We made offerings of rice cakes and rice wine to the goddesses and gods. Then it was time for fortune-telling. The old women who traveled from village to village to fulfill this purpose sat on mats. Min-lee and Wan-soon sought out the youngest fortune-teller. I approached a woman whose face was dark and wrinkled from the sun. She didn’t remember me, but I remembered her because my mother had always trusted the futures she foretold. I got on my knees, bowed, and then sat back on my heels. The old woman filled her palm with uncooked rice kernels and tossed them in the air. I watched as my destiny rained down. Some kernels fell back onto the old woman’s hand; others fell to the mat.
“Six grains will mean you’ll have good luck,” she said, quickly covering the back of her hand. “Eight, ten, and twelve are not as good but good enough. Four would be the worst number I could tell you. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
She removed the hand covering the kernels and counted. “Ten,” she said. “Not too bad, not too good.” With that, she flicked away the kernels, and they dropped through the spaces between the rocks around us.
I sighed. I would now make extra offerings and pray more. Others got bad readings. Some women cried at their prophecies; others laughed them off. Min-lee and Wan-soon both received sixes. Their fortune-teller asked them to swallow the kernels so they might carry their good luck.
Finally, under Shaman Kim’s watchful eyes, we wove miniature straw boats, each about a meter in length. We filled them with tributes and offerings, attached small sails, invited the goddesses and gods to board, and then sent the vessels out to sea. We tossed more rice wine and handfuls of millet and rice into the water. With that, spring officially arrived.
The day after the farewell rite, I started to cut sweet potatoes to mix with barley to make my children’s lunches appear more substantial when I remembered what Joon-lee had said about us looking poor. I opened an earthenware jar and dipped into my supply of salted anchovies to put on her barley. I expected her to thank me when she got home from school, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She ran in, opened her satchel, and pulled out a new book. The jacket showed a little girl wearing a ruffled skirt, apron, and ankle boots. Blond curls framed her face. She held an old man’s hand. Goats nibbled on grass. Behind them rose snowcapped mountains that seemed plentiful in number and awesome in height.
“She’s Heidi,” Joon-lee announced, “and I love her.”
Supplies of the book had been delivered to schools across the island. Why? We never learned, but every girl her age had received a copy. Now my daughter, who only days earlier had been fixated on learning to ride a bicycle and days before that had proclaimed her desire to become a scientist, became obsessed with Heidi. Wanting to encourage her, I asked her to read the story to me. Then Heidi, Clara, Peter, and Grandfather possessed me too. Next Do-saeng and Min-lee became consumed by the story. Min-lee got Wan-soon to read it. Then Wan-soon read the book to her mother. Soon houses across Hado were lit by oil lamps at night as daughters read the tale to their mothers and grandmothers. Everyone wanted to talk about the story, and we visited each other’s houses or gathered in the olle to discuss it.
“What do you suppose bread tastes like?” Wan-soon asked one afternoon.
Her mother answered, “When you go to Vladivostok for leaving-home water-work, you’ll have an opportunity to taste it. They have a lot of bakeries there.”
“What about goat’s milk?” Min-lee asked me. “Did you drink it when you went out for leaving-home water-work?”
“No, but I tasted ice cream once,” I answered, remembering licking cones on a street corner with Mi-ja and two Russian boys.
One person loved Clara’s grandmother. Another loved Heidi’s grandfather. Many of the baby-divers, whose thoughts were turning to weddings, adored Peter. Wan-soon even said she wanted him for her husband. Min-lee said she preferred the Doctor, because he was so kind. But again, no one was more bewitched by the story than Joon-lee. Her favorite character was Clara.
“Why would you choose her?” I asked. “She’s injured. She can’t help her family. She cries. She’s selfish.”
“But she’s healed by the mountains, the sky, the goats, and their milk!” After a pause, she stated, “I’m going to Switzerland one day.”
When I heard that, I knew I had to steer her in another direction. No matter what Do-saeng said, having three victims in our family—one of whom was a teacher—guaranteed that we were tainted by the guilt-by-association system. Joon-lee would never receive permission to go to the mainland, let alone Switzerland. Since she was still too young to understand all that, I asked the first thing that came to my mind. “How can you go to a fairy world?”
Joon-lee just laughed. “Mother, Switzerland is not a fairy world. It is not a land of goddesses either. I will leave Jeju just as Kim Mandeok did. And I’ll buy myself a bicycle.”
The Vast Unknowable Sea
Three months after the first visit, Dr. Park and his team returned, as promised. Then three months after that, at the end of August, they came again. For two weeks each visit, the same group of eighteen women—nine divers and nine nondivers—had light suppers, rested on cots in the mornings, and were tested. This time, though, we were driven by boat to the underwater canyon where Mi-ja and I had taken our first dive. The scientists selected the site for the very reason that my mother had chosen it: the geography allowed the nondivers to hover above the rocks that came nearly to the surface, while the divers could go down twenty meters into the coldness of the canyon. The nondivers still couldn’t last more than a few minutes, but with the warmer weather, we divers went back and forth for at least two and a half hours before returning to the boat. We learned that our temperatures didn’t drop as much as they did in winter, which seemed obvious to us. But now Dr. Park had the precise measurement he desired: 35.3 degrees Centigrade in water that was 26 degrees or 95.5 Fahrenheit in water that was almost 79 degrees. “Very impressive,” he said to us. “Not many people can function as well as you do when their temperatures fall so far below normal.”
The scientists added a new dimension: food. They came to our houses three times a day to measure everything before we put it in our mouths. They asked us the same question we often joked about in the bulteok. “Who should have more food—a man or a woman?” We knew the answer, but their tests proved it. A haenyeo not only needed 3,000 calories a day compared to a nondiving woman, who typically ate 2,000 calories a day, but also ate more than any man they tested in Hado. “We have not seen this magnitude of voluntary heat loss in any other human,” Dr. Park effused, “but look how you make up for it!” But he was studying us at a very different point in our lives. I remembered back to when Mi-ja and I were girls just learning to dive, later when we were in Vladivostok, and later still in the lean war years. We’d never had enough to eat, and we’d both been very thin.
Every woman—diver and nondiver—wanted to be hospitable. Each woman prepared her best dishes, so she could offer a meal to the scientist who came to visit. In my household, Do-saeng, Min-lee, and I pushed aside Kyung-soo, who usually did the cooking, so we could make the types of dishes we ate in the bulteok: grilled conch, steamed blue abalone, small crabs stir-fried with beans, or octopus on skewers. As the scientist of the day sat on our floor, eating, Joon-lee asked endless questions. What was it like in Seoul? What university did he attend? Was it better to be a research scientist or a medical doctor? Those men answered Joon-lee’s questions, but they watched her older sister whenever she crossed the room.