The Island of Sea Women (201 POCHE)

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

The sea is better than a mother. You can love your mother, and she still might leave you. You can love or hate the sea, but it will always be there. Forever. The sea has been the center of her life. It has nurtured her and stolen from her, but it has never left.

She considers the sea to be her bank.

Those of us who ran our own households learned we could gather more wealth without husbands to drink or gamble it away. We

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

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

deep-heart friend.

It was every haenyeo’s duty to nurture our wet fields by cleaning and caring for them for future seasons and generations.

We suffer and suffer and suffer, but we also keep getting up. We keep living. You would not be here if you weren’t brave. Now you need to be braver still.”