Sitting at the front of the St. Paul library with the usual suspects for January’s book club meeting, I was struck by the common response to The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See.
It’s a historical novel set on the Korean island of Jeju, and tells the life story of Young-Sook – a haenyeo (free diver), and her friendship with Mi-ja – the daughter of a Japanese collaborator.
None of us were familiar with the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. While most of us understood North and South Korea were a product of WWII, I don’t think any of us realized how brutal things were during the American occupation and in the decades after before reading.
I certainly hadn’t known anything about what Koreans called the 4.3 Incident for decades, because to refer to it at all was a risk to their lives; but is now known as the Jeju Massacre after South Korea’s National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events, which began investigating in 2000, nearly 50 years after it took place.
(Sound familiar?)
The Jeju 4.3 Events refers to the violence and uprisings on Jeju island between 1948 and 1954, and has an official count of 14,504 victims. The novel focuses on the specific events in the village of Bukchon, where Young-Sook and her family are living. It’s pretty horrific. Neither the fictionalized depiction of the 300 – 400 deaths at the hands of the Korean Constabulary or the survivor accounts found online are for the faint of heart.
While our book club discussion ranged over multiple themes and aspects of the story, the common threads were awe at the strength and resilience of the haenyeo, how little we knew about something that happened not that long ago, and the impact of censorship.
Certainly our ignorance of the 4.3 Events was in part a result of the censorship. In 1978, Korean author Hyun Ki-Young published Aunt Suni, another fictionalized account of the events, then spent three days being tortured by the government and warned about the danger of writing about the massacre again. Combined with the practice of “guilt by association” which meant that if a member of your family was even accused of being involved with pro-North activists your opportunities for education, professional advancement, and travel were now non-existent, it is perhaps not surprising it took so long for people to be willing to speak about what happened.
It is good that they are now.
St. Paul Municipal Library’s book club meets at 6:30 p.m. on the last Wednesday of each month. February’s book is “This Time Tomorrow” by Emma Straub.
