Лиза Си - The Island of Sea Women

Mi-ja bowed very low, several times. With that acknowledgment, Mother set off. I was about to follow her when Mi-ja held me back.

“I want to show you something.” She pulled the book out from under her sleeve. Her eyes met mine. With two hands and a formality I’d only seen during ancestor worship, she offered it to me. “You can hold it if you want.” I wasn’t so sure I wanted to do that, but I took it anyway. It was a slim volume, bound in leather. “It’s all I have left of my father,” she said. “Open it.”

I did. The pages were made from rice paper. I assumed the writing was Japanese, but it could have been Korean. A couple of pages in the middle of the book stuck out unevenly. I turned to that section and discovered that they’d been torn out. That seemed disrespectful, but I noticed Mi-ja was smiling.

“Look what I’ve done,” she said, taking back the book. “Here is a rubbing I did of a carving we had in our apartment in Jeju City. This one I made of the ironwork hinges on Father’s coffin. I made this one the day Auntie Lee-ok picked me up. It’s the pattern of the floor in my old room. It was the only way to save my memories.”

The whole time I was trying to imagine what her life must have been like, living in the city, with a room of her own, surrounded by books.

“Auntie sold our things. She said no one in Hado wanted to see reminders of my father. She also said she would use the money to feed me and send me back to school. Now that I’m here…” She jutted her chin. “You don’t have a school for girls. Auntie had to know that. She thinks my father was a bad man, so she only gives me seaweed and kimchee to eat. My father’s money has gone to buy pigs and… I don’t know…” After a long pause, her darkness evaporated. “You and your mother are the nicest people I’ve met since coming here, and this is the best day I’ve had since Father died. Let us, you and me, make a memory of it. Of this place. So we will always remember today.”

Without waiting for me to agree, she tore a page from the book, placed it on one of the rocks at the entrance to our field, pulled out her lump of coal, and rubbed it on the paper. Rocks were nothing special to me. They were everywhere I looked. But when she put the rubbing in my hand, I saw the rough stone pattern of my birthplace, while the unintelligible words beneath the picture were part of a world I would never know or understand. Tiny pinholes where the coal and rock had punctured the paper seemed like the endless possibilities that the stars in the night sky promised. I felt like I’d been given something too special for me to keep, and I said so.

Mi-ja considered that, and then pursed her lips, gave a tiny nod, and tucked the page in the book with the others she’d made. “I’ll keep it,” she said, “but it’s our memory. No matter what happens, we’ll always know where to find it.”

When you’re seven, you can say you’ll be best friends forever. It rarely turns out that way. But Mi-ja and I were different. We grew closer with each passing season. Mi-ja’s aunt and uncle continued to treat her terribly. To them, she was like a slave or a servant. She slept in their granary—barely bigger than a meter in diameter—between the main house and the latrine, with its pigs and smells. I showed her how to do chores and taught her the songs for grinding millet, knitting horsehair hats, netting anchovies, gathering pig excrement for our fields, and plowing, planting, and pulling weeds, and she rewarded me with her imagination.

We have many sayings on Jeju Island. One of them is Wherever you are on Jeju, you can see Grandmother Seolmundae . But we also say, Grandmother Seolmundae watches over all of us. No matter where Mi-ja and I went—going to the fields, walking to the shore, running the few minutes between her neighborhood and my neighborhood within the larger confines of Hado—we could see her reaching for the sky. Her peak was covered with snow in winter. Chores were hardest then: hauling water in the bone-cold mornings, walking on ground white with frost or snow, wind so sharp it cut through our clothes as if we were wearing nothing.

In the first and second months, Mi-ja and I helped Mother weed our millet and rapeseed crops, because it’s a well-known fact that men’s knees are too stiff for this work, and they are shy around sickles and hoes. Jeju was known for its five grains—rice, barley, soybean, millet, and foxtail millet. Rice was for the New Year celebration, but only if Mother had saved enough money to buy it. Barley was for the rich, who lived in Jeju City and in the mid-mountain area. Millet was for the poor. It was the food that filled our stomachs, while we could extract oil from rapeseed, so both crops were extremely important to us.

That first winter, Mother also hired Mi-ja to work in the collective. “I’ll allow you to share the communal meal after the other haenyeo and I return from the sea,” Mother said. “Keep the fire hot and your mouth shut, and the others won’t bother you.” So Mi-ja entered the bulteok long before I did. She gathered firewood, kept the flames in the fire pit steady, and helped sort sea urchins, conch, and the agar-agar and kelp that the haenyeo brought to shore.

This did not sit well with Grandmother, who said, “No one can ever remove the stain of her father’s activities for the Japanese, which is why no one other than you will hire her to do chores as they might another orphan.”

But on this matter, Mother took a strong stand. “When I look at that girl,” she said, “I see someone who will always eke by on her wits and the hunger that drives her.”

In spring, azaleas beamed magenta, purple, and crimson even from afar on Grandmother Seolmundae’s flanks. Fields of rapeseed gleamed as yellow as the sun. We harvested our crop of grain, plowed the field by hand, and planted red beans and sweet potatoes. At the end of spring, every family across the island stripped the thatch off their roofs. Mi-ja’s aunt and uncle made her haul away the old thatch, bring in new thatch, and do the best she could to pass stones up to the men to weigh down the thatch and keep it in place. When she was done, she came to my house, where Mother allowed her to help me sort through our old thatch to search for insect larva, which Mother boiled for us to eat.

Summer brought the coolness of green to Grandmother Seolmundae’s slopes, but everything else was hot, humid, and rainy. Mother gave me my first tewak, which she’d made herself. I was so proud of it, and I didn’t mind sharing it with Mi-ja one bit. Since she’d lived in Jeju City, and without a mother’s wake to follow, she didn’t know how to swim. I took her to the tide pools where I’d played when I was three and four. We went on the very hottest days of summer to a shallow cove to splash and frolic with other Hado children. The Kang sisters were always there, and we loved to listen to them fight and make up. Yu-ri used to come with her brother, Jun-bu, who joined other boys his age to dive over the protective wall of rocks into the open and unprotected sea. We loved watching those boys. Especially Jun-bu. We wondered how someone so studious could laugh in such a carefree way.

Sometimes Mother and the other haenyeo returned to shore at midday to nurse their babies. They would watch us, calling out to tell us to kick harder or to take a deeper breath to build our lungs. But mostly the mothers didn’t have time to come to shore during their workday, and the afternoon air was filled with the sounds of babies yowling in hunger and fathers murmuring soothing, but useless, words, for only a mother has the milk. By the end of our second summer, Mi-ja was swimming well, and we were beginning to practice diving down a meter or so to hide something under a rock for the other one to find or to touch an anemone to watch it close in on itself.