The women were already in the water when I got to the cove below Seongsan Ilchulbong — six black wetsuits bobbing in the grey-green sea, orange floats trailing behind them like buoys. The youngest was probably sixty-five. The oldest, the woman selling tickets told me, was eighty-one.
The Demonstration
The haenyeo — Jeju's women divers — have free-dived for shellfish, abalone, and sea urchin for centuries, holding their breath two minutes at a time, ten meters down, in water that is cold most of the year. UNESCO listed the culture in 2016. At the Seongsan cove they do a daily demonstration for visitors, and I will admit I expected something performative — a show for the tourists.
It was not a show. They actually dove. I watched a woman who looked like somebody's grandmother — because she was — vanish below the surface for what I timed at a minute and forty seconds, then surface with the whistling exhale the haenyeo call sumbisori, a sound somewhere between a gasp and a flute note. She came up with a turban shell, dropped it in her float net, and went back down.
The Stall After
When they came in, they sold the catch at the stall on the beach — raw sea urchin, sliced abalone, conch — at plastic tables ten meters from the water it came out of. I ate sea urchin that had been on the seafloor an hour earlier, dressed with sesame oil, while the woman who had dived for it sat at the next table eating her own lunch, still in her wetsuit, hair dripping.
The Last Generation
There are maybe 4,000 haenyeo left, down from 30,000 in the 1960s, and the average age is over seventy. Their daughters took the education and the mainland jobs the diving paid for — which is the point and also the end of it. The demonstration exists partly to fund the tradition it displays.
Go while you can. The cove is at the base of Ilchulbong's north side, the demonstration runs most afternoons when the sea allows, and the sea urchin costs 15,000 won. It is the freshest thing you will ever eat, sold to you by the woman who pulled it off the rocks with her hands.