This was met by indifferent looks. We didn’t know about “other human groups” or “cold-water stress.” We only had our own experiences. When Mi-ja and I had dived off Vladivostok in winter, we didn’t see any people in the water with us apart from other haenyeo. We considered our ability a gift that allowed us to help our families.
“We’re looking for twenty volunteers,” he went on. “We would like ten haenyeo and ten nondivers.”
“What are they volunteering for?” Do-saeng asked.
“We’ll be testing women in and out of the water,” Dr. Park answered.
“We don’t enter the sea when the goddess of the wind is here,” Do-saeng said.
“You don’t enter the sea, or you don’t harvest?” he inquired. “We aren’t asking you to harvest anything. That’s why we came now—when you aren’t busy. If you aren’t harvesting, the goddess won’t be angry.”
But what did he know about our goddess or how strong she was? Still, he had a point. No one had ever said it was forbidden to enter the water during this time.
“We’ll be taking your temperatures,” he continued, so sure of himself. “We’ll—”
“Can I help?” Joon-lee chirped.
People on both sides laughed. Those who knew Joon-lee expected something like this from her, while the strangers clearly thought she was cute. She ran to her grandmother. Dr. Park squatted so he was face-to-face with her. “We’re studying the basal metabolic rate of the haenyeo compared to nondiving women. We’ll come in each of the four seasons. Is your mother a diver?” When she nodded, he continued. “We’re going to set up a lab on this beach. We’ll take women’s temperatures before and after they go in the water. We want to study their shiver index. We’re wondering if a breath-hold diver’s ability to withstand cold is genetic or a learned adaptation. We—”
Joon-lee turned and stared at me with her soot-black eyes. “Mother, you have to do this. Granny too! And you too, Big Sister.” She swung back to Dr. Park. “That’s three. Oh, and Kim Yang-jin will do it too, won’t you?” When my diving partner nodded, Joon-lee gave Dr. Park a resolute look. “I’ll help you find the others. We don’t have many households without haenyeo, but there’s a widow who grinds and sells millet, a woman who makes charcoal, and another who’s known for her weaving.” She cocked her head. “When do you want them to start?” And then she took in the other men’s faces. “Where are you going to put your lab?”
Lab. I didn’t know what that was. That’s how far my daughter had come already.
Finding volunteers was not easy, though. These were still the years of secrecy, and we had reasons to be cautious. On September 21, 1954—after seven years and six months—the last of the insurgents were caught or killed, and the shoot-on-sight order for Mount Halla was finally lifted. The 4.3 Incident—although how something that lasted more than seven years could qualify as an “incident” didn’t make sense to me—was officially over. We pieced together information in a variety of ways. What we learned was staggering. Three hundred villages had been burned or razed, forty thousand homes destroyed, and so many people killed that not one family on Jeju had escaped untouched. On the mainland, Koreans were told not to believe stories about the massacre. The people of Jeju had always been suspicious of outsiders. Now we were even more so. As a result, our island had become more closed off. It was as if Jeju had once again turned into an island of exiles, all of us wandering souls.
Reminders of what had happened were everywhere. The man who walked on crutches because his knee had been shattered by a pickax. The girl, with burns on most of her body, who grew to marriageable age but received no proposals. The young man who’d survived months of torture roamed the olles, his hair uncut, his face unshaven, his clothes uncleaned, and his eyes unfocused. We all suffered from memories. Nor could any of us forget the throat-choking smell of blood or the crows that had swarmed in great clouds over the dead. These things haunted us in our dreams and during every waking moment. But if someone was foolish enough to speak a single word of sadness or was caught shedding a tear over the death of a loved one, then he or she would be arrested.
The list of restrictions was long, but none were more terrifying for me than those that limited access to education. No matter how bad things got, I had to do my best to make sure Jun-bu’s dreams for our children became real. This meant that while the idea of total strangers poking and prodding me had no appeal, I agreed to participate—and made my older daughter and mother-in-law participate too—because Joon-lee was interested in the project, and those men might help her in some way I couldn’t conceive.
We were told to eat a light supper, wear our diving clothes under our land clothes, and report to the laboratory the next morning without having eaten breakfast. Wan-soon and Gu-sun picked up my mother-in-law, two daughters, and me. The six of us walked down to the beach, where two tents had been set up. Between my daughter’s efforts and the team’s inquiries, they’d managed to find ten haenyeo—including the Kang sisters and my diving partner, Yang-jin—and ten women who did not work in the sea.
Dr. Park introduced us to the others on his team: Dr. Lee, Dr. Bok, Dr. Jones, and so on. Then he told us, “You will begin the day with thirty minutes of rest.”
Do-saeng and I exchanged glances. Rest? What an idea. But that was exactly what happened. We were escorted into the first tent, where we lay down on cots. Joon-lee stayed at my side, but her eyes darted from cot to cot, table to table, man to man. Although I could understand their Korean words, much of the meaning was lost on me.
“I’m using a nine-liter Collins spirometer to measure oxygen and convert that to kilocalories to establish a basal metabolism rate as a percent deviation from the DuBois standard,” Dr. Lee intoned, speaking into a tape recorder.
It sounded like gibberish, but Joon-lee seemed to soak up every word and action.
The next step was conducted by Dr. Bok, who put a glass tube in my mouth. He reported that I had a normal temperature of 37 degrees Centigrade and 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Across the aisle, my older daughter giggled when one of the white doctors placed something on her chest that had tubes running up to his ears. I did not like that one bit, nor did I like the idea that he would do the same to me. I was about to take my girls and walk out of there when Dr. Park cleared his throat.
“Yesterday I told you something you must know already. You have a greater tolerance for hypothermia than any other humans on the planet. In Australia, aborigines walk naked, even in winter, but their temperatures rarely fall below thirty-five degrees Centigrade. Men and women who swim across wide channels lose a lot of body warmth, but even they rarely drop below thirty-four point four degrees Centigrade. Gaspé fishermen and British fish filleters spend their days with their hands immersed in cold salt water, but it is only their hands. And then there are Eskimos. Their temperatures stay within the normal range. We believe that’s because they have a diet high in protein, and they wear so many clothes.”
The way he spoke was strange, but his animated bearing was even more foreign. Still, I wasn’t a fool, and I suspected he was using his energetic manner to distract us from what the other doctors were doing to us. One of them put a band around my upper arm and squeezed a rubber ball, which caused the band to swell and press into my flesh. What happened next was so swift that none of us had the time to process it fully. Gu-ja had the same type of band around her arm, but the scientists didn’t like what they were seeing. “Her blood pressure is too high to qualify her to be in the study,” I overheard one of the men say. Before anyone could object, our collective’s chief was escorted from the tent.