I received my copy of /Moon Tides, Jeju Island Grannies of the Sea/,
published in 2011. I turned first to the section on Aging. There is a
photo of Oh Yeong-Geum, born in 1915. She would have been 38 years old
when I was there and might conceivable have been one of the women I saw
bobbing up from dives to rest briefly on their floats. Here is what
she's quoted as saying in an interview with the book's author Brenda
Paik Sunoo in 2007:
"I learned to be a haenyeo all by myself when I began going to the sea
when I was 15 years old. My mother and grandmother were not haenyeo. I
have never been to the mainland or the deep sea to do haenyeo work.
I've only dived around here, and only in shallow waters.
"I have four daughters and two sons. Two daughters live in jeju-si, and
two live here in Gimnyeong. Two of them are haenyeo. But the second
one who lives here doesn't do haenyeo work because she is afraid of the
deep water. I live with my first son's family here in Gimnyeong. He is
59 years old, a barber. My second son lives in Seoul.
"I stopped doing haenyeo work when I was 75 years old, in the late 80s.
In past times, we never had rubber suits like the women divers wear
today. During the winter, we were really freezing when we came out of
the sea. We shivered terribly and even gritted our teeth a lot because
it was so cold. These days, the haenyeo wear rubber suits, so they can
stay in the water for five hours straight without feeling too cold.
"When I was a haenyeo, we made a fire with dry grass or wood brought
from home around a bulteok (fire pit). These days, the haenyeo can take
a hot shower after diving. They're so lucky. When we washed out our
cotton suits and laid them on the rocks to dry, they quickly became
frozen. It was such a miserable and tough time back then. One of my
daughters went to the mainland to do haenyeo work. No one has had a
harder life than her.
"Before I got married, I took a boat for two days to Japan. Many people
got seasick and vomited and couldn't eat anything. But I was okay. I
worked at a zipper factory. While there, I met my husband through a
matchmaker at age 20. He was originally from Gimnyeong. I am from
Sehwa. After we were married, and I got pregnant, we came back to
Gimnyeong when the Pacific War broke out.
"Through the years, I did farming and haenyeo work. I never went to
school. Because my husband was an only son, he didn't do much of
anything. While farming, I grew barley and foxtail millet."
*Comment: *I gather Sunoo has never been a haenyeo or dived along with
them to see what it was like. I distrust some of her comments a little.
My recollection, which may be faulty is that the haenyeo I saw wore
bathing suits, but I only saw them when they came up and then from
perhaps 50 yards away so perhaps I'm "remembering" what was actually an
assumption. I started diving again perhaps shortly after 1963 and well
before I could afford a wet suit. The Pacific Ocean I dived in was
probably warmer than the Ocean off Jeju Island. It seemed pretty cold
at the time, but then so did the Pacific after I'd been in it for a few
hours. At first I got a partial suit which was easy to swim with and
didn't require many lead weights to allow me to submerge. But
eventually I got a full suit like the women are depicted using in the
book. They were cumbersome, but they did allow me to stay out longer.
I have a lot of pleasant memories of diving. For me it wasn't the hard
work that these women describe -- not really work at all. If I could
spear 3 or 4 fish that weighed over a pound each, that would provide
more fillets than we were willing to eat in a week -- and I often
speared more fish than that. These woman had to keep working until
their nets were filled and then swim them to shore so their
good-for-almost-nothing-husbands could take them. The husbands would
then give them fresh nets so they could keep on working.
Yeong-Geum is quoted as saying she gave up working as a haenyeo when she
was 75 years old. I gave up diving because Susan didn't really like to
be along when I was spearing fish and I didn't usually want to just
sail, but especially when Susan became too ill to do either. It is
interesting to read these active and former Haenyeo discussing matters
like these . . . I too once took a sea voyage to Japan. Mine was on the
General Gordon and took 13 days. Like Yeong-Geum on her voyage I didn't
get sick, but most of the others did and everything below deck smelled
like vomit.
Lawrence