When the captain shut down the motor and the boat bobbed in the whitecaps, we stripped out of our street clothes. Mi-ja tightened the ties on my water clothes, and I checked hers. We put on our tool belts, wedged our small-eyed goggles into place, threw our tewaks overboard, and then jumped into the water feetfirst. Bracing cold swallowed me. I kicked my feet beneath me to stay afloat. Still, the water was rough enough to smack my face. A breath, a breath, a breath, then straight down. Enveloping silence. My heart beat in my ears, reminding me to be careful, stay alert, remember where I was, and forget absolutely everything else. I wouldn’t be greedy. I’d take my time. For now, I simply looked around. I counted, one, two, three turban shells I could easily harvest on my next breath. I would make a lot of money today! I was just about to go back to the surface when I spotted a tentacle creeping sucker over sucker out of its rocky den. I held that spot in my head, then swam quickly to the surface. My sumbisori—aaah! I detached my net from my tewak, took some quick breaths, and went back down. When I got to the crevice, I saw not one but two octopuses, roiling together. I jabbed one and then the other in the head to stun them. Before they could waken, I stuffed them in my net and kicked to the surface. Aaah! Triumphant on my second dive!
Mi-ja discovered she was pregnant first. I expected her to cry and worry, and she did.
“What if I have a son who’s like his father?”
“If there’s a son inside you, he’ll be perfect, because you’ll be his mother.”
“What if I die?”
“I won’t let you die,” I vowed.
But no matter what I said, Mi-ja remained gloomy and apprehensive.
A week later… Joyous! That’s how I felt, even though I was hanging my head over the boat’s railing and throwing up. I too had a baby growing inside me. And Mi-ja and I weren’t the only ones on the boat. Most of us had been married for a year or less. And look! Eight of us were pregnant. Surrounded by so much happiness, Mi-ja’s spirits lifted. She was one of many. Of course In-ha wasn’t too thrilled.
Children bring hope and joy, but naturally every single one of us wished for a son. A couple girls had secretly known they were pregnant when they left home. This meant that babies would start to arrive within five months. Mi-ja and I figured we’d have our babies—if we were right in our counting—in mid-June. But we had to get through the first rough weeks of morning sickness. Each dawn, as we went to sea, all we needed was one haenyeo to throw up to trigger the rest of us. The boat captain didn’t mind if what came out of our stomachs went directly into the sea, while In-ha changed course and decided that each woman with a child growing in her belly would be even more motivated to have a large daily harvest.
We ate abalone porridge with all the organs nearly every day, knowing this was the most nutritious meal we could eat and that it would also train our babies to love the taste. Soon our stomachs began to swell, and we loosened the ties that closed the sides of our suits. We hoped our babies would be born “right in the field,” meaning they would take their first breaths on the boat or slip out when we were in the sea.
Pregnancy brings changes not only to a woman’s body but also to her mind. Things Mi-ja and I had once done in Vladivostok seemed silly now. We no longer dashed from place to place to make rubbings. We’d already captured those memories. Instead, we were growing our babies. By the time the bitter months of winter arrived, Mi-ja’s morning sickness was completely gone. It lingered for me, but I found the frigid waters brought instant relief. The moment of submersion into that cold seemed to calm my baby, put him to sleep, freeze him in place. As the months passed and our bellies grew, water offered new comforts. As soon as I was submerged, my aches were massaged, and the weight of my baby was buoyed. I felt strong. Mi-ja did too.
The first babies began to arrive. Mothers had no one onshore to care for their infants, so each baby was put in a cradle with a single rope securing it to the deck. As soon as we were in the water, the captain would leave us, as was the custom, but go not too far away. Newborns sleep a lot, and the rocking of the boat kept them calm. Nevertheless, as the morning wore on and we came back to the surface after a dive, we would hear not only the individual and unique sounds of each woman’s sumbisori but also the individual and unique cries of each baby. Lunches were lively and busy. The new mothers nursed their infants while shoveling millet and kimchee into their own mouths. The rest of us bragged and gossiped. Then it was back into the water.
In mid-June, Mi-ja went into labor in the sea. She kept working until the final hour, when In-ha and I joined her on the deck for the delivery. After all her foreboding, that baby practically swam out of Mi-ja. A boy! She named him Yo-chan. It was through the ancestral rights he would perform in the future that Mi-ja would be able to stay in contact with her family on earth when she went to the Afterworld. Once we got back to the dormitory, she made offerings to Halmang Samseung and Halmang Juseung—one a goddess who protects babies and one a goddess who can kill them with her flower of demolition—while I prepared a pot of buckwheat noodle soup for her to eat, since it’s known to cleanse a woman’s blood after childbirth. We did not have Shaman Kim here to bless the special protective clothes an infant wears for his first three days of life, but on his fourth morning Mi-ja packed away her worries.
I would have preferred to have gone into labor in the ocean and had my baby born in the field, but eight days after Yo-chan’s arrival, my water broke in the middle of the night. My labor was even easier than Mi-ja’s. What came out was a girl. I liked the name Min and added to that lee for her generational name, which Min-lee would share with her future sisters. I still needed to have a son, but what a blessing it was to give birth to someone who would work for Jun-bu and me and help make money to send our future son or sons to school in the years to come. Mi-ja made me the special mother’s soup, we made offerings, and then we waited three days to make sure Min-lee survived. To honor this most important moment in our lives, we traced the babies’ footprints on pages from Mi-ja’s father’s book.
The four of us were back on the boat within days. The babies lay side by side in their cradles, linked with all the other cradles. When we came back to the boat to warm up, we opened the tops of our water clothes, exposed our breasts, and let our babies latch on to our nipples. I was raised to follow the aphorism A good woman is a good mother. I’d learned how to be a good mother from my mother and then from being a second mother to my siblings, so I loved my baby from the moment of her first breath. Motherhood shouldn’t have come naturally to Mi-ja, but her connection to her son was instant and deep. Whenever she nursed Yo-chan, she whispered into his face, calling him ojini, which means “gentle-hearted person.” “Eat well, ojini,” she’d coo. “Sleep well. Don’t cry. Your mother is here.”
When our contracts ended, at the end of July, our babies were six and five weeks old. We took the ferry to Jeju. Our arrival was both frightening and hopeful. My entire life I’d seen Japanese soldiers, but now there were many more of them on the wharf. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, coming off ships, milling about, marching to and fro. It was stunning enough that Mi-ja, curious as ever, asked a pair of dockworkers, “Why so many?”