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.”