This centuries-old Korean subculture of free-diving women is almost gone.
Y
un Yeun Oak, an 80-year-old Korean free diver, brings a tray of seafood to my table. She puts it down and names the contents of the little bowls, each holding a different type of today’s catch. “This is a sea cucumber, this is a sea pineapple, and this is sea urchin,” she says in Korean, as Michelle Hong, the tour guide from Intrepid Travel, translates. The food is so fresh, it still carries the ocean scent with it. It was hand-picked only hours ago by women like Oak, who dive down 60 feet underwater with no oxygen tanks, holding their breaths for two minutes–some even longer. They are named haenyeo, which literally means “sea women.” Westerners sometimes call them the mermaids.
A unique Korean subculture, haenyeos originally came from Jeju Island, about 50 miles south of the Korean peninsula. Over time, they moved to the other parts of the country, including its largest port city Busan where I’m about to try my ultra-fresh lunch. An entirely female profession, the dives and divers were designated by UNESCO as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Traditionally, haenyeo started diving early in life: girls learn the breath-holding techniques from their mothers. Called sumbisori, this ancient breathing practice was passed from mother to daughter for centuries.
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Oak followed her mother into the sea. Born and raised on Jeju Island, she was only eight when her mother started teaching her the art of foraging underwater.
“I learned to dive from my mother,” she says. “I started learning when I was eight or 10 years old, and I started diving when I was about 15.” When she grew up and got married, she moved to Busan, where she continued diving. She still dives several times a week catching squid, abalone, and sea urchins, which she then serves to guests at Busan’s Yeongdo Haenyeo Culture Exhibition Hall—a haenyeo-owned restaurant and museum dedicated to this unique profession.
Haenyeo Heroes
Exactly how haenyeo work evolved to be a female-only field isn’t exactly known, but there are a couple of different theories. One states that historically, when the men left to fight in various wars or died at sea while fishing, women of the Jeju Island had to dive to put food on the table. Another posits that centuries ago, one Korean ruler imposed a heavy tax on men’s earnings; meanwhile women’s incomes were taxed less, which allowed them to keep more money in the family. Some haenyeos also say that women’s bodies are better built for diving because they tolerate cold water better due to an extra layer of fat.
The cold presents a real challenge. When sea women dive, they submerge up to 100 times, spending hours in the icy depths. Until the 1970s, they only wore cotton swimsuits, which offered no protection from the frigid temperatures. Their ability to tolerate cold attracted scientists who studied human physiology and concluded that haenyeos evolved unique adaptive traits to cope with cold. The emergence of wetsuits in the 1970s changed that. When haenyeos adopted the wetsuits into their practice, recent studies found that their unique cold tolerance had waned.
Because haenyeos historically had been breadwinners, their Jeju Island communities were semi-matriarchal, a very different societal structure from the rest of male-ruled Korea. Unlike in many Asian societies, Jeju families would wish for the birth of baby girls rather than boys. Girls promised more income and more prosperity for the family.
Haenyeo communities were always very tight-knit and they remain so today. Diving is a dangerous way to make a living, so the women watch out for each other—in the ocean and in life in general. The older, more experienced females are considered the community’s matriarchs and wisdom holders. Haenyeos observe three levels of experience: hagun, junggun, and sanggun, with the last one being the most senior. The sangguns don’t just excel at the diving and harvesting techniques—they have an almost uncanny ability to read the sea and know what to expect. They are often able to predict the weather by noticing the subtlest changes in the environment, the sounds of the ocean, or the behavior of marine animals. For example, when some sea creatures start to burrow into the sand, they know a storm is coming.
The Haenyeo Refrigerator
On the days Oak dives, she rises before dawn and heads to shore where she meets other sea women who are part of the Busan’s haenyeo center. She puts on her wetsuit, a pair of fins, and a mask that protects her eyes from the salty water. When she ventures into the ocean, she takes only a few things with her: a knife, a net, a little waist pouch, and a tewak—a bright orange buoy that signals her presence underwater. If boats pass by, they know to exercise caution because a sea woman is working beneath.
Different marine creatures require different foraging techniques, Oak tells me. Sea pineapples are easy to grab because they sit on top of rocks and can be scraped off. Sea cucumbers tend to squirm in between and underneath the rocks. “So I have to flip the rocks upside down to get them,” she says. Similarly, sea urchins hide in crevices and under the rocks, but they have sharp needles that stick out, so scooping them out requires some finesse. And squid moves very fast, so to catch it a haenyeo must move fast too.
When haenyeos emerge from the depths of the sea, they exhale very quickly to empty their lungs of carbon dioxide, making distinctive “hoi-hoi” sounds reminiscent of whistling. These sounds also serve as a means of communication with others in their diving group. “That’s how we tell each other we are alright,” Oak says. They take a quick rest while transferring their catch from the waist pouch into the net underneath their tewaks—and dive again. On days when harvests are plentiful, their nets hold so much seafood that they can be larger than haenyeos themselves. The women take some of the catch home and serve the rest at the Center. They can also save some by leaving it in the water inside the net attached to the tewak. “It’s like a haenyeo refrigerator,” Hong quips—to keep the seafood fresh for when they don’t harvest.
“We don’t dive every day,” Oak shares. “We take turns. We usually dive two days in a row and then spend two days serving food at the restaurant, so our bodies can rest because diving like that is hard on the body.” Working in the restaurant is easier than diving, she adds, but after so many years, the ocean is like home. “For as long as I have an able body, I will be diving.”
A Vanishing Vocation
As a culture, Koreans are very focused on preserving their traditions and passing them through generations. Haenyeos may be the only exception. Today’s sea women don’t want their daughters to follow them into the sea. “It’s too dangerous a profession,” Oak tells me, adding that she had seen her brethren die on a dive. “One day that woman just didn’t resurface next to her tewak. “I didn’t want my daughter to face all these dangers.”
Neither can she make as much money as she used to be able to. “When I was young, there was so much food everywhere underwater,” she says. “Today, it’s a lot less. We don’t know if it’s because of pollution or because we take too much from the sea.” And seafood doesn’t sell for as much money either, she adds. “I wanted my daughter to have a better life than I did. We didn’t have all these other opportunities like studying, but today, young people do.”
Oak isn’t unique in her point of view. Other haenyeos also want better, safer and more prosperous paths for their daughters. They are deliberately not teaching their techniques to their young generations. That’s why most haenyeos are in their seventies and older. One of the oldest haenyeos working at the Culture Exhibition Hall is in her nineties.
Because no young women are learning the trade, the haenyeos are steadily decreasing. According to statistics, there were 14,143 haenyeos in the 1970s, and only 4,005 remained in 2015. “We are the last haenyeos,” Oak says. “When our generation is gone, there will be no sea women left. But for a few more years, we’re still here and we’re still diving.”
