The next morning, Yu-ri woke up. She was not the same girl, though. She could smile, but she could not speak. She could move, but she limped and sometimes jerked her arms. Both sets of parents agreed that a marriage was no longer possible. Mi-ja and I hung on to my secret, which made us closer than ever. In the weeks that followed, after we’d worked in the dry or wet fields, we visited Yu-ri. Mi-ja and I talked and giggled, so Yu-ri would have the sense she was still a young girl with no worries. Sometimes Jun-bu joined us and read aloud the essays he was writing for school or tried to tease us as he had once teased his sister. On other days, Mi-ja and I helped Do-saeng wash Yu-ri’s body and hair. And when the weather grew warm, Mi-ja and I took her to the shore, where we sat in the shallows to let the smallest wavelets lap against her. We told stories, we patted her face, we let her know we were there, and she would reward us with a beautiful smile.
Every time I visited, Do-saeng bowed and expressed her gratitude. “If not for you, my daughter would have died,” she’d say as she poured buckwheat tea or presented me with a dish of salted smelt, but her eyes sent a darker message. She may not have known exactly what part I’d played in Yu-ri’s accident, but she certainly suspected that it was more than I’d let on, either to her or to my mother.
How Do We Fall in Love?
(before)
When Mi-ja and I first met, we were such opposites. I was like the rocks of our island—jagged, rough, all edges, but useful and no-nonsense. She was like clouds—drifting, melting, impossible to catch or fully understand. Even though we both became haenyeo, I would forever be of the earth in the sense that I was practical and concerned always for my family. Mi-ja was more like the sea—ever changing and occasionally tempestuous. I was tied closely to my mother and longed to follow her into a life in the sea; Mi-ja had no memory of her mother but missed her father terribly. I had the love and respect of my brothers and sister, while Mi-ja had only an aunt and uncle who didn’t care for her. I worked hard, hauling water, carrying my baby brother on my back, doing farmwork, and gathering dried manure for heating, but Mi-ja worked harder still, completing chores for her aunt and uncle, in our fields, and for the collective. I could not read or write my name. Mi-ja could write her name and still remembered a few Japanese characters. And, as steady as I appeared to others, inside I was often fearful; as evanescent as she seemed from the outside, her inner fortitude seemed to be as strong as bamboo—able to withstand almost any force or weight. On Jeju, we had a saying: If there is happiness at age three, it will last until you reach eighty. I believed this to be true. Mi-ja, on the other hand, often said, “I was born on a day with no sun and no moon. Did my parents know how hard my life would be?” We could not have been more different, and yet we were very close.
How do we fall in love? The first time you see your husband’s face on your engagement day, you don’t know how your emotions will evolve over time. The moment your baby is wrenched from your insides, love may not be what you feel. Love must be nurtured and tended to in the same way we haenyeo care for our fields under the sea. With arranged marriages, many wives fall in love with their husbands quickly. For some, it can take years. And for others, decades of marriage will always be filled with loneliness and sadness, because we never grow the connection to that person with whom we share our sleeping mat. As for children, every woman knows the fears and sorrows. Joy is a delicious luxury that we experience most cautiously, for tragedy conceals itself around every corner. How different it is with friendship. No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son; we tie ourselves together through moments. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one else ever will.
I remember clearly the first day I saw Mi-ja. I had recently turned seven. I lived a happy, if simple, life. We were poor, no better or worse than our neighbors. We had our wet fields in the ocean and our dry fields on land. We also had a small home garden next to our kitchen, where Mother grew white radishes, cucumbers, sesame leaf, garlic, onions, and peppers. While the vastness of the sea would suggest endless bounty, it was an unreliable source of food. The island had no natural harbors. The seas were rough. Our Korean kings had long barred our men from fishing in any significant way, and now, under Japanese rule, fishermen were allowed only rafts, with a single seat and a sail. (Or they could work on the large Japanese fishing vessels or in their canneries.) Many Jeju men were lost to rough tides, high waves, and strong winds. Long ago, Jeju’s men had been divers, but the Korean monarchs imposed such a high tax on their work that it was eventually given to women, who were taxed at a lower rate. It turned out that women had an aptitude for the work. Women, like my mother, were patient. Women understood suffering. Women had more fat, so they were better suited to endure the cold. Still, it was hard for Mother—or any woman—to make a meal hearty enough for a large family from sea urchin roe, turban shell, sea snails, and abalone alone. Besides, those creatures were not for us. They were for the wealthy—or, at least, wealthier—people on the mainland, or in Japan, China, and the USSR. All this meant that for most of the year my family lived on the millet, cabbage, and sweet potatoes that we grew in our dry field, while the money Mother earned from diving paid for clothes, house repairs, and anything else that required cash.
It was a wife’s social and familial duty to birth a son, who would lengthen her husband’s lineage. But every family in the seaside villages of Jeju was most grateful for the birth of a daughter, because she would always be a provider. In this regard, our family was not so fortunate, because we only had four females in our household: Grandmother, Mother, me, and Little Sister, who, back then, was only eleven months old and too young to help. Still, one day, she would work with me to help our parents pay their debts, chip in to build a better home for their old age, and possibly even contribute to sending our brothers to school.
On the summer day eight years ago when I first met Mi-ja, Father stayed home, as he usually did, to take care of my siblings. Mother and I set out to our dry field to weed. She looked like a misshapen melon. Her stomach bulged with what would soon be my third brother, while her back was bent under the weight of a basket stuffed with tools and fertilizer. I carried a basket filled with drinking water and lunch. Together we walked through the olles. In the village, the stone olles around houses were high enough to prevent neighbors from peeking inside. Once outside the village, the olles were about waist-high. Each plot of land was also surrounded by stone walls, which had less to do with limning a family’s property than with blocking the relentless wind, which could snap long-stemmed crops in two. No matter what their use, the olles were made from volcanic rocks so large they must have required at least two of our ancestors to put each one in place.
Just as we reached our land, Mother stopped so abruptly that I bumped into her. I feared we’d stumbled upon Japanese soldiers, but then she yelled, “You! There! What are you doing?”