A breath,
a breath,
a breath…
Acknowledgments
I would not have been able to write The Island of Sea Women without the help of three extraordinary women: Dr. Anne Hilty, Brenda Paik Sunoo, and Jenie Hahn. I tracked down Anne Hilty, Jeju’s official ambassador of the haenyeo, through her numerous articles in The Jeju Weekly, National Geographic Traveller, and other magazines, as well as her book Jeju Haenyeo: Stewards of the Sea. Beyond her haenyeo expertise, she’s also written extensively about Jeju’s geography, shamans, goddesses, Kim Mandeok, food, the April 3 Incident, and death and burial rituals. We had a lively e-mail correspondence and Skype chats in which she answered every question I threw her way. She helped put together my travel itinerary to Jeju, arranged interviews, and introduced me to numerous people who proved to be extremely helpfuclass="underline" Governor Won Hee-ryung, who gave me a warm welcome to the island; Grand Shaman Kim Yoon-su, whom I visited at the Chilmeoridang shamanistic center; Shaman Suh Sun-sil, who shared her experiences with me in her own home; Song Jung-hee, the publisher of The Jeju Weekly; Kim Jeyon, Jeju government’s international relations coordinator; Professor Lee Byung-gul, director of the Jeju Sea Grant Center; Dr. Choa Hye-gyong, who early on headed a team to study the haenyeo for the Jeju Development Institute and shared with me her recordings and translations of haenyeo songs; Grace Kim, for her translation duties; Kim Hyeryen, who arranged for me to stay at her niece’s traditional house in Hado; and Marsha Bogolin, the manager of a guesthouse in the mid-mountain area.
Dr. Hilty also sent me The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report, which outlines the conclusions of the National Committee for the Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju April 3 Incident. From this 755-page document, the result of one of the lengthiest human rights investigations in the world, I garnered details given by survivors and others on both sides of the conflict, as well as from declassified documents provided by the U.S. National Archives and various U.S. and Korean military branches. The report gave me first-person descriptions of the events at the March 1 demonstration, the shooting of the young woman in Bukchon, and how events played out in that village, including the account of an ambulance driver who overheard the plans of what would happen that day. It also provided me with the texts of posters, leaflets, radio broadcasts, speeches, and rallying cries.
Brenda Paik Sunoo, the author of Moon Tides: Jeju Island Grannies of the Sea, is a bighearted woman. She arranged for me to stay in her building in the seaside village of Gwakji. She introduced me to Yang Soonja, a fashion designer who walked me through the persimmon-dyeing process; Cho Oksun, a retired haenyeo and neighbor; Kim Jong Ho, a poet, who shared his memories of being a boy during the April 3 Incident; and Kang Mikyoung, the daughter of a haenyeo and expert on domestic abuse on Jeju. Brenda and I also spent wonderful hours with Youngsook Han, a scholar, who translated for me during an especially moving interview with her haenyeo mother, Kang Hee-jeong, who spoke about the first time she saw electric lights, the Japanese occupation, how she became a haenyeo, and what it meant to send her daughter to college. (I’ll be thanking other haenyeo shortly, but let me say here that together their stories and memories helped me create the bantering conversations in the bulteok about the nature of men, the benefits of widowhood, and so much more.) Along the way, I had several lively discussions with many of these women about the influence of Heidi in their lives and on the island. Last, Brenda and I had a lot of fun with Yim Kwangsook, a nurse visiting from the United States, who translated during various interviews. I won’t forget our visit to the traditional Korean bathhouse any time soon.
I met Jenie Hahn at Jeju National University. She translated the oral histories of several haenyeo, including those of Ko Chun-geum, Kim Chunman, Kwon Youngae, and Jeong Wolseon, in which they spoke of the day-to-day practicalities of recruitment, ferries, food, and dormitory life for itinerant work in other countries. Jenie also sent me A Guide to Jeju Spoken in the Language of Jeju and English by Moon Soon-deok and Oh Seung-hun—which proved to be invaluable with its explanations of food, traditions, and aphorisms—and her translation of Kim Sooni’s “The Goddesses, the Myths and Jeju Island.” When I needed to confirm facts, Jenie graciously checked with Moon Soon-deok (Jeju Development Institute) and Kang Keonyong (a senior researcher at the Haenyeo Museum) for me.
Allow me to gently shift my thanks to more general categories: the island, cultural traditions, haenyeo, and the April 3 Incident. Jeju is thirty times the size of Manhattan. This lush and beautiful island is home to 25 percent of the entire plant species of Korea. It’s the native home of what we commonly call the Christmas tree. The first foreigners believed to visit the island were Hendrick Hamel and his crew of Dutch sailors, who were shipwrecked on Jeju in 1653. They were imprisoned in Seoul, but a few of them, including Hamel, escaped thirteen years later. Once he returned to the Netherlands, he wrote a memoir chronicling his travails, thereby introducing Jeju Island to the West. Hundreds of years later, in 1901, Siegfried Genthe, a German climber, sought and received permission to be the first Westerner to scale Mount Halla. He also wrote of his adventures, and even today Mount Halla is used by many mountaineers as practice for climbing Mount Everest. Jumping to the 1970s, David J. Nemeth did his Peace Corps stint on Jeju. He kept a diary, which was eventually published as Jeju Island Rambling. The island also became the subject of his dissertation, The Architecture of Ideology: Neo-Confucianism Imprinting on Cheju Island, Korea, and later he wrote Rediscovering Hallasan: Jeju Island’s Traditional Landscapes of Sincerity, Mysticism and Adventure. For other general information about Jeju, I relied on Stories of Jeju, published by the Jeju Development Institute. The Kim Mandeok Memorial Hall gave me insights into the legacy of this early female philanthropist. The exhibits at Jeju Hangil Memorial Hall provided details about the island’s anti-Japanese movements. The Folk Village offered a good sense of the varieties of architecture and their purposes on Jeju, while the Jeju Stone Cultural Park was a great place to learn about the many uses of this natural resource.
As stated throughout the novel, Jeju is quite different from the rest of Korea. The language, for example, is unlike standard Korean. The Jeju dialect is heavily nasal, and many words end abruptly, so they won’t disappear into the island’s rough breezes. It’s completely free from those elements of Korean that stratify tenses and grammar, telling people how to address everyone from the emperor down to a chicken. On Jeju, people greet each other as equals. The matrifocal nature of the island is manifested in its being home to ten thousand spirits and deities, with the vast majority of them goddesses. Goddesses and Strong Jeju Women, by Soonie Kim and Anne Hilty, and translated by Youngsook Han, tells the wonderful myths and stories of several of those goddesses. The writings of Chin Song-gi and Gui-Young Hong were also useful as I tried to re-create Jeju’s rich landscape of traditions. Every person I met graciously invited me to sample Jeju’s extraordinary and delicious cuisine. For a more scholarly look at food, however, I turned to Top 20 Jeju Local Dishes for Your Life and Health, published by Jeju National University’s Department of Food Science and Nutrition, and once again translated by Jenie Hahn.