“There’s nothing to explain. My husband is dead. My sister-in-law is dead. My firstborn son is dead.”
“I was there. I saw.” She shook her head as if trying to drive out the memories.
“So was I. You told me you had to protect your own family! You wouldn’t even take my children!”
Muted gasps rose up around us. Mi-ja turned red—whether in anger or in humiliation, I couldn’t tell. Then her body stiffened, and her eyes went cold.
“Every family on this island has suffered. You are not the only victim.”
“You were my friend. We were once closer than sisters.”
“What right do you have to accuse me of not saving your family?” she asked. “I’m only a woman—”
“And a haenyeo. You could have been strong. You could have—”
“I ask you again. Who are you to condemn me? Look at your own deeds. Why didn’t you stop Yu-ri from diving down again—”
I staggered back. This woman, whom I’d loved, and who had—through her own actions and inactions—destroyed my family, was using a secret I’d confided to her against me. And she wasn’t done.
“And what about your mother’s death? She was the best haenyeo. She went down with you and didn’t come back to the surface alive. Your kicking caused the abalone to clamp down on her bitchang. And you admitted you were inept with your knife—”
Do-saeng, who for so long I’d believed saw me in a bad light for all the things I was being accused of now, stepped forward. On either side of her were Gu-ja and Gu-sun. They made a powerful trio.
“This is a day of mourning for our family.” Do-saeng’s voice held the authority of a chief haenyeo. “Please, Mi-ja, leave our family alone.”
Mi-ja held still for a few long moments. Only her eyes moved, slowly passing over the faces of people she’d known from childhood. Then she turned, limped out of the field, and disappeared behind the rocky wall. I did not speak to her again for many years.
Big Eyes
Five months later, on June 25, 1950, the north invaded the south. We called this the 6.25 War. Three days later, Seoul fell. On Jeju, the police demanded that all radios be turned in. I did not want to give them the wedding gift I’d bought for my husband. I considered all the places to hide it. Maybe in the granary. Maybe in the pigsty or the latrine. But those ideas were tossed aside when I saw neighbors not only had their carefully hidden radios seized but were arrested and not heard from again. I turned in the radio, and another piece of my husband disappeared.
I didn’t know what was happening elsewhere in the country, but here on Jeju, in addition to the tens of thousands of refugees we had from the mountains still living in camps outside villages, we received more than a hundred thousand refugees from the mainland. Food became even scarcer. Human filth lay everywhere. Diseases spread. And more people were rounded up. Anyone suspected of being a communist—or having ever attended a meeting that might be considered leftist—plus their wives, husbands, brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents—was detained. It was said over one thousand were now in custody on Jeju, including some from Hado. We never saw them again either.
Those who’d been held in custody since the beginning of the 4.3 Incident were sorted into groups and labeled A, B, C, or D, depending on how dangerous they were perceived to be. On August 30, Jeju’s police were instructed to execute by firing squad the people in the C and D categories. The only good news in all this was that most members of the Northwest Young Men’s Association joined the army to fight against the northern regime.
And still we haenyeo rowed, sang, and dove. When we’d first been allowed back into the sea, Do-saeng had paired me with a woman named Kim Yang-jin, who had married, as a widow, into our part of Hado. She was my age. She kept her hair cropped short. She had bowlegs, which gave her an amusing style of walking, but they didn’t seem to hinder her underwater.
“As I enter the sea, the Afterlife comes and goes,” Do-saeng trilled as we headed to the open waters. “I eat wind instead of rice. I accept the waves as my home.”
And we sang back to her. “Ill fate, I do have. Like a ghost underwater, diving in and diving out.”
“Here comes a strong surge,” Do-saeng called. “Let us ignore it and keep diving.”
“Our husbands at home, smoking and drinking, do not know our suffering. Our babies at home, crying for us, do not see our tears.”
Far to our right, we spotted a boat filled with haenyeo. First, we had to make sure they weren’t from Sut-dong and that Mi-ja wasn’t among them. Several women grabbed their spears, knives, or prying tools, holding them low and out of sight in case we had to fight for our territory. Once we saw they weren’t our rivals, we rowed closer. I didn’t recognize any of the women on the boat. I glanced at my mother-in-law. She was ready for a confrontation, if these were poachers, but also ready to exchange information, if they were friendly.
We pulled up our oars as we neared. The two vessels glided toward each other, rising and falling over the swells, until we were close enough that we had to use our oars as prods to keep the boats from crashing into each other. The chief of the other collective spoke first.
“We’re sorry if we’re trespassing into your wet fields,” she said. “We decided to row away from home for a few days. We didn’t want to be followed back to our families.”
“Where are you from?” Do-saeng asked.
“We live to the east of Jeju City, near the airport.”
They’d rowed more than thirty kilometers to get here. Something or someone had frightened them not just out of their territory but very far from home. The women on the boat, all physically strong, were clearly shaken. None would meet our eyes.
“What happened?” Do-saeng asked.
The other chief didn’t respond. Sound travels far across the water, and wind can carry voices even farther. I reached out and grabbed the tip of an oar from the other boat. The women holding that oar grabbed mine. A couple of other paired women did the same until we were close enough to hear low voices but not so close that we’d damage our boats. Now we could share information without fear that it would be heard by the wrong ears onshore.
“We saw them dumping bodies in the sea,” the chief’s gravelly voice rasped.
“In the sea?” Gu-ja, who was sitting at the back of the boat with her sister, blurted, too loud.
“So many men…” The chief shook her head.
Do-saeng asked a practical question. “Will they wash ashore?”
“I don’t think so. The tide was going out.”
Yet again, there’d be no proof of what had happened. But it also meant—and this was so disconcerting that my stomach flipped—the sea had become like our home latrines. Only instead of the cycle starting from our bottoms, going into pigs’ mouths, and then later our eating the meat from their bodies, which would later fall out of our bottoms, it was starting with our own people, who were even now being consumed by fish and other sea creatures, which we would harvest and eat.
“What have you heard?” the chief on the other boat asked.
My mother-in-law then revealed something that she hadn’t told me or the collective in the bulteok. “The haenyeo chief in Sehwa says that her cousin saw several hundred people shot near the airport. They’ve all been buried there.”
I began to shake. Why, why, why did my countrymen have to turn on each other? Wasn’t the ongoing 4.3 Incident enough? Now we had an invasion and bloody war. To me, it was multiples upon multiples of sorrows and tragedy for families on both sides. We, the survivors, were linked together in an intricate web of grief, pain, and guilt.