The Island of Sea Women

Young-sook recalls her first day as a diver in 1938. Her mother is the head of the local diver’s collective, and the girl wants to make her mother proud. Among the diving culture, the men stay home and take care of the children while the women go to sea. Young-sook, her mother, and grandmother meet up with Mi-ja. Young-sook and Mi-ja are both fifteen and will make their debuts as baby divers that day. The group walk to the beach shelter where they plan the day’s diving strategy.

The collective consists of thirty women ranging in age from elderly to teenagers. They all sit in their shelter according to rank, and all obey their elected leader, Young-sook’s mother. A chatterbox named Yu-ri quizzes Mi-ja about her outcast status. Mi-ja’s mother died in childbirth, and her father was branded as a Japanese collaborator. Young-sook’s mother befriended the girl when nobody else would and allowed her to join the diving collective.

All the divers change into their water gear and climb into a rowboat to head out to the designated dive point for the day. Young-sook frets about her breathing and the sound, called sumbisori, that all divers make when they breach the surface to draw in air. Before they board, Mi-ja takes a book out of her bag and uses a piece of charcoal to rub the boat’s emblem onto a page. This will memorialize the day for the girls. Young-sook says, “We’d been commemorating our favorite moments and places this way for years. It wasn’t our best rubbing, but with it we’d remember today forever” (21).

The morning’s dive proves uneventful until everyone is called back to the boat. Yu-ri tells Young-sook that she spied something big underwater that might be a profitable catch. She convinces Young-sook to dive back with her. The catch turns out to be an octopus, and it grabs hold of Yu-ri, nearly drowning her. The rest of the collective dives in to provide assistance. After they drag Yu-ri back into the boat, they can’t revive her. Once they get her back home, she remains comatose for days. Eventually, the village healer, Shaman Kim, is called to perform a ritual, but the girl doesn’t wake up. Her mother, Do-saeng, is inconsolable. A week later, the shaman tries again. This time, Yu-ri awakens, but she has been brain-damaged and is not the same person she was before.

Young-sook recalls how she first met Mi-ja. She is seven at the time, and Mi-ja is caught trying to steal food from the Kim family’s meager garden plot. Young-sook’s mother takes pity on Mi-ja, who is being raised by her hard-hearted aunt and uncle. The girl is allowed to help with the gardening and share in the food. This is also the day that Mi-ja shows Young-sook the book with all her charcoal rubbings.

That same year, Young-sook’s mother hires Mi-ja to work in the diving collective even though other members are suspicious of the daughter of a Japanese collaborator. Ever since Japan took over Korea, there have been bitter feelings by the occupants. When the girls turn nine, there is an island-wide anti-Japanese demonstration. The female divers, in particular, feel a sense of discrimination because the Japanese take such a large percentage of their daily catch. Young-sook, her mother, and Mi-ja all attend the protest. The other villagers develop a more favorable impression of Mi-ja when they see her anti-Japanese sentiment. Months after the rally, the Japanese begin to retaliate. They jail several of the protest leaders. Young-sook’s family garden is raided by soldiers while her mother and Mi-ja are both beaten. After that, Young-sook’s mother stops meddling in politics.

By the time the girls are twelve, their diving and sea-harvesting skills have improved. Young-sook’s mother encourages her daughter to try to catch an abalone. These are tricky to harvest because they anchor themselves to rocky underwater surfaces. If startled, they can clamp their shells shut and trap a diver’s leather wrist strap, causing her to drown. Young-sook dives with her mother and deftly captures one of the mollusks. She returns to the surface to place her prize in the boat when she realizes that her mother is still underwater. Young-sook dives again and finds her mother’s knife has fallen to the seabed, and her wrist strap is pinned in an abalone shell. She has been underwater much longer than her daughter and is nearly out of air. Despite Young-sook’s desperate attempts to cut her mother free, the diving chief dies.

The entire village goes into mourning as the shaman presides over a lengthy series of rituals to properly honor the spirit of the deceased. Young-sook says sadly, “They say, When the hen cries, the household will collapse. But we don’t have a saying for what happens when the hen dies” (72). Since Jeju women run community and family affairs, Young-sook’s father is incapable of leading the family. That task will fall to Young-sook as the eldest daughter. The dive team elects Do-saeng as its new leader.