I heard Min-lee call, “Mother! Granny!”
Do-saeng and I ran outside.
“Look who I found in the olle,” Min-lee said. She carried her sister’s suitcase in one hand and a basket in the other. Next to her was my younger daughter, who looked completely different than when I’d waved goodbye to her on the dock nine months ago. That day Joon-lee had worn a skirt that came midcalf and a long-sleeved blouse—both made from persimmon cloth. Her hair had hung down in two braids. Now she wore a sleeveless dress with a hem many centimeters above her knees. She’d cut her hair in such a way that her new bangs hid her eyebrows. The rest of her hair had grown several inches and it swung loose and straight almost to her waist. Her twin four-year-old nephews held her hands. Her smile was big. She did not have a big butt. I’d been wrong about that, for which we were all thankful.
“No, Mother, I can’t go with you to the sea,” Joon-lee told me two weeks later, when the next diving cycle arrived.
“Don’t worry about the law—”
“I’m not worried about that. I can’t go, because I have to study.”
“Can’t I even get you into the sea to cool off?”
“Maybe later,” she said. “I need to finish this chapter.”
Maybe later. I already knew what that meant. Never. It was always the same two excuses. Either she had to study, or she needed to write letters.
This was the longest she’d been home since she was twelve, and it wasn’t going well. I loved my daughter, but she couldn’t stop complaining. She didn’t like to go in the ocean, because she didn’t have a shower to rinse the salt from her skin. She didn’t like to wash her hair in the bathing area, because her conditioner didn’t work well with salt water. She was unaccustomed to chores and didn’t get up early to help me or her grandmother haul water or gather firewood, but she would go by herself to the well to bring back a bucket or two of water to wash her hair. (I had her do it behind the little house so our neighbors wouldn’t see how wasteful she was.) She saved her worst complaints for the latrine: “It stinks! The pigs are groveling around right under me. And the bugs!”
We still had another two and a half months to go before she returned to Seoul.
“Tell me about the book,” I said, trying to find a way to connect. “Remember when you read Heidi to me. Maybe you could read this one—”
She looked at me with annoyance that turned to sadness. “Mother, you wouldn’t understand it. I’m trying to read ahead for the sociology class I’m taking next semester.”
Sociology. It wasn’t the first time I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“All right,” I said, turning away. “I’m sorry. I won’t bother you again.”
“Oh, Mother, don’t take it that way.” She put the book down, crossed the room, and put her arms around me. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”
She stared into my face, and I was taken aback, as I always was, by how much her delicate features reminded me of her father. I smoothed tendrils of hair behind her ears.
“You’re a good girl,” I said. “And you make me proud. Go back to your studying.”
But inside, I hurt. I thought of her like seafoam—drifting farther and farther from me—and I couldn’t figure out how to change its course.
Gu-ja, of all people, told me what sociology was. “It’s the study of how people get along. Gu-sun and I have a second cousin who does that work in Jeju City.”
That the Kang sisters had an educated relative in the city surprised me, but this also told me that I needed to adapt better to the changing conditions around me as I did, without thinking, to those in the sea.
“Do you mean how friends or family get along?” I asked.
“I suppose,” she answered, “but I think it’s more like what happens in our bulteok.”
For days I mulled over what Gu-ja had told me. Gradually an idea began to form in my mind. When the second diving period of summer arrived, I invited Joon-lee to come to the bulteok with her grandmother and me. “Not to go in the sea,” I explained, “but to learn about haenyeo society.” I was thrilled when she said yes.
Once in the bulteok, Joon-lee sat quietly, listening to the other divers and me as we changed clothes. “Is there food on this beach?” I asked the collective. As the typical boasting answers flew at me—“More food than rocks in my fields, if I had any fields” and “More food than the liters of gasoline it would take to fill my car, if I had a car”—she jotted them down in a notebook. When Do-saeng and her friends went to the beach to collect the algae that had washed ashore, Joon-lee joined me and the other haenyeo on the back of the truck to the dock. She hadn’t tied up her hair, and it blew here, there, and everywhere. Even as she waited on the boat while we dove, she didn’t properly cover her hair. Hours later, during our return to shore, she asked questions about what we were doing, but they only made me look like a bad mother.
“Haven’t you taught her anything about diving?” Gu-ja asked me.
When I let the years scroll across my mind, I could see I’d tried, but it hadn’t taken. As a young girl, Joon-lee had never been interested in taking the tewak I’d given her into the sea. She’d never borrowed my big eyes, nor had she asked me to make her a set of water clothes. When she turned fifteen, she was already living in Jeju City, so I couldn’t train her for sea work as my mother had trained me. I couldn’t help but be embarrassed in front of the collective, but my daughter came to my defense.
“Don’t tease your chief,” she said lightly. “She’s worked hard to give me this life. You’ve done the same for you daughters too, right?”
They had, but of course none of those girls had done as well as Joon-lee.
Once in the bulteok, we did as we usually did: warmed ourselves by the fire, cooked a meal, and talked about problems in our families. Joon-lee blossomed in front of me, asking all sorts of questions about our matrifocal society. This was the first time any of us had heard this label—a culture focused on women—and it intrigued us.
“You make the decisions in your households,” she explained. “You make money. You have a good life—”
Gu-ja waved off the idea. “We think of ourselves as being independent and strong, but all you have to do is listen to our songs to know our days are hard. We sing about the difficulties of living under a mother-in-law, the sadness of being separated from our children, and lament how difficult this existence is.”
“My sister’s right,” Gu-sun said. “It’s better to be born a cow than a woman. No matter how stupid or lazy a man is, he has the better hand. He doesn’t have to supervise the family. He doesn’t have to wash clothes, manage the household, look after the elders, or see that the children have food to eat and mats to sleep on. He doesn’t have to do hard physical work in the wet or dry fields. His only responsibilities are to take care of babies and do a little cooking.”
“In other places, he would be called a wife,” Joon-lee said.
This made us laugh.
“So if you were a man,” she prompted, “how would your life be different?”
From my youngest days as a baby-diver, conversation in the bulteok had often centered on men, husbands, and sons. I could remember my mother leading a group as they discussed whether it was better to live as a man or a woman, but my daughter’s question sent the haenyeo in my collective in new directions.