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.