I’m not particularly familiar with Korean history and geography, although more so than I was when I read Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, but I have heard of Jeju Island, off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, as a tourist destination. I pictured it as a small, sun-soaked island with beautiful beaches and blue seas. Reading The Island of Sea Women transformed my perception of Jeju. It also made me aware of the strategic importance Jeju Island has held through history as a “stepping stone”, as the author puts it, to other major states, including China, Japan, the USSR. The author, Lisa See, is American with Chinese roots (among others) and has written a number of historical novels based in East Asia and Los Angeles’ Chinatown where she grew up.

The Island of Sea Women revolves around the friendship-sisterhood of two women, Young-sook and Mi-ja, who grew up together in Hado on Jeju Island. Mi-ja is an orphaned daughter of a Japanese collaborator who is informally adopted by Young-sook’s mother despite the stigma attached to her and together the two girls train with their village collective of haenyeo (해녀), women divers who harvest sea creatures for food and to sell, to fulfill their eventual roles as breadwinners of their families. The story is told from the perspective of Young-sook and takes the reader through the Japanese occupation of Korea, WWII and the replacement of the Japanese by the Americans, the Korean War and its aftermath, ending in the modern day with Young-sook as an older woman. Of course, as with any good historical novel, we see all of these events through the very intimate impact that they had on the characters in the story. Also with many historical novels, there is an extensive amount of violence, pain and suffering, and death all wrapped up in one very difficult decision after another. One of the threads that carries through this story is the way these decisions affect relationships, cause misunderstandings and batter a person’s heart until it grows hard. As I read, I also found myself going through these emotions, not always willing to consider things from other perspectives.

I recently came across a map of the world that showed all the countries where the USA has intervened, either directly or indirectly, in the democratic process (linked below). I was reminded of that map as I read Lisa See’s portrayal of the transition Korea went through after the fall of the Japanese Empire following World War II. The Korean Peninsula was divided into the two parts we know today with each part handed over to a different nation to “assist” the transition process: the North to the USSR, the South to the USA. Popular resistance to this division is clearly represented in the views of the characters on the island who neither favoured Communism nor American “democracy”, but just wanted to govern themselves. The impact of artificial polarisation so often used in political manipulation is demonstrated very clearly in this story when some of the Jeju people rise against a new occupation of their land and are labelled as “Reds” by the authorities, with the Americans watching in silence. Of course, this novel is just one person’s telling of events, but it offers valuable insight into the way such labels are used by different powers to achieve their own agendas and manipulate the world into seeing populations and events in such binary terms.

Another element of the book that immersed me in a new world was the descriptions of Young-sook’s experiences and feelings of being a haenyeo. This book gave me an appreciation for the life of the many people across the world and history who have traditionally worked on and in the water and the dangers they have learnt to manage over generations. Similar to much traditional work that depends on the cycles of nature, there is a deep sense of understanding of nature and of the need to be able to read and stay in tune with the changes through the days and seasons. The comfort and sense of autonomy that Young-sook  found in the sea were also at times a respite from the horrors happening throughout the novel. A part that most drove this home for me was a description of how the haenyeo would continue diving well into their pregnancies and even sometimes give birth in the sea! It left in awe of such a connection to the natural world and, at the same time, very aware of how different my relationship with nature is.

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.”

– The Island of Sea Women

​Towards the end, set in the 2000s, Young-sook talks about how more and more tourists were coming to visit the island, now a UNESCO Heritage Site, and some came specifically to see the haenyeo at work. By this time, the role was disappearing, a development Young-sook attributes to increased control of their activities by external parties, changes in beliefs (patriarchal Confucianism from the mainland replacing a matrifocal society) and “soft” young generations who couldn’t handle, and weren’t interested in, the hard life of a haenyeo. Young-sook expresses frustration at the tourists coming to watch her and her equally elderly fellow haenyeo do the work they have done every day for decades. By this point in the book, I had followed Young-sook through her entire career as a haenyeo, I had witnessed her development from a “baby diver” to chief haenyeo and seen how this was not just one job of many, but a crucial foundation of the whole community: it had fed fathers and daughters and sisters, it had sent children to school, it had allowed Young-sook to see other parts of the world. It was the core of who she and her community was. With this perspective, I suddenly felt conscious of how hollow trying to preserve such folk traditions can be when they no longer hold the significance they once had in their society. I myself love to see how people have lived and understand the traditions of a place and people, but it reminded me of a statement Malek Bennabi made in من أجل التغيير (For the Sake of Change), when he talks about (I paraphrase) people in Muslim societies putting on folk performances or wearing traditional clothing and thinking that this was a way of holding on to the glories of our past, when in reality they are just for show when the core ideas that they come from are no longer what drive society. How do we maintain a connection to our past and values without turning our history into meaningless performance?

I listened to the audiobook version of this, narrated by Jennifer Lim, and it was a captivating experience. She was able to create the different characters’ voices so vividly (my favourite was irritated older Young-sook) all with accurate pronunciation – in my limited knowledge – of the Korean names and haenyeo terms. This novel has everything I look for in historical fiction: I learnt a lot about Jeju and Korean history, the settings were described in beautiful clarity, the different characters were sensitively and honestly portrayed, and I was constantly emotionally connected to the story. This book was translated into Korean in 2019 so I looked up the Korean version on Korean websites to read some Korean reviews of it and I might do that more often! The most brutal events on Jeju after the Japanese left, known as the “4/3 events” (3rd April events), during which around 30,000 people were killed, were denied by the South Korean government, forbidding people from even talking about it, for many years, so this adds another layer to reading the Korean reviews. Overall, when I came to the end of this book, the foremost feeling that swept over me was anguish for the horrific suffering so many have and continue to go through at the hands of weak people, unprincipled people, and evil people. I pray that we can be a force for justice, courage and comfort across the world.

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