여성 Women
While daylight is nothing more than a lazy copper strip peeping over the horizon, Soomin gathers with the other haenyeo on the rocks at Moseulpo, blinking into the wind. Liquid gunmetal water licks the basalt with a hungry tongue and she shivers, despite the thick neoprene of her wetsuit.
Not yet 20, Soomin is the youngest here by more than 30 years, and while the other women chat easily of husbands and daughters and grandsons, she stands slightly apart, breathing in the salt and seaweed tang of the ocean. They wait for Jihye-nim, the sang-gun of their group who will give them their instructions for the dive. She arrives on her spluttering moped with a whoop.
“I dreamt of hawksbills last night,” says Jihye, lifting her red helmet that makes her look like the end of a matchstick. “This is a good omen, onni. We shall catch well and safe today.”
They take their instruction, their nets, their masks, and submerge into the water, cold this time of year, yet comforting all the same. A sharp baptism reminding them who is Queen. They swim with their buoys and nets to the dive site, close to the shore, but adjacent to the rocks which can tear a wetsuit and the flesh from a bone.
Soomin empties her lungs, inhales a bellyswell of salted air, and flips forwards, arcing first then line-straight. Down she plunges, down to the weedy garden below, licked cold and clean. A mossy turtle raises her paddle and veers into the green. Past mackerel, past mullet spooked to scatter like sand grains in a storm, Soomin follows the reef wall down down down. The women, clad in sleek black, are a harem of seals, and she is comforted by their presence.
Fifteen meters below, the conch huddle in clusters on the rock, abundant, ready. Reaching between the tendrils of seaweed, Soomin prises two ripe and firm molluscs away from their companions and into her palms. Inside her body, stretched taut, the pockets of air beg to be released. She checks that her dive partner is still in view and indicates that she needs to surface. Her partner, tempering her own capabilities to accommodate Soomin, already grips a fistful of shell and together they tilt away from the reef, fins finding a launch pad. They propel themselves upwards, salt and skin as one and Soomin is lighter than the skittish bream or the tangled hair of seaweed or the gentle nip of sea lice. Slower than a sunset, she releases the thinnest strand of air from tight lungs. Up they sail, the gentle leak of air from their bodies entwining with the silt and the weed and the roe.
In Seoul, Soomin meets Yuna and Minji to drink Soju in a loud Myeongdong bar. She adjusts the straight hems and tight buttons of the clothing she reserves for these trips.
“I admire you,” says Yuna. “Admire you, but I couldn’t do it.”
Yuna is studying physics and Minji entrepreneurship at Seoul University. There’s nearly two million dollars’ worth of education between the three of them and only Soomin seems to remember how to laugh. They drink and talk about everything but the tight longing in their chests.
“I’d love to come back to Jeju, but there’s no time for trips, naa,” says Minji, wincing at the first burning sip of Soju.
Soomin’s parents stopped boasting about her achievements when she shunned university to stay on Jeju and become a haenyeo. She goes to bed early, has lungs that can balloon to twice their resting size, can carry a galaxy of sea air to rocky reefs below the water. Her eyes are bright, her cheeks are round and her muscles toned, yet she is the pariah, not her hollow-cheeked, bird-boned compatriots with their knotted shoulders, their twisted guts and degree courses that are picking holes in their seams. There’s Minji: climbing out of windows to dance on tables with boys. There’s Yuna drinking vodka in her room until she throws up and carving ruby sleepers into her inner thigh with a rusty blade.
“It’s good to see you,” says Minji, squeezing Soomin’s arm.
They were roommates at school, Minji and Yuna, though Soomin never felt excluded from their trinity. If anything, she was the glue that held them together, and after hours of cramming more facts in their brains than they could ever use, Soomin got to return to her grandmother’s warm arms, her tteokbokki that could shift the fug of learning as quick as any drug, while Minji and Yuna returned to their dorm to stew in their shared anxiety.
“You’re so lucky, Soomin,” Minji would say back then. “Your grandmother listens.”
Some weekends, Soomin’s halmeoni would take all three girls to the sea and tell them stories about the gardens below the water.
“We’re too old for stories, Halmi,” Soomin would laugh, but Minji’s skin would shine and Yuna’s eyes would gleam and their shoulders would drop to reveal their pale, vulnerable throats.
Soomin wonders now if these gloss-skinned barely-adults batting heavily mascaraed lashes are too old for stories now, or whether they’d sell a kidney to gather at the knees of an old woman with more stories than friends.
It is a meditation, a prayer, and she is at once more and less aware of everything around her.
With every dive, Soomin drifts further from her body. It is a meditation, a prayer, and she is at once more and less aware of everything around her. Her body belongs to someone else, and while she is searching less, she is finding more. Crackles and beats lead her: a thud thud is a grey sea chub, a crayfish crepitates the water with tiny pops.
The dive site today is off the rocks at Seogwipo, where dried volcanic tears kneel at the foot of Jeongbang Waterfall. Tourists stroll down the rickety wooden steps that lead to the basin to admire the thundering cascade, while the haenyeo dart between them, baskets over their shoulders, shadows through a fog.
Soomin has dived here only twice, but the abalone was plentiful. They had hauled their catch onto the rocks and within minutes, tourists had risked their precious white ankle bones for a taste of the abalone straight from the sea.
“We can sell it like this?” Soomin asked Jihye-nim.
“This is how we live eolin-i. We dive, we sell.”
Soomin had to turn away as a young couple held each other in a steady gaze and tipped the raw abalone into one another’s pink and willing lips.
After a swift baptism, the haenyeo float, dotted across the water like the freckles Yuna and Minji bleach from their faces. Soomin is paired with Yejin today, a grandmother with hair as white as a fresh pearl, who signals Soomin to look at something. The shell of a large hawksbill just breaks the surface of the water by Soomin’s elbow, and she grins at Yejin. Together they nod and follow the hawskbill’s lead.
One of Halmi’s favorite stories to tell was that of the grandmother palace. During a deadly outbreak of smallpox, a young haenyeo rescued a turtle that had been marooned at high tide. Later, beneath the marine canopy, she met a hawksbill who led her through a door to an underwater palace. Amidst the coral balustrades, the basalt porticos, the turtle handed her a coral flower, red and silky and vibrant. You saved my granddaughter, she said, I am forever in your debt. The young haenyeo thanked the grandmother turtle and returned to the surface, where she pressed the flower between the pages of a book. She was the only woman in her village to survive the epidemic, and lived a long and abundant life, giving birth to generations of sea women who to this day carry on her kindness to nature. The flowers are rarely seen these days, but the haenyeo call them saengjonja flowers. The survivors.
While Soomin scoops abalone into the crook of her arm as one might hold a baby, she recalls Minji and Yuna sitting on the rocks at Sagye while Halmi built the palace and imbued the hawksbill with tangled words.
“Tell it again, imo,” says Yuna, and though she’s 16 in this memory, her eyes gleam and for a time Soomin can see that she forgets about the scar under her chin, or the pocket of flesh intruding on the bridge between her thighs that occupy too much of her time.
Soomin is about to turn, to make contact with Yejin, when the hawksbill is there, beak to nose with Soomin. She almost gasps, but remembers her training. A mollusc tips from her pile and tumbles down to the dark silt below. They wait inside a bubbled heartbeat for one, maybe two seconds, then the turtle swerves, heads back to her own life in the depths.
바람 Wind
Soomin is exhausted today.
The third missed call tore her from a dreamless sleep, but by the time she had trudged from bed to bathroom and located her phone in the dark, it was almost three and trying to sleep would have been futile.
She squints at the screen, blinks long enough to see that the calls were from Yuna, and hits redial.
A robotic voice with a faintly American accent informs her that the number she has dialled is not in service, but the voice message icon suggests otherwise.
The message at first is a fssshhh, not unlike the sound of placing an ear to a shell, and she’s about to hang up when something whispers into the static.
I can’t breathe, she thinks it says. Help me breathe.
They sit around the bulteok buffeted from the wind by the thick bodyguards of rock and Soomin checks her phone again. She has tried Yuna repeatedly, but nothing. And she has left eight messages in answer to the singsong chirrup of Minji’s message bank though received no reply. She wants to say to the women, Listen to the irregular thud of my heart today. Let me share what cracks me apart today, but instead she remains quiet and listens.
These women are not her friends: this much is clear. They are not her friends, but they would risk their lives for her, and somehow this kinship means something different than friendship. They are mothers, grandmothers, seven, eight times over, and they’d leave their children orphans, their grandchildren rudderless to keep a novice like Soomin safe.
But she could never tell them that she’s worrying today about her thin, glass-skinned friend who drives a Tesla and has an apartment overlooking the Han River. These women have childbirth and poverty and draughty houses canopying their conversations. Lazy husbands who go out at night and return with agitated fists. They have the fledgling tendrils of cancers and heart murmurs inside their chests and bones, and most certainly one of their number is destined to die at sea this year. This is not a job with a pension plan: there is no retirement apartment overlooking Gwakji Beach, or rainy afternoon checkers like her own grandmother had in the salt-lamplit lounges of the Sanbangsang Church Ladies Guild. These women will be examining their raisin-puckered fingers on their deathbeds wondering if they can’t manage just one more dive.
This is not Soomin’s fate. She inherited her grandmother’s house with the tangerine trees in the yard, and her 18th birthday gift from her parents was an apartment in Insadong. She could retire tomorrow if she wanted, but her skin screams for salt and so she is here.
The women don’t know this about her, but they can probably guess. She wears her good fortune like a subtle perfume, and they’re close enough to smell it. But they also don’t know that she prays to the sea goddess each night to wash away her friends’ pain, or that whenever she sees a yellow butterfly, she whispers, Hello Halmi.
Tonight, the moon is smudged around the edges, like someone has pressed a greasy thumb to it, smearing the halo. She walks along the promenade by Sanbangsang Land tapping out messages to Yuna and Minji.
“Soomin-na!” Minji’s voice is reed-tight and high.
Minji whispers that she is outside the hospital, that Yuna threw back a handful of hydazepam and a hip flask of vodka, took a blade to her wrists. That the third member of their trinity decided to die.
Soomin is on the last flight out of Jeju.
Was it grade eight or grade seven? The three of them, laid out on sleeping mats like railroad ties, shoulder to shoulder under a tent canopy, counting one two three roll to turn over. Their voices disembodied in the dark, the low rumble of their heartbeats pressed into one another’s backs. Minji whispering I’ve never known darkness so dark before. Yuna asking if this is what it might feel like to be dead.
“No,” said Soomin. “This is exactly what it means to be alive.”
Soomin was ready to cast off the comforts of her charmed life to be closer to the land and sea, even then, while Yuna speculated on oblivion. How almost formed they were, but still malleable like the molten lava that spilled from the volcanoes that form Jeju, rapidly cooling into these shapes, these people.
In the Asan Medical Centre, Yuna is small and hollow, haloed by the soft pillow.
“Oh,” says Soomin. “Oh.”
Yuna is shackled in bandages that are smudged with stigmata, as though her pulse tried to escape her body.
“She will recover,” says her father, his voice a low quiver and her mother’s words have been stolen.
Soomin reaches for her friend’s hand. She will recover, but as what? On the flight over, Soomin gazed at the grey-cloud sea stretched below and wondered at the point of it all. All this angst, all this worry. Yuna has always been teetering on a precipice ready to tumble. She is a girl born at the wrong time and the wrong place: she was meant for a time where women were gently ignored and lurked in shadows as opposed to here, in the spotlight carrying the weight of her parents’ expectations. Not here, not this.
“I can take her to Jeju,” says Soomin. She is sure that her request will be met with a stony no: her straight-backed father and tight-lipped mother tut and cluck, but their faces scream, Please, take this stranger and bring our daughter back.
In the dark, the truth slips out easily.
Soomin drives Yuna and Minji in silence to the Dodu Rainbow Coastal Road where painted basalt blocks rise like multicolored teeth from the walkway. It is years since Soomin has walked here, and she’s not sure whether Minji and Yuna have ever followed this Olle Trail down to the horse-shaped lighthouses that grin maniacally over the port, but Halmi used to bring her here on grey days. See eolin-i. There is always color if we go looking for it.
They grip hot coffees that soak their heat through the thin paper of the cup and into the girls’ palms. This morning, Soomin brushed Yuna’s hair and wrapped it into a sweeping knot on the top of her head, and Yuna didn’t complain about her ears that poke out like cup handles, or even cast a glance into the mirror. She has swaddled her friends in oversized woollen jumpers that dwarf their skeletal frames. Minji dabs at a stray tear that may have been jostled out by the wind, or could have been pushed out from inside.
To their right, the sea beats out an angry dirge while the wind begs their attention. October in Jeju is the month of change: humid air and relentless sun at the start, resentful storms by the end. Today, though, is one of those cusp days where the sky is the blue of duck eggs and the breeze just wants to carry away the things that can be shed.
They veer from the water where yet another volcanic cone that hugs the lip of the land halts their progress. Past the temple with its faithful goat on the lawn and up the path that wends over the oreum, they step carefully across the wet carpet of leaves. The girls still have not spoken, but Soomin and Minji exchange glances from time to time. Yuna looks forward, as wan and tragedy-stricken as a figure could be.
They crest the hill and stop at the lookout point which gives them a sweeping vista of the coastline, the red and white twin lighthouses standing sentry over the little port. Yuna rests her tattered wrists on the rail and sighs.
“The salt-air is good,” she says and pulls in a greedy lungful.
Ask the sea, Soomin’s halmeoni used to say. She will listen. Sometimes she’ll respond. Soomin wonders what she could ask her now to protect these fragile wrists, this xylophone key chest. It will be okay eolin-i, she might say.
There is color in both Yuna and Minji’s cheeks when they get back to Soomin’s house.
“We can get pizza, na,” says Minji, who rarely eats food unless it is liquid.
It is getting dark by the time they’re settled on Soomin’s couch and coating their fingers in Whoopi Hoopi pizza grease. The diner used to be a favorite on Fridays after school when the boarders were permitted to stay with Soomin and her grandmother. Straight from school, still shackled by stiff blazers and itchy socks, they would snag the high table in the corner so Minji could see the American Programme boys en route to Yale via a mozzarella-topped study session. Soomin rarely goes now, because the empty tug of absent friends makes her want to cry. Even if you’ve chosen it, she thinks, it’s hard to be left behind. Now it’s take-away only.
The pizza tastes like yesterday and the whens. It’ll get better when I’m at University. I’ll find someone to love me when I’m as thin as Yun-hee from Peace Blossom. I can rest when I’m dead and buried.
Yuna says, “I’ll be better when this degree is over.”
“Unless it kills you first,” says Soomin. “Yuna, we’re adults. We can’t live in the whens anymore.”
She thinks of Halmi and how she used to say, It has to be now eolin-i. You might never get to the when. After Soomin’s grandfather left her a widow at 53, she’d hopped on a plane and moved to the honeymoon island without a backwards glance. Now is all we have.
The lights flicker and Soomin’s phone signals an emergency alert. Sometimes the alert will inform them that a person is missing, give a description of their height, their weight, their clothes. Other times, it warns them to stay away from rivers and cliffs. Tonight, it warns that a typhoon is approaching, and minutes later the lamps are dead and Soomin is fishing her emergency candles from the kitchen drawer.
In the dark, the truth slips out easily.
“I just don’t know who I am,” says Yuna. “I’m like a collage-person: stuck together fragments of my friends and my mother and a little bit of Bae Suzy.”
“This is not just you, Yuna,” says Minji. “None of us know who we are. I wanna dance all night, say fuck you degree, and sleep with everyone I can grip for long enough.” In the candlelight, Minji’s face is a topographical atlas of all she is and isn’t. “But in the morning, the guilt eats me. When I dance, I’m a bad girl, but inside I’m a good girl.” She sings, notes wavering, her favorite Miss A song, the one she used to sing at school, the song she wears as an anthem. “We’re all torn and tattered.”
“Soomin isn’t,” Yuna says.
Soomin is, thinks Soomin, but where to start?
The wind provides a lonely descant to their chorus. A chill snakes through where Soomin cracked the window to let in a breeze and the flames dance in the breath.
Yuna continues. “Soomin is just there, the only authentic one among us. Where does it come from, this bravery?”
She could stay here in her friends’ surety that she’s getting things right. Be admired for knowing her own mind for once, unlike the quiet, sigh-punctuated dinners she sits through with her parents once a month. One of the candles sputters, wick drowning in the molten wax.
“The other haenyeo sneer at me behind my back,” she says. “They think I’m a spoiled rich kid playing at poverty for a while until Daddy comes to bail me out. And maybe they’re right. I don’t risk my life to keep my family fed. Nobody is relying on me to have a good harvest in the water. I don’t even count my earnings, or eat much of what I catch.”
“Then why do you do it?” asks Minji.
A violent gust snatches the flames from their cradles, plunging them into a black fug. Soomin’s heart thuds so loudly she thinks they must be able to hear it. “Because underwater,” she says quietly into the crepuscule, “I know who I am.”
물 Water
They’re up before sunrise, the pulse of caffeine igniting electrical pulses in their blood. Soomin shows them how to tug on the wetsuits, though both of Soomin’s spares swamp her friends.
“I feel like the after photo of a weight loss surgery na,” says Minji, tugging at a thick fold of rubber spooling around her inner thigh.
“I feel invisible,” says Yuna, “and I like it.” Yuna, who slept nine solid hours last night in the thick black of Soomin’s bedroom. Yuna, who doesn’t even glance in the mirror this morning, so probably has no idea that she looks more like the 11-year-old with the toothy grin that Soomin was paired with at orientation than the tragic figure in the Asan Hospital bed.
She takes them to Gwakji where, even in October, the water refracts the weakening sunlight into shimmering crystals. Behind the Gwamul Open Air Public Bath, they perch on the rocks while Soomin explains how to breathe in the way of the haenyeo, and she teaches them her own sumbisori: the frantic inhale, the sound that she creates when surfacing which both identifies and protects her at sea.
“Do you remember the other meaning of sumbisori?” asks Soomin. When her halmi first whispered the word, she was already in love with the sea and slowly starting to accept why she was here on the island of sea-women. The word was intoxicating, and even now, she shivers at the word, the power of releasing that reed of air splitting the difference between life and death.
“Overcoming,” says Yuna after a pause.
They gaze back towards the beach, to the white sand, the shallow, turquoise enclave where toddlers splash in bright hats and full-length swimwear. Soomin doesn’t need to speak and the three of them step down the rocks and into the water. Minji winces as the first flush of water floods her wetsuit.
“At least we don’t dive in cotton anymore,” Soomin says. “You’ll soon warm up chingu.”
The girls will dive for only a few seconds: Soomin has been training for two years, and still can manage just a shade over 80 seconds per dive. She takes her friends by the hands as though they are children. “Ready?” she asks.
She takes them down only a few meters, measuring their calmness by the grip of their fingers in hers. She had expected resistance: a thrash, a desperate suck for air that the body does as a reflex, but they have followed her instructions to the letter. Behind the masks that magnify their eyes like they’re anime characters, both Yuna and Minji blink with wide-eyed wonder at the secret world that’s always been there, hiding just behind the thin membrane of the water’s surface. Yuna’s fingers trail through swaying tendrils of seaweed. Soomin wonders if the frayed edges of her wrists are sealing back together in salt-twine, whether there’s a delicious sting there.
Though she is used to it, Soomin never tires of the beauty down here, but today, her focus is on her friends. She tilts up towards the sky, taking the girls with her, and they begin a gentle rise to the surface. They break the seal and all three suck for air with a squeal.
“Oh my god,” says Minji. “Wow. Just wow.”
“I can’t believe we just did that!”
Soomin tows them back to the rocks and helps them clamber up, though she remains submerged to the shoulder. “Rest,” she says. “And then we can go again.”
Yuna takes Minji’s hand and presses it to her chest. “Can you feel that, Minji?”
“You’re beating like Gun-il!” says Minji, delighted to mention the drummer she’d leave her degree for.
“What’s that?” asks Yuna, gazing at something over Soomin’s shoulder. She turns, just in time to see the striated armour of a hawksbill submerging into the blue.
“I won’t be long,” says Soomin, pulling on her mask. She sucks in a breath and ascends in a heartbeat. She twists her head, almost missing the turtle as she swerves under an overhang in the reef. Soomin follows at a respectful distance. She must be eight, nine meters below though the light struggles to penetrate in the darkened recess.
The turtle turns as though to watch her and Soomin pauses, hand pressed to the reef above to stop herself from floating upwards. She is small—juvenile, Soomin suspects—but her face carries the ancient knowledge of these waters. With a flick of her paddle, she is gone, and Soomin is alone under the overhang. She is about to press out and up to the surface when she checks where her hand is resting.
Between the kiss of her palm and the rock sit three crimson reef flowers. Saengjonja, she thinks. The hardiest of the coral flowers. The Thrivers. The Survivors. They are exactly as she pictured the reef flowers that protected the young haenyeo in the story. Their petals dance a gentle skirmish in the tide pull. She closes her eyes, names a flower for each of her friends, one to herself, before giving in to the wrest of her lungs and the other two edges of their trinity waiting for her on the surface.
Jay McKenzie reads, writes, and procrastinates in the Northern Rivers, Australia. This year, she’s won the Fish, Midway Journal, Write by the Sea and Danahy Prizes, and her work appears in Fractured Lit, Fictive Dream, Maudlin House and others. How to Lose the Lottery will be published by Harper Fiction on March 26, 2026.
Header photo of hawksbill turtle by Rich Carey, courtesy Shutterstock.
