The Island of Sea Women

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-10

Chapters 11-16

Chapters 17-19

Chapters 20-23

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Symbols & Motifs

Charcoal Rubbings

Initially, Mi-ja strikes upon the idea of making charcoal rubbings as a way to maintain her connection to her father after his death. The book she uses is one of his reference manuals from work and the words it contains are themselves meaningless to the child. However, Mi-ja is able to take the pages and transform them into art by commemorating significant moments in her life. Once she becomes friends with Young-sook, she transfers her affection from her father to her friend by revealing the book and its magical memories. The two girls make a rubbing of the symbol on the side of their fishing boat to memorialize their induction into the world of the haenyeo.

Later shared memories are added over the years. Even after the friendship has ended, Young-sook is very aware of the location of the book. She finds it in Mi-ja’s abandoned house almost immediately. Years later, Joon-lee reclaims the book to return it to Mi-ja. While Young-sook resents what she sees as an act of betrayal on the part of her daughter, the charcoal rubbings come back to her in unexpected ways.

Since Young-sook refuses to open Mi-ja’s letters, she is unaware that many of them contain the charcoal rubbings that the two friends made together. Young-sook’s illiteracy would make it hard for her to read Mi-ja’s correspondence, even if the government censors hadn’t already chopped it to pieces. However, the images contained in the rubbings can’t be censored, and they carry a more powerful emotional resonance between the friends than any words could ever do. At the end of the novel, it is the sight of those charcoal rubbings that reminds Young-sook what her anger has cost her.

Dark Mother Ocean

The ocean is omnipresent in the pages of The Island of Sea Women. It shapes the culture of the female divers and serves many purposes for the haenyeo. As Young-sook says, “She considers the sea to be her bank. Even if she didn’t have checks or credit cards, she could make money underwater. She’d always felt healthiest when she dove too, always felt healed in the water” (76). After her own mother dies, Young-sook’s grandmother advises her to think of the ocean as her mother, only better because it can never leave her.

As benevolent as the ocean appears to be, it also has a dark side. There are multiple dangers lurking in its depths, and it can take life as easily as it can nourish. Young-sook learns this lesson many times over. Yu-ri is brain-damaged by a diving accident. Young-sook’s mother drowns, as does the inexperienced Wan-soon many years later.

Despite Young-sook’s preference for being in the water, it takes a toll on her own physical health. She herself nearly drowns when she goes beyond her depth as an octogenarian diver. The doctor in the emergency room lists a catalog of ills associated with the haenyeo breathing technique and the depths to which these divers swim on a single breath. Young-sook admits to various aches and pains all caused by her diving equipment or the risks she takes to collect a catch. The sea is not always kind.

Young-sook expresses her own ambivalence about the ocean after her mother’s death when she says, “You can love or hate the sea, but it will always be there. Forever. The sea has been the center of her life. It has nurtured her and stolen from her, but it has never left” (79).

Breath of Life and Death

The novel takes pains to point out the dual nature of the ocean, and it does the same with the concept of breathing. A breath can bestow life, or it can kill. The motif of breathing might be expected to recur frequently in a story about diving underwater. Someone who engages in this type of work needs to know how to control the breath. The haenyeo have a special name for the outflow and intake of breath when a diver breaches the surface after a lengthy stint underwater. It is called the sumbisori, and it is unique to each individual diver.

A diver’s ability to hold a sustained breath is a prized skill that develops with time. Young-sook brags that she can dive thirty meters on a single breath. Her mother could hold her breath for three minutes before surfacing. However, the haenyeo breathing technique is criticized as dangerous by modern medicine, thereby emphasizing the dual nature of breath. Some breaths give life, and some can kill.

When Young-sook’s mother is struggling to free herself underwater, she is forced to breathe and take in seawater, which ultimately kills her. Young-sook herself very nearly dies when she blacks out underwater from lack of oxygen to the brain.

The best example of destructive breath occurs during the Bukchon Massacre. After Young-sook witnesses the devastating sight of her husband, sister-in-law, and son all being murdered, she prays for an underwater breath that will kill her. Instead, she receives the breath of life. She describes it this way:

I stopped breathing, holding in air longer than could be possible, as if I were in the deepest part of the sea. When I couldn’t hold it any longer, I sucked in not the quick death of seawater but instead unforgiving, unrelenting, life-giving air (232).