The Haenyeo of Jeju

A long whistle rises over the water.

It is not a bird. The sound is high and thin. It holds for a beat and then fades, as if someone had just emptied every last breath from her chest. A few seconds later another one sounds, about 10 meters from the first. Then another, farther off. Then three or four at once, from different directions, scattered across the bay as though the whole stretch of water were breathing.

Look closely, and there is nothing out there but a few round orange floats bobbing on the surface. And beside each float, someone's head has just come up.

That whistle has a name of its own. It is called sumbisori. It is the breath of someone who has just come up from the seabed after holding her breath, pushing all the stale air out fast so she can draw fresh air in. Once heard, it cannot be mistaken for any other sound. It happens on many mornings along the shores of the Korean island of Jeju. The people who make it are called haenyeo, a Korean word meaning women divers.

Put simply, what they do comes down to three movements. They go down into the water, pry loose what lies on the bottom, and come back up. Just those three movements, and they take almost a whole lifetime to learn.

A haenyeo goes down about 10 meters. No air tank, no snorkel, nothing but her own breath. On average, she holds her breath for about a minute on each dive. Down, search, pry loose, up. Then down again. On a long day, that adds up to as much as seven hours in the water, and there are about 90 days like that at sea in a year. What they bring up is abalone, sea snails, sea urchins, octopus, sea cucumbers and all kinds of seaweed.

Something has to be said plainly right here, because it matters more than any thrilling detail in this story. This is not a game, and not just anyone who wants to can do it. The water is cold, the currents are strong, and the seabed is full of sharp rocks. Those who take up the work learn it young and keep learning all their lives. They always go out in a group, so that someone is watching over each of them, and no one ever goes into the water alone. Children must never try holding their breath and diving on their own, not even in water only knee-deep. This rule has no exceptions at all.

Now take a closer look at their gear.

The orange float out on the water is called a tewak. In the old days it was a dried gourd with its insides hollowed out. In the mid-1960s, divers switched to foam, which is lighter. Hanging below the tewak is the mangsari, a net bag that holds everything they gather. In each diver's hand is a flat iron bar, used to pry off abalone that cling tight to the rocks. Alongside it goes a small sickle for cutting seaweed. Haenyeo have worn diving goggles for more than 100 years.

The rubber wetsuit only reached them at the start of the 1970s, brought in from Japan. Before that, they went into the sea in clothes of cotton cloth. In 2012, haenyeo began wearing orange wetsuits. That way, from the shore or from a boat, anyone looking out can spot them at once against the gray water.

On land, their most important place is not the boat landing. It is a low ring of stone wall called a bulteok, with a place for a fire in the middle. There the women change their clothes, warm themselves after coming out of the water, and eat a little something to get their strength back. And it is there, too, that those who came before tell those who come after what no book has ever written down. They tell which way the current runs today, and which rock has a hollow. They tell which patch of seabed should be left alone to rest, and how to save strength so as to dive the whole session with legs still strong.

This work has a proper ladder of ranks.

A newcomer is called a hagun. Divers stay at that rank a long time, season after season. After many years, a diver moves up to junggun. At the top is sanggun, the rank of those who have been in the work the longest. But being a sanggun is not only about diving better than others. The duty of a sanggun is to guide the others in the group.

There is one more rule that the whole group keeps very strictly: do not take everything.

A sea snail shorter than 7 centimeters goes back into the water to grow. In the breeding season, no one touches a thing. No machines, no compressed air, only breath, because a pair of lungs has its limits and a machine has none. The right to harvest the waters in front of a village belongs to that village's own fishing cooperative. So keeping the seabed full for next year is not a kindly piece of advice. It is how each family puts food on the table.

Every year, the women come together for a rite called jamsugut. They pray to the goddess of the sea for everyone's safety and for a mangsari heavy in the hand.

The work follows a path all its own. Mothers pass it to daughters, and mothers-in-law pass it to daughters-in-law. Today the island also has a school that teaches the haenyeo craft, and a museum all their own. In 2016, UNESCO inscribed the culture of the Jeju haenyeo on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. And among the women who still put on wetsuits and head out to sea, some are already in their eighties.

Not one of them talks about her work in a tone of complaint. They speak of the sea in front of them just as a farmer speaks of the family field. It is their own place of work, known down to every stone lying beneath the water.

Morning comes, and the whole group stands on the rocky shore, about to go into the water together. Before they go, the oldest woman turns to the youngest in the group. She gives just one piece of advice, the advice every generation passes down to the next: stay down only as long as your breath allows, come up while there is breath left, and do not be greedy.