The Island of Sea Women

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The narrative alternates in time between 2008 — when an aging Young-sook sits on a beach sorting algae, fielding the incessant questions of onlookers (“Are they scholars, journalists or documentarians? Mi-ja and I talked and giggled, so Yu-ri would have the sense she was still a young girl with no worries. Last, we tied white kerchiefs over our hair to conserve body heat and because no one would wish for a loose tendril to get tangled in seaweed or caught on a rock. 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.

Still, despite the rowing and singing, I began to feel sick to my stomach and Mi-ja’s usually pink cheeks turned an ashen gray.Here, hers was just one of many loud voices, since the ears of all haenyeo are damaged over time by water pressure. We wended our way through the olle—one of thousands of stone-walled pathways that ran between houses and also gave us routes to crisscross the island. My wife just finished reading this book, 1/3 rd of the way in she was hoping that a certain man would die.

Yet they survive and as times change and their families grow, they learn that what they once had was something special, something that they alone could hold claim to, something the world and the sea made them become. Later in the novel, Young-sook will reflect on all the times Mi-ja showed she was the daughter of a collaborator. We each had a bitchang to use for prying creatures from their homes and a pronged hoe to pick between the cracks and embed in the sand or on a crag to help pull us from place to place. With no breathing equipment, the deep-sea diving Korean women (*Haenyos*), hold their breath for two minutes, diving 65 feet deep to harvest seafood: abalone, shellfish, sea urchins, octopus, conches, sea slugs, sea cucumbers, oysters, and squid.The novel focuses on the deep friendship between Young-Sook and Mi-Ja, a friendship which will be broken asunder when civil war breaks out and Korea enters the darkest period of its history. Later, on page 314, Clara recites a proverb attributed Buddha: To understand everything is to forgive.

Thank you to Scribner and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. When reading a historical fiction book, I need to trust that the author has his or her facts correct and doesn’t play loose with the truth. Her hands, though gnarled from work and deeply creased from years of exposure to the sun, are agile. The sons were so overcome that they were instantly petrified into five hundred stone outcroppings, which you can see even today. Two girls, Mi-ja and Young-sook, are the best of friends waiting for their time to be old enough to join the diving collective.Separated when they are married, they try to maintain their friendship until a tragic event drives them apart.

She stretches out her hand and shows Young-sook a black-and-white photograph of a girl dressed in the white bathing costume of the past. The most experienced among us can go as deep as we want, while the baby-divers can pick through those spots close to the surface.

I’d always heard she could go down twenty and sometimes more meters on a single breath, but already my lungs burned and my heart thumped in my ears. Yu-ri and her father contributed to the family’s income, although they still didn’t earn as much as Do-saeng, while my mother had to raise all the money to send my brothers to school without help from my father.