The Island of Sea Women

Mi-ja and Young-sook grow up together on Jeju Island, diving as haenyeo — the all-female free-diving collective that has sustained the island's families for centuries, women going 30 feet down without equipment to harvest abalone and sea urchin while their husbands keep house. They are friends through Japanese colonial rule, through WWII, through marriage and children. Then the April 3rd Incident arrives — 1948, a US-backed South Korean government massacre of thousands of Jeju civilians suspected of communist sympathies, covered up for decades. One moment of betrayal during the killings ends their friendship for sixty years. See builds the entire novel around that rupture and the history that made it — Japanese occupation followed by American occupation that proved equally brutal, a matriarchal society caught between warring empires that had no interest in what the women of Jeju had built. A visitor dispatch rigorously researched from primary sources and interviews with haenyeo women.