The Island of Sea Women

The day after Young-sook has her upsetting encounter with the tourists, she decides to go out diving. Despite her age, she still feels drawn to the sea. “‘I hear the ocean calling,’ she tells her grandson this morning, and he isn’t about to fight her, and neither will anyone else in the household. Even long after she could have retired, she was one of the best haenyeo” (76). Young-sook thinks about how women divers are becoming extinct on the island. Few are under the age of fifty-five anymore.

Young-sook immerses herself in the ocean and tests her skills to see if she can dive down to thirty meters as she used to do. She blacks out before returning to the surface and is rushed to a hospital emergency room. There, the doctor explains that the breathing technique she learned as a girl is very bad and often results in decompression sickness. This means that Young-sook has the bends and must spend time in a hyperbaric chamber. While there, she is reminded that Mi-ja is gone. “Things spiral from there, and all the thoughts she’s been trying to avoid since meeting that family yesterday crowd in around her” (82).