When she was a girl, a haenyeo officially retired at age fifty-five. Those who continued breathing the air of this earth didn’t want to stay home, so they did water work on the shore. Times have changed. When she joins her grandson and his family in the big house for breakfast, she often announces, “I get lonesome at home by myself. I think I’ll go down to the sea.” What she means is she gets bored sitting around the house with her youngest great-grandchildren. Yes, she should enjoy those special times with the babies—something she wasn’t able to do with her own children—but they don’t have stories or tease or joke around. And working in the dry fields has never been, as her great-grandchildren put it, “her thing,” with all that stooped weeding, hoeing, planting, and harvesting. For her, life is better when she can live in harmony with nature—the wind, the tides, and the moon.
Young-sook can do what she wants, because she’s financially self-sufficient. No one ever paid her way, and no one ever will. She considers the sea to be her bank. Even if she didn’t have checks or credit cards, she could make money underwater. She’d always felt healthiest when she dove too, always felt healed in the water. Whenever she had problems in her life, she went diving. Of course, it’s dangerous, but every day something pulls her to the sea. When her body isn’t underwater, her mind is.
“I hear the ocean calling,” she tells her grandson this morning, and he isn’t about to fight her, and neither will anyone else in the household. Even long after she could have retired, she was one of the best haenyeo, with the most hard-won experience of tides, currents, and surges, the deepest knowledge of the nesting grounds for octopus, and her ability to hold her breath. How strange that these days it’s hard to find a haenyeo under fifty-five. They say that in another twenty years, the haenyeo will be extinct.
She has constant pain and ringing in her ears from decades of water pressure. She gets headaches, vertigo, dizziness, and nausea—as if she were always on a rocking boat. Her hips ache from carrying the weights she wore around her waist to drag her to the ocean floor when she started wearing a wet suit and the effort it took to fight against them when she needed to resurface. Those weights were in addition to paddling back to a boat or to shore with her net as heavy as thirty kilos with a day’s catch, and then dragging it onto dry land and back to the bulteok. Still, the unrelenting sea… It beckons her…
As she walks to the shore, Young-sook sees the remnants of the old stone bulteok and bathing enclosures, where these days young people go to meet in secret, listen to music, and smoke cigarettes. Such a waste. She veers left and joins other old women as they enter the new bulteok. It has individual shower stalls, changing rooms, air-conditioning, a stove, and a huge tub that can fit at least a dozen women, so they can rinse away salt water and warm up at the same time. It doesn’t have a fire pit, but it has a roof, and area heaters can be pulled out when needed. All these amenities, along with healthcare, have been given by the government as a thank-you for the work the haenyeo have done.
The women peel off their clothes. Breasts that long ago fed babies and gave husbands pleasure droop down to belly buttons. Once flat stomachs now ripple with rolls of insulating fat. Hair that was once lustrous black has dulled to white. Hands that have seen a lifetime of work are knobby, wrinkled, and scarred. Next to Young-sook, the Kang sisters yank and stretch their black neoprene pants up and over their sagging bottoms. Then they pull over their heads their regulation orange neoprene tops, which will make them more visible to passing boats.
Young-sook squeezes her skull through her cap, positioning the small opening above her eyebrows and just below her lips. As she looks around the bulteok, she sees the weathered faces of friends she’s known her entire life squishing through their own small openings. The characters of the women—and their histories of goodness, generosity, stinginess, and callousness—are centered in those few centimeters. Each line tells a story of underwater journeys, births and deaths, survival and triumph. The deep grooves around Kang Gu-ja’s mouth bloom outward like a child’s drawing of the sun. Creases streak from the corners of her eyes down her cheeks. Kang Gu-sun will forever be the younger sister. Despite her losses, kindness radiates from her eyes. Some women are toothless, cheeks pressed forward, amplifying furrows of sorrow and joy. Now, almost as one, they pull their face masks onto their heads, but each woman wears hers in a unique manner—over her brow, on top of her head, or on the side at an angle. A few women add homemade floral vests over their neoprene tops, wanting to show off their individuality.
The grannies leave the bulteok—with their tewaks, nets, fins, and other tools—walk down some steps, and set out across the jetty to the boat. They’re taken to a cove off a nearby island known for its abundance of top shell. Once the boat reaches its destination, Young-sook and the other women take a few moments to make offerings of rice and rice wine to the Dragon Sea God and pray for an abundant harvest, a safe return, and peace of mind. Young-sook’s life by now can be summed up in three words—pray, pray, pray—for all the good those prayers have done her.
Then, whoosh… Into the water. It’s been about thirty years since she and other haenyeo started wearing rubber clothes. “You’ll be covered head to toe,” an official from the government had told them. “This will finally put an end to the criticism that haenyeo are immodest and show too much skin. And you’ll be helping with our tourism industry!” (He’d been talking about tourists from the mainland, and he’d been right about that. But no one back then could have predicted the foreign tourists, that they’d love to come to the shore to watch ancients like her enter the sea, or that they’d enjoy seeing “re-creations” at the new Haenyeo Museum, where hired girls wore traditional water clothes and sang rowing songs in daily shows.) When Young-sook first started using a wet suit, she’d been able to stay in the water longer, because she was protected from the cold. It had also protected her from jellyfish stings and water snake bites. (It did not protect her from other dangers: fishing lines or speedboats bearing tourists.) Weights and fins had helped her reach a greater depth too. The result: she was safer, her catches were larger, and she’d earned more money. But when people suggested the haenyeo start using oxygen tanks, she, along with other divers around the island, refused. “Everything we do must be natural,” she’d told the collective, “otherwise we’ll harvest too much, deplete our wet fields, and earn nothing.” There, again, balance.
As she settles into the feeling of weightlessness, her aches and pains melt away. And, on a day like today, when her mind is in turmoil, the vastness of the ocean offers solace. She kicks down, going headfirst, shooting her body deeper and deeper. She hopes the pressure on her ears will squash the thoughts of the past. Instead, it feels as though they’re being pushed out—like toothpaste from a tube. The image troubles her. She needs to concentrate—always be aware—but her mother and grandmother, and, lurking in the shadows of her mind, Mi-ja, keep pushing against the backs of her eyes.
Young-sook’s mother used to say that the sea was like a mother, while Young-sook’s grandmother said that the sea was better than a mother. After all these years, Young-sook knows her grandmother to be the most right. The sea is better than a mother. You can love your mother, and she still might leave you. You can love or hate the sea, but it will always be there. Forever. The sea has been the center of her life. It has nurtured her and stolen from her, but it has never left.