The Island of Sea Women

Lisa See

Simon & Schuster

Otago Daily Times, June 15th 2019

Before picking up Lisa See’s latest historical novel, I had never heard of the South Korean island of Jeju. The moment I finished, I started hunting for more information about this fascinating place and the female free-divers, haenyeo, on whom its economy had depended for centuries. With its ceaseless winds, stony soils and female-skewed demography, this isolated volcanic island developed a matrifocal social structure hundreds of years before the birth of feminism in the West.Although political power and property rights passed through the male lineage, these women spent were the primary income earners and spent their days diving for in the treacherous waters of the Korean Straights while their husbands stayed at home to care for the children.

They also played a crucial role in maintaining Jeju’s unique social, cultural and religious traditions in the face of colonial governance by first Japan and then mainland South Korea, impositions that divided Islanders between ‘collaborators’ and those determined to retain Jeju’s independence. These tensions reached their height in the aftermath of WWII, when the US-backed South Korean government conducted a 7 ¹/₂ year campaign to root out ‘communist sympathisers’ that saw over 14,000 islanders executed and 300 villages razed to the ground. Euphemistically known as the 4.3 Incident, discussion of the massacre was legally prohibited for over 50 years, and the mutual mistrust between those who worked with and against the Mainland forces lasted for decades.

Recent social and political changes, including the introduction of female education in the 1970s, have seen the numbers of haenyeo fall to the point where the tradition is in danger of disappearing altogether and, with it, the collective memory of generations. Lisa See is one of several artists and researchers attempting to capture this history, distilling a wealth of written and oral sources into a story of a single life and a shattered friendship. The result is a powerful, first-person narrative that carries the reader into the heart of the island’s fascinating and troubled history.

The story opens in 2008 when an elderly haenyeo, Kim Young-Sook, is approached by relatives of her childhood friend, Han Mi-Ja. The visitors who have come for the opening of a peace park dedicated to the victims of the 4.3 Incident want to re-establish contact between the families, who parted on bitter grounds many years before. Although Young-Sook refuses to speak with them, their request sparks long-buried memories of their friendship and the events that led to their estrangement, a narrative that forms the core of the novel.

As children, the two girls were inseparable: joining the same diving collective, diving off Jeju in the summers, travelling for “leaving-home water-work” in Vladivostok in the winters, and sharing all their hopes and dreams. Marriage brings temporary separation, with Ma-ji moving to Jeju City with her mainland-born husband while Young-Sook is betrothed to a local village man. Ma-Ji returns when she can, and the pair joke that their eldest children, born within days of one another, will one day marry and formally unite their two families.  Then, shortly after the start of the 4.3 Incident, government soldiers arrive and arrest the entire village. Young-Sook begs Ma-Ji, whose husband works for the government, to save her son, but she refuses, a betrayal whose tragic consequences Young-Sook vows never to forgive.  Now, decades later, she wonders whether she has misjudged her old friend.

Despite occasional lapses in tone (would an intelligent but illiterate woman use a word such as ‘aphorism’?), there is something here for every reader. Young-Sook’s narrative is a rich fusion of personal and historical detail that covers everything from the strict hierarchy of the diving collective to complaints about the uselessness of men, from shamanistic ritual to marital abuse, from Young-Sook’s complicated relationship with the sea to an island-wide obsession with Heidi. It also raises difficult questions about US culpability in the 4.3 Incident, and the need for and nature of forgiveness. Most importantly, The Island of Sea Women celebrates the haenyeo themselves; tanned, ‘immodest’, loud, and unwilling to submit to the authority of men, their extraordinary physical and psychological strength shaped Jeju for centuries. Thanks work like this, they may finally get the recognition they deserve.