles, picking up Do-saeng, Yu-ri, and other women and girls, all of us wearing white diving kerchiefs to mark us as past, present, and future haenyeo.

“Hurray for the independence of Korea!” we shouted.

“Stop unfair labor practices!” our voices rang out together.

The five-day market in Sehwa was always crowded, but, on that day, it was even more so. The five leaders from the Hado Night School took turns making speeches. “Join us in our march to the district office. Help us deliver our demands. We’re strongest when we dive together. We’re even stronger when the collectives come together. We’ll make the Japanese listen!”

Top-level haenyeo led us, but it was the presence of grandmothers, who remembered the time before the Japanese arrived, and girls like Mi-ja and me, who’d lived our entire lives under Japanese rule, that reminded everyone of our purpose. This wasn’t just about the forty percent discount price that the Japanese were imposing on the haenyeo. It was about freedom and our Jeju independent ways. It was about the strength and courage of Jeju women.

Mi-ja’s eyes glittered in a way I’d never seen. She often felt alone, but now she was part of something much larger than she was. And Mother was right. Mi-ja’s presence did seem to make an impression on the women in our group, because several of them came up to walk by her side for a while so they could hear her shout, “Hurray for the independence of Korea!” I was excited too, but for very different reasons. This was the farthest I’d been from home. I had Mi-ja by my side. We held hands, while raising our other arms, fists clenched, to shout the slogans. We’d been growing closer—between all the things I’d taught her and all the imagination, stories, and joy she’d given me—but in this moment, we were one person.

By the time we reached Pyeongdae, thousands of women had come together. Mi-ja and I linked arms; Mother and Do-saeng walked shoulder to shoulder. We entered the district office’s compound. The five organizers climbed the steps of the main building and began addressing the crowd. The speeches were more or less the same as the ones they’d made earlier, but they seemed to generate more energy with so many people listening and reacting, with shouts echoing what had just been said.

“End colonization!” Kang Gu-ja called out.

“Freedom for Jeju!” Kang Gu-sun roared.

But no one could top my mother’s voice. “Independence for Korea!” For everything Mother did in her life, and for all the ways she protected and inspired the women in her diving collective, this was the moment of which I was most proud.

Japanese soldiers came to stand between those making speeches and the front door to the district office. Other soldiers took positions on the edges of the crowd. The situation felt tense, with so many people shoved together. At last, the door opened. A Japanese man stepped out. Out of habit, out of fear, the five Hado women bowed deeply. From her low position, the one standing in the middle extended her hands to present the list of demands. Wordlessly, the man took it, went back inside, and shut the door. We all looked at each other. Now what? Now nothing, because there would be no negotiations that day. We all walked back to our villages.

Before we left, Mi-ja and I had to make a remembrance. I pointed to a Japanese character etched on a door to one of the buildings in the compound. Mother was speaking to her friends, and, now that the excitement was over, the soldiers had lost interest too, so no one paid us any attention as we walked to the door and began our ritual. It may not have been the best idea, though, because two things happened simultaneously: four guards ran over to see what we were doing, and Mother yelled at us. “Get away from there right now!” Mi-ja, with the piece of charcoal securely in her hand, and I, with the completed rubbing tight in mine, dashed through the milling women to Mother’s side. Hyng, but was she angry! But when we looked back at the soldiers, they were bent over, hands on their knees, laughing. It was many years before we learned that the character we’d chosen for our treasure said toilet.

The march was one of the three largest anti-Japanese protests ever to be held in Korea, the largest led by women, and the largest for the year with seventeen thousand supporters. It inspired another four thousand demonstrations in Korea over the following twelve months. The new Japanese governor of Jeju agreed to some demands. The discount ended, and a few crooked dealers were removed from their posts. All that was good, but other things also happened. We began to hear of one arrest, and then another. Thirty-four haenyeo—including the five original leaders from the Hado Night School—were arrested. Dozens of others were detained during a crackdown to stop additional protests. Rumors spread that some of the teachers at the Hado Night School were socialists or communists, and many of them went into hiding or moved away. None of that stopped Mother from attending classes.

“I wish you two girls could learn to read, write, and do basic math, because it will help you if, in the future, one of you becomes chief of a haenyeo collective,” she told us. “If I can save up enough money, I’ll pay for the two of you to come to school with me.”

That sounded far more dangerous than marching in a demonstration, because the women who’d been arrested were being held precisely because of what their education had inspired them to do. But I wanted whatever Mi-ja wanted, and she wanted to go very much. My mother was her only hope.

Eight months after the Hado-led demonstration, Mother, Mi-ja, and I were once again doing farm tasks in our dry field. Weeding is awful—bent over all day, being wet to the bone from rain or sweat or both, the tediousness of the precision required to pull out the intrusive plants without damaging the roots of those we were growing. Mother led us in a call-and-response song to keep us distracted from our discomfort, but with Mi-ja by my side I could never complain too much. She’d become adept at fieldwork after toiling so long with us. Mother paid her in food, which she always asked Mi-ja to eat in our presence. “I don’t want your aunt and uncle consuming the results of your labors,” Mother said.

We weeded and sang, not paying attention to the world outside the stone walls that surrounded our field. Mother’s hearing wasn’t good, but her peripheral vision was sharp, and she was alert for all dangers. I saw her leap up, with her hand hoe held before her. Then she dropped the tool, collapsed to the ground, and rested her forehead on her folded hands. All this I registered in seconds.

Beside me, Mi-ja stopped singing. I started to tremble, petrified, as a group of Japanese soldiers strode into the field.

“Bow down,” Mother whispered.

Mi-ja and I fell to the ground, imitating Mother’s supplicant position. Terror heightened my senses. Wind whistled through cracks in the stone walls. A few plots over, I could hear singing as other women did their farm chores. The soldiers’ boots crunched through the field as they approached. I tilted my head so I could peek at them. The sergeant, recognizable by the polish of his boots and the insignia on his jacket, flicked the stick he was carrying, slapping it into the palm of his other hand. I lowered my eyes back to the dirt.

“You’re one of the troublemakers, aren’t you?” he asked my mother.

My mind scrambled. Maybe they’ve come to arrest her. But if they knew about her involvement with the demonstrations, they would have come for her already. Then my mind spiraled to a darker possibility. Perhaps one of our neighbors turned her in. These things were known to happen. The right piece of information could bring a family a sack of white rice.

“Let the girls go home,” Mother said, which, it seemed to me, was hardly a proclamation of innocence.

It may have been something else, though. I was only ten, but I’d already been cautioned about what soldiers could do to women and girls. I peered up again, needing to get a sense of when I should run.

“What are you growing here?” The sergeant nudged Mother with the toe of his boot. Her body stiffened in what I first took to be anger. She’d proved her strength by becoming a haenyeo chief, so inside she must have been getting ready to fight them one by one. But then I saw the way her clothes vibrated on her body. She was shaking with fear. “Answer me!” He raised the stick above his head and brought it down on her back. She swallowed a scream.

Behind the sergeant, other men yanked up plants and shoved them in satchels looped over their shoulders. This invasion wasn’t about my mother’s activities. Or doing bad things to Mother, Mi-ja, and me. It was about stealing our food.

The sergeant raised his stick and was about to bring it down again when I heard Mi-ja whisper in Japanese. “Please don’t take our plants by their roots.”

“What’s that?” The sergeant pivoted toward her.

“Pay no attention to her,” Mother said. “She doesn’t know any better. She’s an ignorant—”

“I’ll cut some leaves for you,” Mi-ja said as she started to rise. “That way the crop will continue to grow, and you can come again.”

Silence grabbed the men’s throats as they took in what she’d said and how she’d spoken. Her Japanese was clear in tone. She was lovely in the way we’d heard the Japanese liked—pale, delicate features, with a natural subservience. In a flash, too quick for Mi-ja to tighten her muscles or try to move out of the way, the sergeant struck her bare leg with his stick. She dropped to the dirt. He raised the stick above his head and brought it down again and again. Mi-ja screamed in pain, but my mother and I didn’t move. One of the soldiers fingered his belt buckle. Another one, biting his upper lip, retreated until his back was against the stone wall. My mother and I remained completely still. When the sergeant’s fury had worn out and he finally stopped whipping Mi-ja, she lifted her head.

“Stay down,” Mother mouthed.

But Mi-ja kept moving, pulling herself to her knees and raising her palms upward. “Please, sir, let me harvest for you. I will pick the best leaves—”

The men were suddenly as paralyzed as Mother and I were. They watched, as still as the ancient stone grandfather statues that could be found dotted around the island, as she struggled to her feet, then bent to peel off the outer leaves of a cabbage. With her head bowed, she offered the leaves to the sergeant with both hands. He wrapped his hands around her wrists and pulled her closer.

The sharp metallic trill of a whistle cut through the air. The seven men turned their heads in the direction of the sound. The sergeant released Mi-ja, spun on his heel, and marched toward the break in the wall. Five of the soldiers followed right behind him. The sixth one, who’d shied away earlier, grabbed the leaves, stuffed them in his satchel, and took off after the others, preceding up the olle, going farther inland.

Mi-ja collapsed, whimpering. I crawled to her side. My mother scrambled to her feet and whistled a series of notes—high and shrill like a bird’s call—to warn others working in their fields. Later, we heard two women were arrested, but right then we had to care for Mi-ja. Mother carried her back to our house, where she used warm water to help peel Mi-ja’s clothes from her broken skin. I held her hand and mumbled, “You’re so brave. You saved Mother. You protected all of us.” Those stupid words couldn’t possibly have lessened Mi-ja’s pain. She kept her eyes clamped shut, but tears leaked from them anyway. And they didn’t stop until long after Mother had applied salve to Mi-ja’s wounds and wrapped her legs in clean strips of cloth.

The next day, a different group of soldiers came to our house, marching through the rain and mud. This time it seemed certain they’d come for Mother. Or perhaps they wanted retaliation against my family. My oldest brother took as many of the young ones as he could gather, and they ran out the back and climbed over the wall. I sat on the floor next to Mi-ja’s mat. She was in so much pain that she seemed unaware of the commotion in the courtyard. No matter what happened next, I wouldn’t leave her side. Through the lifted slats on the side of the house, I watched as the soldiers spoke to my father. Our house was owned in his name, but he was not in charge of our family. He could comfort a crying baby better than my mother could, but he was unused to adversity or danger. Surprisingly, they treated him courteously. Rather, courteously for occupiers.

“I understand damage was done to your crops and some things were… taken,” the lieutenant said. “I can’t return what’s already been eaten.”

The entire time the lieutenant spoke, his eyes flicked around the courtyard. The pile of tewaks against the side of the house, the stone Father liked to sit on to smoke his pipe, the upside-down stack of bowls we used for our meals, as though he were counting how many people lived here. He focused his greatest attention on Mother, seemingly assessing her.

“I apologize for the misbehavior of the women in my household,” Father said in his fumbling Japanese. “We always want to help—”

“We are not bad people,” the lieutenant interrupted. “We’ve had to crack down on troublemakers, but we are husbands and fathers too.”

The lieutenant sounded sympathetic, but there was no way to trust him. Father bit a thumbnail. I wished he didn’t look so scared.

The lieutenant motioned to one of his men. A bag was dropped on the ground. “Here is your compensation,” he said. “From now on, try to do as we do. Keep your women home.”

That was an impossible request, but Father agreed to it.

After that day, Mother stopped attending classes and meetings. She said she was too busy running the haenyeo collective to stay involved in demonstrations, but she was only trying to protect us. What had happened seemed frightening and demeaning. We believed that these were the worst times we would experience—Japanese rule, resistance, and retaliation. As for Mi-ja, the way she’d stepped forward to protect my mother forever changed our friendship. From that day on, I believed I could trust her with my life. So did my mother. Only Grandmother’s heart refused to soften, but she was an old woman and stuck in her ways. All of which meant that by the time Mi-ja and I turned fifteen—and Yu-ri had become a different person—we were as close as a pair of chopsticks.

Life Bubbles

Our routines didn’t change after Yu-ri’s accident. Even Do-saeng returned to the bulteok. We dove for two periods during the lunar month, for six days each, following the crescent moons when waxing and waning. Over the next seven months, my swimming skills improved. I could dive straight down now, even if I still couldn’t go that far. If I took several shallow dives, then I could risk a deeper one. I now understood how carefully Mother had orchestrated Mi-ja’s and my education. When I’d turned ten, Mother had given me an old pair of her goggles, which I’d shared with Mi-ja. When I’d turned twelve, Mother had taught us how to reap underwater plants without damaging their roots so that they would grow back the next season, just as we did in our dry fields. Now my ability to read the seabed for things I could harvest increased daily. I could easily recognize the differences between brown algae, sea mustard, and seaweed, while my skills at sensing prey—the poisonous bite of a sea snake or the numbing sting of a jellyfish—improved too.

“You’re not only painting a map of the seabed in your head,” Mother instructed me on a bright fall morning as we walked to the bulteok, “you’re learning where you are in space. You need always to be aware of where you are in relation to the boat, the shore, your tewak, Mi-ja, me, and the other haenyeo. You’re learning about tides, currents, and surges, and about the influence of the moon on the sea and on your body. It’s most important that you always be mindful of where you are in that moment when your lungs begin to crave breath.”

I grew more accustomed to the cold, shivering less, and accepting this aspect of haenyeo life, which could not be remedied. I was proud of my accomplishments, but I still hadn’t found, let alone harvested, an abalone, while Mi-ja had already brought five onto the boat.

Mother lapsed into silence as we neared the spot in the olle where we picked up Mi-ja. We never knew if she’d be there. If her uncle or aunt wanted her to do something, then that took precedence, and Mother couldn’t interfere. If Mi-ja were sick, if they beat her, if they asked her to haul water from two kilometers away just because they could make this cruel demand, we wouldn’t know in advance.

We came around the curve in the olle, and there she was. “Good morning!” she called.

Beside me, Mother’s shoulders relaxed.

“Good morning,” I said, smiling as I reached Mi-ja.

“We should enjoy these next six days,” Mother commented, “because the water is still bearable. Soon winter will be here…”

Mi-ja gave me a sidelong glance. It was obvious to anyone who knew my mother that she was different after Yu-ri’s accident, and it kept people from teasing her too much about the fact that I had yet to harvest an abalone. Still, on occasion, a diver might mock her: “What kind of mother are you, if you can’t…” Or “A chief needs to teach her daughter to…” The question or sentence would never be finished, because another diver would poke that first woman in the ribs or quickly change the subject to husbands, tides, or the estimated time of arrival of a coming storm. Everyone tried to protect my mother—until some other haenyeo would get caught up in a moment of exuberance and say something thoughtless again—because the responsibility for the collective now weighed heavily upon her. This was worrisome, because who hadn’t heard the stories of haenyeo haunted by the injuries or deaths of other divers? Whether from ghosts, guilt, or sorrow, a diver could easily be lulled into making a mistake. We all knew of the woman who lived on the far side of Hado. She began to drink fermented rice wine after her friend died and became so disoriented she let a surge push her onto a sharp rock. It sliced deep into her leg, shredding her muscles, and she was never able to dive again. Or the neighbor whose son died of fever, and she let herself be carried away by the waves. Or the unlucky one whose monthly bleeding had attracted a swarm of sharks.

Now, when I looked at my mother, her body seemed worn from worry, from the pain of being under the sea, and from caring for so many others. She never had a chance to rest, because when we went home after our wet- or dry-field work, she still had much to do, including nurse Fourth Brother, now a chunky baby of eight months. The sun rose in the morning, mouths needed to be fed, and life went on, but laboring from before dawn until after dark was taking a toll on Mother.

When we reached the bulteok, she put on the face of a haenyeo chief. She dropped her basket next to the others and took her honorary spot by the fire. She told us where we would dive and how we’d be divided into groups. After we changed, the grandmother-divers went by boat with Mother to an area far offshore, the small-divers swam out with their tewaks to a spot a half kilometer from the beach, and the actual grandmothers and baby-divers, like Mi-ja and me, tended a nearby cove. It was every haenyeo’s duty to nurture our wet fields by cleaning and caring for them for future seasons and generations. The work was easy. I was happy, and I liked spending time with my grandmother.

When our group returned to the bulteok for lunch, Father and another man were waiting for us. Each carried a baby on his hip. Around their legs were other sons and daughters under five. The babies were crying, sounding like piglets held upside down by a single hoof. Father handed me Fourth Brother, who nosed at my nothing breasts. I didn’t have what he wanted, and his pink mouth became one long howl of frustrated craving. When the boat came to shore, the two mothers agilely leapt from the deck and ran over the rocks to us. They took their wailing babies into the bulteok, and in seconds the only sounds that remained were the rhythmic laps of small waves and the laughing of the remaining haenyeo as they made their way into the bulteok. Father and his friend walked off a few meters with their other sons and daughters straggling behind them. The two men sat on rocks, lit pipes, and spoke in voices too low to hear.

Mi-ja nudged me. “Let’s eat!”

Delicious aromas greeted us when we entered the bulteok. Although we’d been doing cleaning duties, Grandmother had spotted a sea cucumber, which she’d boiled, seasoned, and sliced for everyone to share. Another grandmother had gathered some sand crabs, which she stewed with beans. The sun was high, and it poured down on us through the roofless bulteok as we ate.

After lunch, we returned to work. During the afternoon, we repeated the activities we’d done in the morning. All groups met back at the bulteok three hours later. The fathers once again waited for us to arrive, crying babies slung over their shoulders. These were given to their mothers to nurse, while the rest of us changed into land clothes, warmed by the fire, and ate squid that had been cooked. But our labor wasn’t finished. We sorted what we had in our nets—abalones from conches, sea cucumbers from sea urchins, crabs from sea snails, sea squirts from sea slugs.

We then prepared our catch for sale: opening sea urchins and scooping out the roe, hanging squid to dry, and placing some creatures in buckets of seawater, so customers could see they were buying merchandise so fresh it was still alive. On some days, all this could take as little as twenty minutes. Other days, we were there for another two or three hours. So, while mornings in the bulteok were serious, the end of the day was filled with laughter, relief that everyone had returned safely, and bragging about what each haenyeo had caught. We were a collective, but not everything was divided equally. Algae and seaweed were weighed together, and the profits divided into equal shares. The money earned for harvesting shellfish belonged to the haenyeo who brought it in. How many kilos of top shell did a single woman have in her gathering net? The diver who found an abalone? That was a very lucky person!

The accepted ritual was for women to complain, and they did. The banter was loud, our ears still clogged from being under the water with all its pressure.

“My husband drinks my earnings.”

“Mine gambles away the allowance I give him.”

“All mine does is sit under the village tree to discuss Confucian ideals, as though he were a successful farmer. Ha!”

“Men,” huffed another. “They can’t help it. They have weak and idle minds. Men always put things off…”

“It’s true. They have puny thoughts. That’s why they need us.”

These were such common grievances that sometimes the women seemed competitive about whose husband was worst.

“I had to let my husband bring home a little wife,” another diver announced, “because I couldn’t give him a son. She’s a widow—pretty, young, and with two sons. Now all she does is whine.”

Mi-ja and I had talked about it, and we agreed we didn’t think we could bear it if either of our future husbands started a relationship with a little wife—a widow or a divorced woman who enchanted another woman’s husband into setting up a separate household for her. Or worse, if he went to live with his little wife in her home. These arrangements seemed too much about men having fun and too little about their responsibility to their first families. But one woman took a different view.

“Two wives mean two purses,” she recited, expressing how handy a second wife could be.

“A little wife can bring in cash, if she’s a haenyeo,” the first diver grudgingly agreed. “She can even be better than a daughter in some cases. But not this one. She doesn’t even give our husband pocket money!”

“The only way to prevent a husband from taking a little wife is to bear a son. You are nothing but someone’s servant if you don’t have a son who can perform ancestor worship for you one day.”

The women mumbled their acknowledgment of this basic truth.

“But what woman on earth wants her husband to bring home someone younger and prettier?” one of the older haenyeo asked, cackling loudly, bringing humor into the conversation.

“I do all the work. She gets to have a fun life.”

“Fun? What fun?”

The women chortled at the idea.

“We all know the saying,” my grandmother said. “It’s better to be born a cow than a woman.”

“Who should eat more—a man or a woman?” Do-Saeng called out, trying to change the subject.

The bulteok shouted in unison: “A woman!”

“Always a woman.” Do-saeng beamed. “Because she works harder. Look at me! I have chores in the sea and in the fields. I take care of my son and daughter. And where is my husband? A factory job surely must be easier than what I do.”

“At least your husband sends money home!”

Do-saeng chuckled. “But he’s too far away to stir the pot.”

I turned red. Stir the pot.

The woman who would have been Yu-ri’s mother-in-law returned to Do-saeng’s original question. “How can a man enjoy a meal when he contributes so little?”

“Let’s not be so hard on our men,” Mother cautioned, bouncing my brother on her lap. “They take care of our children when we’re underwater. They make dinner for us. They wash our clothes.”

“And they always ask us for money—”

The women roared with laughter.

“Not that I have much to give,” someone said, which set the other women to chattering again. “And the money I have, I’m not going to let run through his fingers—”

“Everyone knows that women are better with money—”

“Because we don’t turn it into liquor to pour down our throats—”

“You can’t blame our men for drinking,” Mother said. “They have nothing to do and no purpose to push them through the day. They’re bored. And think how it must be for them to live in a household that depends on the tail of a skirt.” She paused to let the women consider the aphorism and absorb the reality of what it might mean for a man to rely entirely on his wife. “At least we have the sea,” she went on. “For me, it is a second home, even my preferred home. I know more about it—its rocks and boulders, fields and canyons—than I will ever know about the interior of our island, let alone the interior of my husband’s mind. The sea is where I’m most at peace.”

The other women nodded.

When our work was finished—our harvest sorted, tewaks piled, and nets repaired—sand was thrown on the fire. In the same way we’d crossed the jetty together on our way to the sea, we strolled in a long line along the beach, up an embankment, and onto the pathway that edged the shore. Some women walked alone. Others were in groups of two or three—mothers-in-law with their daughters-in-law, mothers and daughters, and friends like Mother and Do-saeng or Mi-ja and me. Do-saeng lived right on the shore. She said her goodbyes, and we continued on, going inland. We passed through Hado’s main square, and sure enough a group of men sat under the tree, playing cards and drinking. A couple of women peeled off to grab their husbands and take them home. For me, when Mi-ja turned off at the olle that led to her aunt and uncle’s house, the day ended.

The next morning, Mi-ja wasn’t at her spot in the olle. When we got to the bulteok, Do-saeng wasn’t there either. “We’ll have to dive without them,” Mother said and then made her assignments. The true grandmothers and baby-divers would work the area at the end of the jetty. “Everyone else, we’ll swim out a kilometer. Since Mi-ja and Do-saeng aren’t here today, my daughter will dive with me. It’s time for her to harvest an abalone.”

I could barely believe what I’d heard. It was an honor far beyond anything I deserved as a baby-diver. As we changed into our water clothes, a couple of women congratulated me.

“Your mother taught me everything I know about the sea,” one of them said.

“You’ll get your abalone. I’m sure of it,” said another haenyeo.

I could not have been happier.

Once we were ready, we filed out, tewaks and nets slung over our shoulders, our sea-farming tools strung in satchels from our waists, our spears in hand. One by one, we dropped into the sea. The baby-divers and elders, including Grandmother, swam together to the right. The small-divers, actual grandmother-divers, and I looped our arms over our tewaks and began paddling away from the shore, following my mother to our designated spot. The sun spilled gloriously on our faces, arms, and shoulders. The water was cerulean blue. The swells were gentle, giving us nothing to fight against. I wished Mi-ja could see me.

“Here we are,” Mother yelled loud enough for her voice to reach the others over the wind and waves. She spat on her bitchang to bring good luck. I did the same. Then together we dove down. The water wasn’t too deep, and we wove in and out between large rocks, with Mother pointing out sea urchins and other creatures we could come back for later. First, though, an abalone for me. How fortunate I was to have my mother teach me this skill.

Back up for breath, then down again. I had years to go before I’d have my mother’s lung capacity, but she didn’t complain. She was patient. Back up for breath, then down again. She spotted a boulder dotted with abalone. They could camouflage themselves so well, no wonder I hadn’t seen them before. Now that I had, I would always know what to look for—a grayish blue or black bump, not all that smooth, rising from the cragged contour of an algae-covered boulder. Back up for a breath.

“Remember everything you’ve been taught,” Mother advised. “I’ll be right by your side, so don’t be frightened.”

We each took several deep breaths, then down again. We approached slowly so as not to disturb the waters. As fast as a snake striking its prey, I thrust my bitchang under the lifted edge of the abalone and flipped it off its home before it had a chance to clamp down. I grabbed it as it started to fall to the seabed. Seeing I was successful and having more air than I did, Mother thrust her bitchang under another abalone just as I started to kick for the surface. I broke into the air with my prize raised above my head. My sumbisori sounded triumphant. The haenyeo, who were resting on their tewaks, cheered for me.

“Congratulations!”

“May this be the first of many!”

Following tradition, I slowly rubbed the abalone on my cheek to show my affection and gratitude and then carefully placed it in my net. I was ready to dive down again, eager to harvest another abalone, when I realized my mother still hadn’t come up for air. She could hold her breath a long time, but she should have surfaced by now. A breath, a breath, a breath, and then under…

As soon as I set myself in the head-down position, I could see Mother still at the boulder, exactly where I’d left her. She was struggling to reach for something in the sand below her. Filtered sunlight caught the edge of her knife lying just out of reach. I gave two more strong kicks and glided next to her. That’s when I saw that her bitchang was trapped under the abalone. She had needed her knife to cut off the leather strap. Never panic was the greatest safeguard under the sea, but I was terrified. I concentrated hard as I pulled my knife from my belt, afraid I might drop mine as Mother must have dropped hers. By now, though, my lungs were already pressing hard against my chest. Mother had been underwater far longer. She had to be in agony. I pulled myself closer and tried to slip my knife under the leather loop, but it had tightened in the water as it was meant to do. My heart pounded. Blood throbbed in my head. I needed air, but Mother needed it more. I didn’t have time to go to the surface for help. If I did, by the time I got back…

Now we were both desperate. She grabbed my knife and tried to slice through the leather. In her rush, she slit a deep gash in her forearm. The blood turned the water murky, making it even harder to see where she was cutting. Her legs began to kick frantically, trying through sheer strength to free herself from the abalone’s grip on the bitchang. I pulled on her arm, trying to help. I couldn’t last much longer…

Suddenly, Mother stopped struggling. She calmly set the knife on the boulder and placed her now free hand over my wrist, getting my attention. Her pupils were dilated—from the darkness, from terror. She stared deeply into my eyes for a second or two, taking me in, remembering me. Then she released her breath. Her life bubbles burbled up between us. Another second passed. She still held my wrist, but I placed my other hand on her cheek. A lifetime of love passed between us, and then my mother sucked in water. Her body jerked and flailed. I badly needed air, but I didn’t leave her side until she was gone, floating peacefully, still attached to the rock.

Since my mother’s body was easily retrieved and brought to shore, she would not become a hungry ghost. This was the only comfort I could offer to my grandmother, father, and siblings when I told them that Mother would never again breathe and her body would never again be warm. When pressed, I told them about her final moments. We all wept, but Father didn’t reproach me. Or, if he did, it was nothing compared to how I cursed myself. The suspicion that I was the cause of her death ate at me like lye. I was filled with misery and guilt.

Mi-ja came to my house the next morning. She had deep circles under her eyes, and her cheeks were hollowed from a day and night of stomach ailments. She listened as I explained what had happened through gasping sobs. “Maybe I startled the abalone with my kicking to the surface. I was so excited and proud of myself, but maybe I stirred the waters too much and the abalone clamped down on Mother’s bitchang—”

“Don’t blame yourself for things that maybe happened,” she said.

Even if she was right about that, I saw no way to remove my guilt.

“Why didn’t I retrieve her knife and just give it to her? If I’d done that, she could have worked on the strap herself. And worse,” I cried, “I didn’t know how to handle my knife effectively.”

“No one expects a baby-diver to have such presence of mind. That’s why we train.”

“But I should have saved her…”

Mi-ja had lost her mother and father, so she felt my pain in a way no one else could. She refused to leave my side. She held my hand when my father announced the official beginning of our family’s mourning by taking the last tunic my mother had worn to the roof, waving it above his head, and shouting three times into the wind, “My wife, Kim Sun-sil, of the Gul-dong section of Hado Village, has died at age thirty-eight. I inform you of her return to the place she came from.”

Mi-ja stayed at our house, woke up early, and helped me haul water and gather fuel for the fire. She assisted me when I washed my mother’s body, placed buckwheat kernels in her palms and on her chest to feed the spirit dogs she would encounter on her journey to the Afterworld, and then wrapped her in cloth. This act is a daughter’s greatest honor and her greatest desolation. Mi-ja dressed my younger brothers and sister in mourning white. She helped me cook sea urchin soup and other required dishes for the funeral.

Mi-ja walked by my side during the procession through Hado. She bounced Fourth Brother on her hip to keep him from crying. I carried my mother’s spirit tablet and took care never to look over my shoulder for fear she might return to this world again. The women from the bulteok followed behind us, helping us clear the road for the passage of the dead to her grave. Behind them, twelve men carried my mother’s casket. Many people lined the olles. Everyone wanted to be a part of my mother’s journey to the Afterworld.

The coffin was brought back to our house. Friends and neighbors placed offerings—sticky rice cakes, bowls of grains, and rice wine—on the altar. My mother and father’s marriage photo held the center spot. She was pretty when she was young—long before the sun, wind, salt water, worry, and responsibility had creased her face and turned it the color of saddle leather. But all I could think about was how she must look now: tinted permanently blue from the chill of the sea and iciness of death.

Mi-ja sat with me on the floor just before the altar, her right knee touching my left knee, as our neighbors offered their condolences and respects. When the coffin was lifted again, Mi-ja accompanied my family to the field the geomancer had told Father would make a propitious burial site for Mother. It was surrounded by stone walls to keep the wind from washing over her and animals from walking on her. Mi-ja stood by my side when the grave was dug. Together we watched as food was distributed first to the older men, then the younger men, then the little boys. Next came women, from old to young. Mi-ja, Yu-ri, and I barely got anything to eat. Some girls, Little Sister included, received nothing, which caused some of the haenyeo to shout in their loud ocean voices that it wasn’t fair. But what about death is fair? Mother was lowered into the ground in a position in harmony with the land itself, then some men helped position a stone carved with her name atop the grave. Forever after, I would come here to remember my mother, weep for her, and place offerings in thanks for bringing me into this life.

“You see?” Mi-ja whispered. “She’ll always be protected by the stone walls that surround us. You’ll always find her here.” She gave me a gentle smile. “Every March we’ll go to the mountains to pick bracken to give as an offering.”

After bracken is picked nine times, it will sprout again. The saying Fall down eight times, stand up nine reminds us of this and symbolizes the wish for the dead to pave the way for future generations. We would have many opportunities throughout the year to make different types of offerings, but later that day, after a permanent memorial altar with a spirit tablet for my mother had been set up in our home, Mi-ja was the first to place a tangerine on the table. When I think of the money she must have spent on that…

That night, Mi-ja lay next to me on my mat and comforted me as I cried. “You’re not alone. You’ll never be alone. You’ll always have me.” These three sentences she repeated until they became a mesmerizing rhythm in my head.

But my mother’s journey was not yet complete. Over two days of twelve hours each, Shaman Kim performed a special no-soul ritual for the haenyeo collective to cleanse the spirit of my mother and guide her peacefully to the land of the dead. In addition, the shaman would attend to the living, because so many of us had been touched intimately by Mother’s death: I, for witnessing it; Do-saeng and Mi-ja, for being the vehicles that caused my mother to decide to help me get my first abalone that day; the other haenyeo, who helped free her and bring her to shore. The shock we’d experienced caused us all to be affected by soul loss.

The ceremony was held in an old shrine tucked inside a natural outcropping of stones on the shore. Women and girls came from neighboring villages, bringing vessels of cooked fish, rice, eggs, and liquor, which they placed on the makeshift altar next to a photo of Mother. It was not from her wedding day but was a more recent one showing her and a dozen of her classmates posed before the Hado Night School. To honor her diving partner, Do-saeng had her son write messages on white paper ribbons, which fluttered festively in the wind. This was not the only touch of liveliness. Even though it was a sad occasion, Shaman Kim brought with her rainbows of color and a cacophony of sound. Her hanbok was sewn in great bands of magenta, yellow, and blue. She twirled red tassels. Two assistants clanged cymbals, while another three beat drums. All this was accompanied by wailing and crying. Soon we were a mass of bodies swaying in dance. Then we began to raise our voices in prayer and song.

As the sun set, we walked to the water’s edge, where Shaman Kim made offerings to the sea gods. “Release Sun-sil’s spirit,” she entreated. “Let her come back with me.” She tossed one end of a long piece of white cloth into the waves, then slowly hauled it in, bringing my mother’s spirit with it.

The next morning, the winds were violent, making it impossible to keep the candles lit. Today would be about release: for my mother to be released from this plane and for us to be released from our links to her and from our torments. We began with the same pattern of weeping, wailing, dancing, and chanting, until Shaman Kim finally asked us to sit. Around me, I saw faces filled with sadness but also excitement.

“I greet all goddesses,” Shaman Kim declared. “You, esteemed ones, are welcome here. Please know every woman in Sun-sil’s collective has been touched by misery. We must heal those most in need. The spirits ask Sun-sil’s eldest daughter, mother-in-law, Do-saeng, and Mi-ja to kneel before me.”

The four of us did as we were told, bowing three times to the altar. Shaman Kim began with my grandmother, gently touching her chest with a tassel. “You were a good mother-in-law. You were kind. You never complained about Sun-sil.”

The mourners crooned appreciatively at these compliments.

Shaman Kim’s tassel came to rest on Mi-ja’s chest. “Do not condemn yourself for being sick that day. Fate and destiny took Sun-sil from this world.” At these words, Mi-ja sobbed. I’d been so consumed by my own sorrow, I hadn’t realized how Mi-ja might feel.

“She was the only mother I ever knew,” Mi-ja choked out.

Next came Do-saeng…

Hearing Shaman Kim console Do-saeng was perhaps the hardest part of the ceremony. She had already lost the lively daughter she had once known, and now her closest friend was gone. Shaman Kim used knives strung with long white ribbons to cut the negativity that surrounded Do-saeng. “Take away this woman’s shock and sorrow. Let the collective elect her as its new chief. May she lead her sea women with wisdom and caution. Please allow no more tragedies to befall this group.”

Finally, Shaman Kim turned to me. The touch of her fingers along my spine caused my back to relax. Her forefinger tapping my forehead opened my mind. The swish of the tassel across my chest exposed the depth of my anguish. “Let us repair this girl’s spirit,” she said. “Let her fly from grief.” Then she shifted away from me, directing her attention to the Afterworld. “I call upon the Dragon Sea God to bring Sun-sil’s spirit to us one last time.”

Before my eyes Shaman Kim opened her heart completely, and I heard my mother’s voice speak of her life, as was customary. “When I was twenty, I was matched in marriage. This was the same year of the cholera epidemic that killed my mother, father, brothers, and sister. I was an orphan and a wife. My marriage was not particularly harmonious or inharmonious. Then I became a mother.”

I needed Mother to say I wasn’t at fault. I needed her to tell me to be strong. I needed advice on how to care for my brothers and sister. I needed special messages of love for me alone, but spirits are under no obligation to say or do what we want. They are in the Afterworld now and have their own entitlements. It’s up to us to read the deeper meaning.

The shaman’s voice rose. Hairs prickled on the back of my neck as I was enveloped in love. “My life has been in the sea, but my heart has been with my daughters. I love my oldest daughter for her courage. I love my youngest daughter for the sound of her laughter. I will miss them in the coldness of black death.”

With that, Shaman Kim came out of her trance. It was time for more singing and dancing. Then we shared a meal from the sea—slivers of octopus, sea urchin roe, slices of raw fish. My mother had died in the sea, but we could never forget that it gave us life.

That night, Mi-ja stayed with me again, curling her body around mine. “Every year you will mourn a little less and release a little more,” she whispered in my ear. “In time, your sadness will melt away like seafoam.”

I nodded as though I understood, but her words offered little comfort when I knew she had never freed herself of the grief she felt for the loss of her own mother and father.

They say, When the hen cries, the household will collapse. But we don’t have a saying for what happens when the hen dies. As the eldest daughter, I had always been responsible for my younger siblings. Now I had to provide their food and clothing and be a second mother to them. My father was no help. He was a kind man, but he shuddered under the added responsibility. Too often I found him outside, alone with his sadness. No man was built to shoulder the full weight of feeding and caring for his family. That was why he had a wife and daughters.

If family worries were not enough, the Japanese colonists gripped us ever tighter in the months after my mother’s death. She had once hoped to earn enough money to send my brothers to school, if only to age ten. The extra income I earned might once have helped pay their way. But even if we could have relied on my extra income, it was too dangerous, when those “lucky” boys who attended schools around the island were suddenly being forced to build underground bunkers to hide Japanese soldiers.

I felt pressured from every direction. I sought courage and inspiration in the ways my mother had. Wherever you are on Jeju, you can see Grandmother Seolmundae. I walked on the goddess’s flesh, I swam over and through her skirts, I breathed in air she had exhaled. I also had two living people I could rely on: Mi-ja, who was a survivor, and my grandmother, who loved me very much and had also suffered tragedies; and they trusted me to do my best for the family.

“Parents exist in children,” Grandmother said to bolster my confidence. “Your mother will always exist in you. She will give you strength wherever you go.”

And on those days when we walked to the sea and found Mi-ja waiting at her usual spot in the olle, Grandmother recited common sayings in hopes of comforting us two motherless girls. “The ocean is better than your natal mother,” she said. “The sea is forever.”