The Island of Sea Women (201 POCHE)

when people suggested the haenyeo start using oxygen tanks, she, along with other divers around the island, refused. “Everything we do must be natural,” she’d told the collective, “otherwise we’ll harvest too much, deplete our wet fields, and earn nothing.” There, again, balance.

“It’s not a matriarchy. Rather, it’s a society focused on women.”

The past is the present. The present is the future.

Jeju’s matrifocal culture,

“But I should have saved her . . .” Mi-ja had lost her mother and father, so she felt my pain in a way no one else could. She refused to leave my side.

sumbisori.

know I couldn’t change and I couldn’t forgive, but I had to hold on to my anger and bitterness as a way of honoring those I’d lost.

For the next two weeks, while the goddess of the wind was on Jeju, we’d remain idle. We wouldn’t dive and fishermen wouldn’t board their boats or rafts, since the winds the goddess brought with her were particularly fierce and fickle. No other chores could be done either. It was said that if you made soy sauce at this time, insects would hatch in i

In the sea, you can be a grieving widow. Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet. This I know. If you try to live, you can live on well.”