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!”