During Sang-mun’s long absences, Mi-ja walked through the olles to Bukchon with her son, and I’d veer toward Hamdeok on my way home from the bulteok so we could meet halfway—almost as we had done in Hado when we were young girls.
“I brought in two nets filled with sea urchins today,” I might say.
And she might respond with “I made kimchee.” Or washed clothes, dyed cloth, or ground grain.
Sometimes I’d come around the bend and see her with her arms resting on top of the stone wall, staring out to sea.
“Do you miss diving?” I might ask.
“The sea will forever be my home,” she always answered.
Once I saw bruises above her wrist. A man does not change with marriage, and I had my suspicions about Sang-mun, but I was hesitant to ask about him directly. One day I gathered my courage and made a more general inquiry. “Are you happy?”
“You and I are finally living with our husbands,” she replied. “We know things about them we didn’t know in those first few weeks of marriage. Sang-mun snores sometimes. He farts when he eats too much turnip. Often, when he comes home, I can tell he’s been drinking. It’s not our rice wine, but something he has with the Americans. I can’t stand the smell.”
These were nothing answers. She knew it. I knew it.
“I should be going home now,” she said, then called to her son. I watched them walk up the olle until they were out of sight.
As a haenyeo, wife, and mother, I focused on diving, my husband, my two children, Yu-ri, and the new baby to come. We enter the netherworld to earn our living and return to this one to save our children. We haenyeo are ruled by the moon and tides, but we’re also affected by various sets of three: The abundance of wind, rocks, and women. The lack of thieves, gates, and beggars. The three-step farming system that gives our pigs food from our behinds, fertilizer for our dry fields from the pigs’ behinds, and a pig that can eventually be eaten. We didn’t talk about it often, but Jeju was also known as the Island of the Three Disasters—wind, flood, and drought. Wind, again, always, and forever.
Now we had a new set of Three Disasters. First, another cholera epidemic broke out. Grandmother died. It hurt to lose her. It hurt even more that I hadn’t been able to care for her in her final hours. Mi-ja also lost her aunt and uncle. Second, the fall harvest was extremely poor. The crops that sustained us—millet, barley, and sweet potatoes—failed. We were instructed to go to American distribution points to pick up bags of grain, but the former Japanese collaborators, who’d been put in charge of rationing, stole these provisions to sell on the black market. Within forty-five days, the price of rice doubled, not that we could ever afford to buy rice for more than the New Year’s celebration. At the same time, the price for electricity—in those few places on the island that had it—jumped fivefold.
And third, people began to go without other staples. Jeju’s population had doubled with those who’d returned from Japan since liberation and refugees from the north since the division of the country, but the Americans forbade us to trade with our former occupiers, which meant haenyeo families had no money to buy food. There were days when we squeaked by on a mixture of seaweed and barley bran. Other families subsisted on the potato pulp usually given to pigs, so even those beasts had to get by on less. On the mornings when I didn’t dive, I strapped Sung-soo to my back and—with Min-lee and Yu-ri trailing behind me—joined other mothers on the rocky shore to search for sand crabs to make into love-from-a-mother’s-hands porridge. Anytime one of the children found one, a squeal would ring out almost like a sumbisori. I spent long afternoons picking the meat from those tiny shells to make the porridge.
Mi-ja and I agreed to stay out of political discussions even as events roiled around us. On the radio we heard Colonel Brown, a new American in charge, tell us that the long-range goal for Jeju was “to offer positive proof of the evils of communism” and “to show that the American way offers positive hope.”
“Only one problem,” Jun-bu grumbled. “They want us to accept their form of democracy, with an American-backed dictator who can be controlled, while the people of Korea—especially here on Jeju—want to hold our own elections, with our own slate of candidates, so we can vote our own way. Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be about?”
He took this a step further when Mi-ja and her family came to visit. “We should shove out the Americans like we did the French missionaries,” he stated, sure of his position.
“That was a small rebellion decades ago,” Sang-mun argued back. “The Christians are still here, and more are coming now that the Americans have arrived.”
“But we should be independent! If we don’t stand up for what we believe, then we are guilty of collaborating in our hearts.”
Collaborating. That word again.
On one matter Sang-mun appeared to agree. “At the very least we should have free elections.” But then he warned, “Free elections or not, let me tell you something, friend. You should be careful. You’re a teacher. Too much trouble gets stirred up in schools. Remember what they did to the women organizers from the Hado Night School and to their teachers?”
They were all dead, but I didn’t worry because my husband wasn’t an organizer, and he wasn’t going to lead a revolt. Besides, we had more practical things to worry about, like how we were going to feed our children.
One thing led to another, though, and people—organized by the newly formed South Korean Labor Party—began to plan a nationwide demonstration to take place on March 1, 1947, nineteen months after the war ended and on the same date that my countrymen had once held gatherings to promote independence from Japan. Here on Jeju, no matter what side people were on—rightist, leftist, or none-ist—they came from across the island to the starting point at an elementary school in the city.
The sky was bright, and the spring air felt fresh. Jun-bu carried Min-lee, and I had Sung-soo tied to my back. (Yu-ri stayed home with Granny Cho.) Mi-ja and Sang-mun brought Yo-chan. Our husbands had arranged a meeting spot, so we easily found each other, even though the crowd was larger than the one my mother had taken Mi-ja and me to fifteen years ago. Instead of Japanese soldiers watching us, hundreds of policemen kept us under observation. Many of them rode horses.
Our husbands wandered off to join a group of men, while Mi-ja and I stayed with the children. Yo-chan and Min-lee toddled together through the crowd, never getting too far from us. Yo-chan had the sturdy legs of his mother. My daughter was already dark from the sun, but she was wiry like her father.
“A boy and a girl,” Mi-ja said, smiling. “When they marry—”
“We’ll both be very happy.” I looped my arm through hers.
We saw people we knew: the Kang sisters and their families, and haenyeo with whom we’d done leaving-home water-work. I said hello to some women from the collective in Bukchon; Mi-ja introduced me to a few of her neighbors in Hamdeok.
When the speeches started, our husbands returned to us. “Let’s move closer to the stage,” Jun-bu said. “It’s important the children hear what’s said.”