The next day, the rain poured down as though the heavens were weeping. Men in the Korean Constabulary, Jeju police, and U.S. military troops herded the first few hundred mountain refugees to the outskirts of Bukchon. The women and children did not look like troublemakers to me. Apart from little boys and a few old men who walked with their heads bent, I saw few males in the trail of anguish. I could only come to one conclusion: most men were already dead. The children did not talk or sing to make the burden of their situation less heavy. Families carried whatever they’d been able to salvage from their homes—quilts, sleeping mats, cooking utensils, bags of grain, earthenware jars filled with pickled vegetables, dried sweet potatoes—but they’d been forced to abandon their livestock. They made camp as best they could, building lean-tos from reeds and pine branches.
In Bukchon, we were ordered to use the stones that lay in our fields to build a wall around the village. Men, so unused to hard labor, suffered. Jun-bu came home with blisters on his hands, and his back ached. The job also pulled women from working in either their wet or their dry fields. Even children had to help. Once the wall was finished, we were forced to stand guard day and night, armed with homemade spears.
“If you let someone in who is proven to be a rebel,” a police officer warned us, “then you’ll all be punished.”
The refugees soon ran out of the food they’d brought with them. At night, moans of hunger drifted over the moonlit fields, through the rocky walls, and into my house. Whenever the wind shifted, the bad odors of unwashed bodies and no sanitation soured our nostrils, eyes, and throats.
One day as I was walking past the camp a woman beckoned to me.
“I’m a mother. You look like a mother too. Will you help me?”
Although mid-mountain people had always looked down on the haenyeo, our hurt feelings had moved to pity as we witnessed what had happened to them. So of course I asked what I could do.
“I’m not a diver,” the woman said. “I don’t know how to harvest from the sea. Can you teach me?”
I was willing, but when I learned she didn’t even know how to swim, I had to decline. When she started to weep, I whispered, “Come to my field tonight. I will leave a basket for you with sweet potatoes and some other things.”
As I gave her directions, she wept even harder. Soon I heard about other women in Bukchon who left food in their fields or by the wall to the camp. But after one of my neighbors was caught doing this, taken away, tortured, and killed for her charity, I did not take the risk again.
The refugees living outside Bukchon and other seaside villages had obeyed and come to the shore, but others—some fearful, some obstinate, and some rebels—fled inland and tried to hide in remote mountain villages or make new homes in caves or lava tubes. This was the worst thing they could have done. Grandmother Seolmundae couldn’t protect them, and the ring of fire became literal as entire villages were burned. Soldiers set fire to Gyorae. When people tried to escape, they were shot and thrown into the flames to destroy the evidence. Some of the victims were babies and children. In Haga, soldiers killed twenty-five villagers, including a woman in her last month of pregnancy. Then they burned the village. Nearly every day, when we rowed to the day’s diving spot, we saw plumes of smoke wafting from our great mountain and out over the sea.
I went to the five-day market, but there was nothing to buy. The woman in the dry-goods stand passed along what she knew. “U.S. ships have blockaded the island,” she said. “No supplies can be brought in to help those in hiding or provide food to the tens of thousands of refugees now living inside the ring of fire.”
She was clearly knowledgeable, so I asked, “What about food for us?”
The woman grunted. “No one on the island—not even those of us on the right side of the ring of fire—will be able to buy goods anymore.”
Worse—so much worse—there came a day when we were told that haenyeo could no longer dive. Japanese soldiers had once stolen our food and horses, but now our own countrymen were starving us. My husband and I each got by on a single sweet potato a day, so we could give more food to our children. But they lost weight, their hair turned dull, and their eyes began to sink into their heads.
When someone told me that the haenyeo collective in Gimnyongree had gotten permission to open a restaurant to serve police and army troops, I passed the information on to Gi-won. She called for a meeting in the bulteok.
“The haenyeo in Gimnyongree are hoping to prevent police violence, but we will not dive for the very people who are killing our own,” Gi-won said, adamant. “Wouldn’t we be truer to our island if we offered shelter, food, and clothing to the insurgents? These are our people. They could be our sons, brothers, or cousins.”
“We’d be killed if we were caught!” Jang Ki-yeong exclaimed.
“It’s better to go hungry together than to die,” Yun-su added.
“Why should we help them?” someone else asked. “The rebels steal food and kill those who try to protect what they grew. I’m afraid of bears as well as tigers.”
This saying had recently sprung up, and it meant that the police and the constabulary were to be feared as much as the rebels and insurgents.
“I don’t care who started what or when,” Ki-yeong said. “I just want peace.”
Not one person agreed to Gi-won’s suggestion. It was the first time we’d turned against our leader, and it showed that we’d lost all sympathy for the rebels.
More news filtered through the stone wall that protected Bukchon. In Tosan, soldiers killed all men between the ages of eighteen and forty. One hundred and fifty died. In Jocheon, two hundred villagers turned themselves in to the military to prevent being killed in a battle against the insurgents. All but fifty of them were executed anyway. We tried to tell ourselves that none of this could be happening, but it was. A third of Jeju’s population had been forced to relocate to the shore, and so many people had been killed that no one could guess the count. The skies were black with crows, who flew from one scene of death to the next. Picking at the dead made them stronger; they mated, and hatched even more crows. The flocks grew bigger and blacker. I couldn’t look at them without feeling ill.
American soldiers found nearly one hundred bodies in a mountain village, while another group of their soldiers stumbled across the execution of seventy-six men, women, and children in a different village. The Americans may not have actively participated in the atrocities, but they did nothing to prevent them either.
“Is not doing something their way of sending us a message about their real intentions?” Jun-bu asked.
Once again, I had no answer.
After men and young boys were killed in yet another set of mountain villages, the survivors—women, children, and the elderly—were housed in military tents set up by American soldiers in the playground of Hamdeok Elementary School. When there was no more room, the Korean Constabulary executed the surplus of people at the edge of a cliff, so they’d fall into the sea.
I was able to anticipate my husband’s question before he asked it. “Did the Americans with their tents and surveillance planes not see that?”
It worried me to see my husband’s frustrations growing, but the person I thought about most when I heard what had happened in Hamdeok was Mi-ja. She lived there.
We’d grown up with the Three Abundances, but we weren’t prepared for the Three-All Strategy—kill all, burn all, loot all—of the scorched-earth policy. The impact was hard for us to absorb. You hear about an incident but don’t see a mother, a child, a brother. You don’t feel the individual suffering, but we began to hear those stories too: A family was dragged from its home. The daughter-in-law was made to spread her legs so her father-in-law could mount her. When he couldn’t finish the deed, both were killed. I heard of a soldier who heated his revolver in a fire, then shoved it inside a pregnant woman just to see what would happen. Widows and mothers of sons who’d been killed often went mad and threw themselves off cliffs, sailing to their loved ones in the Afterworld. In one village, the girls were kidnapped, gang-raped for two weeks, and then executed, along with all the young men from that village. Wives were forced to marry policemen and soldiers, because marriage was a way to seize property legally. Some haenyeo sold off their dry fields to buy a husband or son out of jail. The most unfortunate women agreed to marry police officers in exchange for the release from jail of a husband, brother, son, or other male relative. Too often, those loved ones were killed anyway. These things I wished I could erase from my mind, but they would never, ever, go away.