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Review: ‘Island of Sea
Women’ pits friendship
versus tragedy
By JOHN ROGERS Associated Press
“The Island of Sea Women (Scribner), by Lisa See.
Ten years ago, Lisa See was sitting in a doctor’s office leafing through magazines when she came across a brief article about a place she’d never known existed — the Island of Jeju — where the breadwinners were once a hearty band of women who eked out modest livings free-diving into the Pacific Ocean for seafood while hus- bands stayed home and raised children.
It was a discovery that has led to one
of the most compelling — and heart- strings-tugging — tales to spring from the mind of the best-selling author of “The Tea Girl From Hummingbird Lane” and nearly a dozen other novels.
Like many of the Chinese American author’s earlier books, it is set in Asia with ties to the United States, although the loca- tion this time is Korea, not China.
And like See’s “Shanghai Girls” and “Dreams of Joy,” the story takes readers on a journey spanning generations — in this case 1938 to 2008 — as moments of cher- ished friendship, unspeakable tragedy and, in the end, a plot twist worthy of Raymond Chandler unfold.
Early on, readers are introduced to Mi-ja and Young-sook, precocious, 7-year-old best friends despite island elders’ misgiv- ings that Mi-ja’s father was a collaborator with the hated Japanese, who controlled the island from 1910 until the end of World War II.
The pair grow up to become “haenyeo” — Jeju’s real-life elite women divers who hone their skills over years to match an innate ability to hold their breaths longer than just about anybody as they deep dive repeatedly into frigid water to grab fish.
Out of the water, the pair grow up to
happily compete for everything from hus- bands to bearing children.
That is until Jeju’s historic 4.3 Uprising,
a real-life event (taking its name from the 1948 starting date of April 3) that is argu- ably one of modern history’s least-known massacres. It resulted in the deaths of some 30,000 people in 1948-49 as South Korea violently put down a rebellion over what government would control the island’s future.
Mi Ja and Young-sook become inno- cents caught up in the slaughter. Their friendship, strained by war, death and competing family ties, breaks apart as they struggle on against the island’s real-life historical backdrop.
By 2008, Young-sook is an old woman but still a diver. Indeed, she’s become part of a dwindling group of haenyeo in their 70s and 80s now revered as national trea- sures on an island that has become both a tourist attraction and a World Heritage Site.
As such she is a bit of a celebrity, much to her annoyance and her general dislike of tourists.
That’s until a day a tourist family from the United States — one that somehow seems strangely familiar — arrives to reveal things she never knew about herself, her family or her best friend.
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