Waterbreath
The late June mornings were humid, especially along the coast, which was littered with plastic bags, straws, and bottles, remnants of the early summer storm that passed through the Island. Waves folded over each other, one after another. Jin felt their sound reverberate through her body, hiss hah, a feeling both familiar and unaccustomed. As she walked the shoreline, Jin was reminded of how her grandmother would say that each wave came from the breaths held in by the Island’s haenyeo during their underwater forages. She drank in each breath now, the scent of the sea filling every crevice of her lungs.
The second of the funeral’s three-day ritual had gone as expected. Jin donned her black hanbok and a white ribbon pin in her hair, as did her mother. During the day, the Island’s people came in one by one and bowed twice to the picture of her grandmother, murmuring faint words of supposed comfort to the pair of descendants.
“I pray for a blessed afterlife for the deceased,” most of them would say. They then exited the small room to mingle over hot noodles, boiled pork, and soju, which her grandmother’s diving cooperative had helped prepare and where her uncles spent most of their time drinking, only getting up occasionally to greet the guests. Some of the guests, especially the co-op members, who had witnessed not only Jin’s whole life but her mother’s as well, wept as they lay a white chrysanthemum on the altar. Jin and her mother had no tears of their own to reciprocate, in contrast to the endless tears shed at her father’s funeral twenty years ago.
As night fell, the attendees thinned out until Jin was left alone with her mother. At another funeral next door, the sound of wailing pierced the air as Jin sat with her mother in silence, waiting for any late-hour guests.
That night, they slept poorly awaiting the final day of the funeral. Struggling with jet lag and unable to bear the stuffy funeral home, Jin got out of bed and decided to take a walk. Once out on the pavement, her slippers caught in the cracks of the poorly maintained roads. Somehow, it was even more humid outdoors than in as the haemu floated inland. There was little visibility due to thick fog, but Jin could hear the sound of the tide approaching as the water rose with the morning.
As she reached the sand, Jin spied a crab preying on a clam, remembering that as a young child, her mother and father took her to the Island’s sandy beaches, along with a bucket, to hunt for crabs. Sometimes, the three of them went out on her father’s fishing boat for a day out at sea. Those clear, blue summer days with nothing to worry about, the world just the right level of brightness, lingered in Jin’s memory like a foreign country. The memory forged a hollow of something faded, nothing left in its place except for the outlines of something that used to be.
Jin knelt along the sand, hoping to find answers, but the sea didn’t respond. It only listened, calmly, while its currents ran forcefully underwater.
*
When her mother had first called with news of her grandmother’s death, Jin didn’t quite know what she was supposed to do with the information. Her grandmother was eighty-eight years old and had been ailing with Alzheimer’s for some years. Although Jin grew up living with her mother and grandmother on the Island, she lived her entire adult life away from them and had ceased all contact.
Jin figured her grandmother didn’t like her very much. As a child, Jin envied her friends, whose grandmothers showered them with compliments and snacks, while her own grandmother stayed aloof. She was half expecting the news when she saw her mother’s name pop up on her phone, knowing that death was the only reason significant enough to break their decade-long silence.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jin told her mother quietly over the phone.
A brief pause ensued, and the two of them started speaking at once. “How are you—”
Another pause filled the air.
Her mother cleared her throat and spoke. “Will… you come for the funeral?” she inquired hesitantly.
Jin contemplated the dwindling number in her bank account, then asked, “When is it?”
“The… day after tomorrow. I know it’s last minute and you must be busy…” Her voice trailed off.
Something inside Jin flashed with anger as she thought of her mother on the phone, how tightly her mother’s hands must be gripping the receiver, how alone she was now that both Jin and her grandmother were gone. Jin had left her mother alone to figure out the logistics of caring for someone with a debilitating and terminal illness. But the more time that passed, Jin found it increasingly difficult to go home, knowing that the frayed threads between them could snap with one final pull.
Her mother started again, “You don’t have to if—”
“I’ll be there,” Jin finally responded. She first spoke the words out of anger, which upon reflection seemed like too much given the situation, then added more softly, “I’ll send you my flight details later.”
*
Upon arriving at the airport, Jin spotted her mother waiting beside the exit. Though it was still early morning, the airport was bustling with a few too many people due to the arrival of tourist season, the noise level several decibels above one that might be considered tolerable.
Jin started walking towards her mother with a carry-on in tow, exactly as she had left the Island. Her mother’s eyes didn’t meet Jin’s as the distance between them closed.
Jin cleared her throat. “Hi, umma.”
“Hi,” responded her mother.
Dawn fell into morning as her mother drove, the two of them journeying wordlessly further into the island as the sun rose from the sea beside them, its rays indistinguishable among the cloud-packed sky.
Once at home, Jin stepped into the living room to find it exactly the same as she had left it, only with a darkened hue that could only be explained by the passage of time. The yellow linoleum floors were sticky, even though her mother still probably wiped them clean every day. Although her mother didn’t smoke, the house still smelled of old cigarettes and sweet rice, probably left over from her grandmother’s half-century long presence.
She made her way to the bedroom, remembering to step across the ledge of the doorway, as if her foot was responding to the ghosts of countless stubbed toes. She reached for her chair and sat at the desk, momentarily taking in a breath, eyeing the array of college entrance exam preparation books and childhood journals on the shelf.
Her mother appeared at the doorway with a blank expression, croaking out, “The sheets are washed. Make yourself comfortable,” then disappeared into the hallway.
That night, as Jin lay in bed, she took in the silence, which produced a strange sensation of emptiness in her stomach, as if a vital part of her abdominal anatomy was missing. When she lived here, all Jin wished for was peace and quiet among the cacophony of visitors, among them her parents’ coworkers, friends, and neighbors. She remembered grimacing at the sound of laughter coming from the living room, bolstered by the warmth of alcohol. Her body absorbing the memories of sound waves floating through the walls, Jin fell asleep.
*
Jin awoke the next morning to clamoring in the kitchen. Her mother was chopping, frying, boiling — all sounds she had heard thousands of times before but now felt alien.
The geumchaegi was approaching as the weather grew warmer, which meant that her mother, a haenyeo, no longer left the house at dawn to do mooljil with the other women in her diving cooperative. Jin remembered looking forward to the summer months as a child, when she could spend time with her mother, eating silky cold bean noodles and sitting on the steps of the house with nearly frozen watermelon slices in hand, spitting out the seeds to see how far they could go.
Entering the kitchen, Jin sat at the table as her mother heaped rice into two bowls and set them atop the table, which was already covered in side dishes and Jin’s favorite food: two day-old kimchijjigae. Long accustomed to a simple life abroad, Jin had almost forgotten about its existence, which represented a cumulative labor of love, from the planting of the cabbage seed to the harvest, then the kimchi making, and finally, the cooking of the stew. Her mother would have begun cooking as soon as she phoned Jin. This steadfastness comforted Jin in a small way.
Jin had once attempted to make kimchijjigae, spending a fortune on store-bought kimchi and faithfully following what laid in her memory, the order of ingredients: first the kimchi, stir-fried in hot oil, then the water, anchovies, tofu, and minced garlic. Finally, time. Kimchijjigae was better the day after, after many reheatings, each time renewing itself into something better. But Jin’s version struck stale no matter how many times it was reheated. Despite this, she wanted to tell her mother, look what I made, but found only silence between the stasis of time.
Her mother sat across from Jin and the two of them picked up their chopsticks.
“Try the kimchijjigae. My kimchi turned out pretty well this year.” Her mother looked at Jin with hopeful eyes.
Jin picked up her spoon and took a sip. The tangy spice caught in her throat, and she began to cough. Her mother got up quickly and retrieved a glass of water. The coughing subsided, but Jin still felt the sting lingering in her throat, like nettle on lace.
*
Soonie waded in the water to find a good spot to collect conches. She took in a deep breath and dove in. Her hands grew stiffer as the days passed, the articulations of her joints beginning to grate against each other, and her ears rang with frequent headaches despite the biannual oxygen chamber treatments. Still, even though she now had enough money to retire, she couldn’t give up her job, her purpose, her independence. For nearly thirty years, her life drew meaning from the simple act of holding her breath and digging for sea creatures, such as the conches that she now freed with her hoe. Its wooden handle revealed cracks from erosion in the seawater. Newer tools were available, but Soonie preferred this one, which was handed down from her mother.
Soonie took to the waters at sixteen, like her mother and her mother before that. She was from the sea, her existence tied to its cycles, its provision, its history. She knew these waters better than she knew her own body. She knew where all the conches and sea cucumbers lay on the ocean floor, locating them like an infant finds its mother’s breast. Spotting a conch now, she took her hoe into her right hand and hacked at it. It came away with one swoop, which Soonie now took into her left hand.
When Jin left the Island for university and stopped contacting her, Soonie’s heart broke and scattered all over the sea. Soonie would listen jealously to the women in her cooperative, who bragged about their children sending gifts or visiting for the holidays. It ached to think of the kind of mother she had become, the kind that lost contact with her own daughter, the kind whose inner demons dictated the kind of love she displayed. Soonie sometimes felt that the world demanded too much from her. She loved Jin, but the world was so different. She wanted the best for her daughter, yet…
And what kind of daughter was Soonie? Her mother’s health was ailing, worsened after the death of Soonie’s father some years back. At times, her mother woke up screaming from nightmares, and she would suddenly grow rigid and quiet, tears streaming out of her eyes. Soonie thought it might be best that she lost contact with Jin, because then she could be shielded from this. Her mother faded, one giant piece at a time, until Soonie finally had to put her in hospice for full time care. Soonie wasn’t sure whether to feel sad or relieved.
When Soonie first started mooljil long ago, her mother told her that each woman’s waterbreath was her unique gift. One’s breath was a gift from the gods when one was born, but the waterbreath required the blessing of the sea. Countless young women had been turned away from mooljil for this reason. Soonie found that her mooljil often depended on her state of mind. Her waterbreath came more easily when she was in a good mood. On a day like today, fettered with thoughts of Jin and her mother, she felt her lungs constrict. Her harvest for these kinds of days were often two-thirds or even half of her usual amount.
Hands now full of conches, Soonie popped her head above the water and squeezed her breath into the air, which sharply whistled as it left her body. The whistles could be heard at these waters all times of the year, including the frigid winter, only ceasing briefly during the summer geumchaegi. Soonie placed the conches into the net attached to her taewak, which floated above water with a net to collect her catches. After taking a brief break, she took in another breath and dove into the water again.
Whenever Soonie visited her mother at the hospice center, she would often be in a worse state than usual. Often, her mother broke down into tears and refused to talk to her.
“Please, tell me what is going on,” Soonie would plead, knowing the words would not reach her.
Young-sook only peered towards her through tear-stricken eyelashes and kept shaking her head and cried out, “No, no, no,” as she sat with her knees in her chest.
Soonie could only sigh and wait by her mother until the episode passed and she fell asleep.
Last week, however, her mother had a rare moment of lucidity. Recognizing Soonie, she rushed to her when she arrived.
Taking hold of Soonie’s shoulders, she said, “Why did you come back? Just when I thought you had escaped.”
Soonie took her mother’s wrinkled hands and sat her back down.
She said patiently, as if she was talking to a child, “What do you mean escaped? I’m right here with you.”
“You were never supposed to come back. Never supposed to become a haenyeo. I promised your father that you would have a better life.”
Distraught, Young-sook’s entire body shook as her tears spotted the hospital gown.
Soonie sighed, assuming her mother was having another episode. But that day, she insisted on telling Soonie a story, speaking frantically, as if she was scared she would run out of breath. Soonie had never experienced her mother willingly explain anything to her. She was the strict disciplinarian, her father the silent witness. Soonie tried to bury these memories now, which poked out from under the seabed.
But whether or not Soonie listened, her Young-sook began talking, and she could not stop once she did.
It was almost winter. A windstorm ravaged the Island as gunshots rang in close distance. The gunshots went pang pang pang, eight in total, and I covered my ears, scared that my eardrums would pop. When they ceased firing, and we were sure that the soldiers had left the village, we searched for our father’s body on the street among the others who were killed with him, including our uncles and three members of the neighbor’s family. We took our father’s body to the patch of farmland next to their house. We barely had time to cover his body with a few handfuls of dirt before we had to run away themselves. There was no time to move our uncles and the others. Blood stained the road and sank into the dirt below it, coloring its layers.
I could feel my heart beating into my ears as I joined the rest of my uncle’s family running into the mountain behind the village. There were seven of us left now. Me, my mother, younger brother, newborn sister, my aunt and two cousins. My mother, holding my baby sister, looked back on the village, its dirt streets surrounded by houses with roofs made of dried grass, as she hitched up the skirts of her hanbok, which kept catching on the weeds. Worried that my mother would get tired, I took my baby sister from her arms, and the seven of us hurried towards the mountain.
We spent the night in a cave, one I used to play in with my friends as a young child. The early winter chill made my teeth chatter. Even in the middle of this peril, the Island’s weather refused to give in.
My mother and aunt contemplated whether or not to move further south that day or to spend another night in the cave. My mother glanced at the children before saying, “We have to go before they find us here. Didn’t you hear about the eight men who were found dead in a cave just like this the other day?”
My aunt replied frantically but in a hushed voice, “You’ve only given birth a week ago. You barely have the strength to walk, let alone go all the way down to the coast.”
“We have to go. I won’t hear more about it.” My mother spoke with the air of someone with authority. But when I looked at her face, her eyes flashed with fear, and her lips trembled. As the eldest daughter, I was used to reading my mother’s needs, often taking my younger siblings to go play when I thought she was tired.
That morning, I clung to my baby sister as we marched. We were so desperate to escape towards the coast, where we would be safe from the killings. The younger ones cried until their eyes could no longer produce tears from the dehydration. My mother and aunt took hold of them periodically to relieve their legs. My own legs were so tired from walking that I thought my skin would blister from the pain, which was then followed by numbness. I didn’t think we would make it.
Night fell before we finally reached the village on the coast. My mother collapsed from exhaustion once she saw the destination. We were safe for now.
Young-sook, still shaking, turned towards Soonie.
“After what happened—”
She stopped to take a breath in. The tears stopped, and she started speaking more calmly.
“After what happened, my mother began diving again to support her family, and I started going along with her. I took to the waters at sixteen, like my mother and her mother before that, although my mother had given it up to get married to a man inland.”
Soonie, annoyed at the sudden show of emotion, interrupted. “Why are you telling me this, why now?”
Young-sook ignored the question.
“The sea provided, as it always did. It gave us our past and our future. But the past was so sticky, so painful that I had to bury it deeply. Your father couldn’t even bear the thought of it. Do you know why he always wore long sleeves? It was to hide the scars from the torture. He was so scared it would happen again, that the danger was always lurking from behind.”
“We’re a democratic country now, umma. That kind of thing won’t happen anymore.”
Soonie was already regretting visiting that day. She didn’t have time to listen to her mother’s end-of-life regrets.
“Even so, Soonie. Even so. Our fear made us live in the past, even as we tried to forget it. We… tried to protect you from it. I vowed I would give my children a better future. One where they don’t have to live in such fear. I would give anything to do that.”
Soonie almost rolled her eyes from the irony. She never needed to know who she was, nor wondered why she had this gaping hole where her heart should be. The sea provided, as did her own hands, if not her family.
But then, Young-sook looked Soonie straight in the eye and said something that almost made her heart stop.
“But what if we made a mistake? What if we held onto the pain so tightly that we forgot to pass down the love as well?”
*
Soonie descended further and further until the colors grew darker and light became scarce. Dark blues and greys monopolized her vision, but suddenly, a flash of light below caught her attention. It was an abalone. Because they lived in such deep waters, which only the most senior of the haenyeo had access to, they fetched a high price. Soonie savored the exact moment that she felt them give into her strength, ripped apart from the ocean’s volcanic floor. Eyeing the abalone, Soonie reached for her bitchang.
Soonie was in deep now, and her waterbreath was running scarce. One more breath, just one moment more, she thought, as she approached the abalone. Soonie wrapped the rubber end of her flat metal bitchang onto her right hand and poked the other end of it between the abalone and the rock, just enough to create a space, exposing the brilliant cyans and yellows and violets of its undershell.
Countless times, the Island’s haenyeo had run out of waterbreath chasing after deep abalones. In the sea, you had to let everything go; the water gods demanded humility. There was no room for greed.
Soonie was now at her very last waterbreath. She felt the edges of her lungs reach their limit against her chest cavity. She gathered her remaining strength and pushed her bitchang down against the powerful force with which the abalone held onto the ocean floor. She could try to get it on her next dive, marking the spot with a pearly abalone shell that she carried for that purpose. But Soonie didn’t feel like giving up now. She pushed further down. The abalone finally popped off. She reached her hand out to grab it, but her vision began to fade as her waterbreath turned on her.
The world turned to red, the burning kind. It smelled of sweet peaches, the fresh kind that Soonie never had because they were saved for her brothers, then baby Jin’s tiny toes, which smelt of baby lotion. Then she heard the thunderous sound of two thousand six hundred seventy men falling to their deaths twenty years ago, skulls cracking in favor of high-rise apartment buildings, and even before that, the thirty thousand gunshots that rang across the Island. Pang pang pang. The water gods called out to her, what are you doing here? She was falling, no, rising, as each breath linked the next, one after another, forming a chain she couldn’t escape. Then, some force other than herself, perhaps the accumulation of her mother’s waterbreaths, swept in below her and took her up to the surface.
Soonie gasped for air, suddenly remembering it all.
*
Holding Young-sook’s picture, framed in white, Soonie walked with the procession towards the burial site. Unlike much of the Mainland, it was the Island’s custom to bury its dead. The breeze blew into her skirts and bent the tall summer grass into a deep bow.
Jin followed behind, remembering Young-sook’s story of the Island’s people being brought back dead in white cloth after grave illness or accidents while abroad during the Occupation. Young-sook rarely said anything about the past, which meant Jin always listened carefully for any morsels whenever she did. Jin didn’t know why the story of rotting bodies wrapped in white cloth stuck with her for so long, but the desperation to come back to the Island—even after death—felt unfathomable. Jin, too, was supposed to have belonged here, to be born and die and be reborn. Her mother had worked hard to make another life possible for her, so that she could leave the Island, exist outside of it. They should have known that she would be lost without it, without acceptance in the only place she had ever known. Jin now felt like she waded through life in clothes borrowed against time, both of which were running thin.
It was easier to cease all contact with Soonie. The silence prevented Jin from remembering the scars, the hate and love and grief wrapped up into a single entity, so intertwined that the individual threads could no longer be distinguished. Now that she was here, the sheer force of emotion that Jin held towards Soonie came as a surprise. Contempt, worry, regret, followed by all the feelings in between that didn’t quite have a name, the bleeding remains of a bond that had been severed, but not quite. It was lingering, pulsating, alive.
While continuing along Young-sook’s funeral procession, Soonie was really thinking about Jin, about the last conversation they had before they lost contact. The Island’s residents had begun drying seaweed in swaths along the coast, left out in the salty air, filling the Island with the faint burning scent of iodine. Jin had called to tell Soonie something she couldn’t understand.
A part of Jin regretted making the call. But something had inside her swelled with the urgency of a pot boiling over, something that had to do with all the years of suppressing herself, something to do with not wanting to live a lie to the one person who had always been there, who had birthed her, from whom she wanted nothing more than to be loved for who she really was.
Jin’s throat caught when the words left her mouth, not that any words could encompass the pain. It was a mixture of regret and helplessness, that Jin could not help but be who she was, love who she loved, and at the same time not give her mother any of the things she wanted, any part of the life she must have imagined for Jin when she was born. Jin knew her mother loved her, but she also knew why she had to leave the place she knew best.
“I’m sorry,” said Jin. She didn’t know if she meant it or not.
But in Soonie’s response, the anger came before the love.
“How could you do this to me?” Her eyes flashing, she felt the sting in her palm as her fingernails dug into her own skin.
Soonie wanted to talk more, but no words came out of her mouth. Her chest trembled, knowing she was finally losing her daughter, just not in the ways she had ever imagined, not to the sea or the army but her own violence. Her breath caught in her mouth, remembering the times her mother and father opposed her marriage, the joy of Jin’s birth, the fear of losing her, the grief of losing her husband. But still, even as she wished it was different, she couldn’t do anything.
“I get it. But I hope you understand too, why I had to leave,” Jin said shakily.
Jin then hung up one final time, Soonie’s greatest fear confirmed.
Soonie still couldn’t understand Jin, but she now desperately wanted to tell Jin that she was sorry, that she loved her the best she knew, that she knows it wasn’t enough. Soonie wondered where all these unspoken words went to live. Her mother’s words, spoken aloud, now lived their existence in her. They were so little, so late.
From the other side, Jin had picked up the phone countless times to call Soonie but found that she couldn’t. The wall of memories engulfed and paralyzed her. It prevented her from crying out for help, reaching across the divide, even though she knew her bones were the same composition as her mother, and her mother’s mother. She knew that imperfect but beating hearts fueled the flow, of breath and memory, through each of their veins, the code of life reprinting folded messages, generating a damaged and brutal love, but a love nonetheless, with all of its bad and good and misguided attempts.
So that was how it worked. Every subsequent generation vowed to do better than the last, to not make the same mistakes, not knowing that both new and old mistakes lay in wait. Soonie reflected on the fact that she was a product of that history, one small hope for the next generation. Maybe things had gotten better. Maybe they could still get better. Better as in coexistence, not evolution. A devolution, perhaps, stripping away all that is unnecessary, circling back to the beginning, where past histories and future hopes lay assembled in imperfect and unstable harmony.
The procession arrived at the burial site, a small field where Soonie’s father was also buried in a square grave, bordered by rocks of the same composition as the ocean floor. Young-sook went to rest in the ground. Soonie and Jin took the rocks and placed them carefully around the grave. Nothing mattered, except that they were here now.
Chae Yeon Kim is a bilingual, transnational writer and activist. She lives in Seoul, South Korea, but is local to many other places. She is interested in stories that cross borders, the space between words, and anything that disrupts what we consider to be truth. Her words have been published in Write or Die Magazine and Mochi Magazine. She is sometimes on Instagram as @alter_archive.
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