Tide Turns on Korea’s Women of the Sea

On a spit of volcanic rock that thrusts into an ocean once rich with abalone, octopus and sea urchin, Halmoni rocked back on her 72-year-old heels and crooked her head at her fishing net, her sun-scored face crinkling with disdain.

“What I caught today is worth less than 10,000 won,” or $11, Halmoni grumbled, pointing to her heap of small, hard sea urchins. “I can’t even buy a cookie for my grandson with this.”

Don’t be fooled. Halmoni is neither as poor nor as feeble as she sounds. Nearly every day, armed with nothing more than a net, a float, a chisel for prying shellfish off their rocks and an impressive set of lungs, the septuagenarian goes diving in the ocean for three to eight hours at a stretch, venturing as deep as 40 feet down to pluck the tasty seafood that flourishes on the ocean floor. The women of subtropical Cheju Island have been plying this taxing trade since at least the 4th century BC, according to medieval Chosun Dynasty accounts written by male bureaucrats who derided the diving women as “a vulgar breed.”

Even now, the women’s only concessions to modernity are the rubber wetsuits that have replaced cotton clothing and the Styrofoam that substitutes for the gourds that were once used as floats.

But the rugged divers of Cheju are a dying breed. Advancing age, declining yields, South Korea’s new affluence, better opportunities for young women and pollution of ancient fishing grounds by encroaching urbanization all conspire against them.

Today, the women of On Pyong say their chief enemies are fish farms, which they blame for slowly poisoning Cheju’s pure blue-green waters--although local authorities insist that the mariculture is not a serious polluter.

The number of female divers has plunged from a peak of more than 24,000 in 1966 to fewer than 5,000, though the statistics are inexact, said An Mi Jeoung, 28, a graduate student in sociology at Cheju National University. An, whose grandmother was a diver, is chronicling the emotional nuances of this disappearing way of life.

The youngest Cheju diver An has found is 33, while the oldest is 90; most are in their 50s and 60s.

“Nobody wants to be a diver any longer, so in 30 years they will be extinct,” An said.

“It won’t take 30 years,” said Hong Choon Ja, 56, former head of the Cheju Divers Assn. and the first woman to hold that job despite the fact that there have been no male divers on Cheju for centuries.

Hong charges that the divers’ seafood yields have dropped about 25% since the advent of the fish farms, which first appeared in On Pyong in 1990. She fears that pollution may wipe out the sea creatures long before the divers lose the stamina to catch them.

“We raised a lot of protest and fought, but now the law allows the fish farms to release their waste water here, and all we can do is watch,” Hong said.

“Now, because of our pressure, they have installed purification systems, but they have already done a lot of damage. They claim the water is clean and not harmful, but how can we tell?” she asked. “Where the water runs, within a year or two, the rocks change color and nothing lives there.”

But while the Cheju divers’ yields have plummeted, from 25,092 tons in 1985 to 10,393 tons in 1996, according to provincial government statistics, prices for the increasingly rare seafood are going up. The divers’ catch fetched $24 million last year, up 47% from 1985. Abalone, which is becoming scarcer and is the most difficult to collect, fetches nearly $43 a pound, Hong said.

The female divers bring in 20% of the seafood catch on Cheju Island, mainly delicacies like sea urchin and abalone that can only be harvested by hand. They market their wares through their divers association, which in turn sells the fish to middlemen and exporters. The divers of each village lease their fishing grounds and seed their seas with abalone and sea urchin to boost their catch. Nonmembers are not allowed to dive.

Despite these protections, the women do not expect their market niche to last beyond this generation.

“Maybe male scuba divers will replace us,” Halmoni said, laughing at the thought.

The fish farms have not yet figured out how to cultivate abalone--but they do pose a serious threat to the divers. The first two farms on Cheju Island opened in 1987; now there are 113, producing 4,300 tons of fish, mostly sole, and raking in nearly $69 million in 1996, according to Lee Sung Hoon of the provincial government’s fisheries section.

The fish farms are required to install water-purification systems on more than 5% of their water tanks, though the figure will be increased to 20% by 1999, Lee said.

“There doesn’t seem to be any serious pollution problem as yet,” he said.

To prevent seafood depletion, the government has placed restrictions on the size of the abalone and the quantity of sea urchins that can be harvested, Lee said.

But the On Pyong divers believe that these measures are inadequate.

“We fight all the time, but it’s no use,” said Halmoni, whose real name is Lee Soon Wol but who instead refers to herself by the word meaning “Grandma.” “There is no way to stop them.”

She sat under a late-afternoon sun, chopping her sea urchins in half and scooping out the soft, bright orange flesh.

Each of the spineless urchins, known as som, yielded less than a teaspoon of meat.

“In the past, these were so abundant that nobody thought of selling them,” she said. Now som flesh fetches about $13 a pound and is exported to Japan or sent to Seoul restaurants to be turned into soup.

A good diver can earn nearly $670 a month from the sea, and most also till the fields on days when the ocean is too rough for diving, An said. Even the elderly divers, who cannot stray far from the shore, can earn about $220 a month.

That is not an insignificant sum by the standards of Cheju Island, which has historically been known for its “three abundances”--wind, stone and hard-working women. Villagers were so poor that, until the mid-1970s, many lived in thatch-roofed stone huts and subsisted on fish and barley. Rice was a luxury reserved only for ancestor-worship days.

But Hyon Pok Sun, 65, said she managed to send her two sons to university--one to South Korea’s preeminent Seoul National University--purely from her income as a diver.

Even after World War II, women who could earn a living from the sea were considered more valuable as daughters-in-law, An said. But as the island grew more prosperous, many women came to see their profession as a shameful badge of poverty, she said, noting that the very youngest and oldest divers tend to have higher self-esteem than those who are now middle-aged.

Though their income is not to be scoffed at, some women continue to dive in order to enjoy the company of their peers.

On Pyong Village has about 260 divers, 150 of them active, according to Hong. On a recent day, about 30 women were at work in the sea by 9 a.m. and emerged at 3 p.m.--without breaks--to find their husbands waiting with bicycles and farm carts to haul their catch off to be weighed and shipped.

After diving, the women changed clothes and remained on the beach warming up, chatting, laughing and eating with friends, the most agreeable part of their day.

Cheju’s women used to dive through the ninth month of pregnancy while their men looked after their families. That custom, now faded, did not alter the basic balance of power between the sexes in this male-dominated society, however. Since one diver gave birth on the way home from work a few years back--naming her baby “Boy on the Road”--the few divers who are of childbearing age have begun quitting before the last trimester, An said.

Diving itself, however, is no less dangerous than in the past. Thirty women have died in accidents since 1989--four so far this year--from heart failure or drowning after becoming entangled in their float ropes. Hearing loss is a common occupational hazard of deep-water diving, as are heart and digestive problems and skin ailments caused by spending long hours in a wetsuit.

And the work does not get easier.

When the divers resurface, they emit an odd hooting, whistling sound as their lungs expel air. Years of practice do not dull the pain.

“It’s the same from Day 1 as 20 years later,” Hong said.

Yet they persist.

“Staying underwater is no problem, but I’m too weak to go into the water quickly or go too far out,” Halmoni said.

Halmoni learned her trade during a childhood spent playing in the sea with her friends. She began diving alongside her mother when she was 12.

“In those days, everybody did it,” she said, dismissing any talk of the physical prowess needed for the job.

But six decades later, Halmoni is less ambitious about her catch. “Abalone is not for old women,” she declared.

In Japan, an estimated 10,000 divers--both men and women--still ply their trade. The average age of divers working in Iseshima, an active diving community in western Japan, is about 50, said David W. Plath, an Indiana University anthropology professor who has studied the Japanese divers since 1981. Some women dive well into their 80s.

“It blows pop stereotypes about age, gender and human frailty,” Plath said.

Though Hong rarely braves the sea these days, she is saddened by the thought that this crop of divers may be the last.

“Those ginseng gatherers on a steep mountain are happy when they find ginseng,” she said. “So are we when we find abalone. The next generation will not have that pleasure, and I’ll be sorry.”

Halmoni too is thinking of retiring--maybe when she turns 75.

“When you watch TV, everyone says, ‘Don’t get old, so many interesting things are happening in this world.’ ” she said. But “I am getting old now, how can I help it?”

Most of the diving women do not want their daughters to follow in their footsteps. Halmoni’s two daughters stopped diving after they married and moved to the mainland.

“Their husbands objected,” she said.

But Halmoni is raising an 8-year-old grandson after the death of her daughter-in-law and wants her own income. When the sea is too cold or rough, she tills her carrot field or works as a day laborer picking mandarin oranges. “My sons don’t like me to continue working, but I insist,” she said. “I enjoy this. If I do nothing, life is boring.”

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.