Lady Good Divers

Lady Good Divers

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View From
Behind The Camera

compass: Korea, Jeju-do

Make a splash on Jeju-do, South Korea’s largest island.

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Korea's largest island is a matriarchy of wet-suited senior citizens, picking seafood off the ocean floor.

Before you see them, you can hear their breath. There’s even a word for the sound: sumbisori, a whistling noise made as they break the surface after a long submersion. A slick, black seal-like form attaches itself to an orange buoy floating offshore. In minutes it emerges on the rocky beach as a woman holding a drooping octopus in her hands. She smiles and holds it out, not a boast but an offering: Please—have a bite.

“I have seen them riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back.” T.S. Eliot wrote these lines about mermaids, but he might as well have composed them while gazing at the whitecaps around Jeju-do, South Korea, where real women of the sea, living myths in black rubber suits and glass masks, haunt the shorelines with all the mermaids’ briny mystery, singing boisterous, undulating songs of consolation and regret—blues from the deep. They’re the haenyeo (“sea women”), female divers who scour the ocean floor off the island’s gnarled coast harvesting conch, octopus, urchin, and abalone to feed the hungry South Korean seafood industry, one of the largest in the world. They dive without tanks, as they’ve done for hundreds of years, cheating the limits of the human body by holding their breath for up to two minutes at a time, a skill learned from their mothers and ingrained by a lifelong intimacy with the ocean.

It’s a perilous profession, requiring great strength of body and spirit. While many East Asian cultures stress the dominance of men, Jeju—South Korea’s largest island, located roughly 53 miles south of the mainland at the junction of the Yellow and East China Seas—developed as a matriarchy. The women are responsible for a significant part of the household income (not to mention the local economy), and they often become the heads of their households. Even now many stout, tough, proudly independent grandmothers spend their days prying shellfish from stone at depths of up to 65 feet, a testament to the firmness of their mettle as well as their muscle tone.

At present, though, the haenyeo (pronounced “HEN-yuh”) are facing threats that could prove impossible to survive, as the drag of age and the brusque stride of economics erode their culture one diver at a time. In recent decades, Jeju’s economy has shifted from fishing and farming to tourism, and as its cities have grown, so have the ambitions of its young people, who want the same urban lifestyles as their peers in Seoul and Busan. Given the choice between a cashmere suit and a rubber one, young women here no longer opt for the latter.

“We’re worried about the life disappearing,” says Ryu Kye-ryang, a 67-year-old haenyeo from Sagye, a small village at the base of the squat, abrupt mountain called Sanbangsan that looms over Jeju’s Yongmeori coast in the south. Taught to dive at age 14 by her mother, Ryu retired last year after undergoing surgery to correct backaches caused by having lead weights strapped to her waist for five decades. “No younger people are learning,” she says. “They want to live in Jeju City. Farming and diving, it’s hard work—no one wants to do it.” As recently as the 1970s, Jeju boasted up to 15,000 haenyeo; these days there are only a third of that number. Ryu says that in Sagye now there are no haenyeo left who are under 45 years old.

To preserve a rare artifact, all you need is enough money, but a way of life can’t be encased in glass. Chwa Hye-kyoung, who earned her Ph.D. researching the haenyeo, is in charge of research and development at the Jeju Haenyeo Museum in Hado, where many divers' tools, documents, and stories are on display. She worries about intangibles like the haenyeo's song, which has no fixed verses - the words are improvised by the women on trips out to sea as a way of lightening their mood, serving the same purpose as spirituals did for the slaves of the American South. "The songs and dances and rituals have to be preserved," says Chwa. "The haenyeo exist in only two countries" Japan" - where they're called ama - "and Korea. So it's very rare, these women's culture." She believes that with more concentrated organizational efforts on the part of the government, it's possible for the haenyeo to survive, and she sees signs that history and the present are aligning to make it happen. She points to the recognition of the major role haenyeo played in organizing the resistance movement during Korea's occupation by Japan in the 1930s—a piece of the haenyeo's history that was buried for decades and has been widely acknowledged only in the past five years.