The Abalone Diver

Winter is the best time to harvest mandarin oranges on Jeju Island, and Thuy cannot escape the smell of them. She plucks the small fruit with her bare hands, brushing off snow, the oranges half buried in white, the colours obscenely vivid in their contrast. So cold that the green leaves tremble. She stubbornly refuses to wear gloves despite her husband Jun's suggestions. Her hands turn a red so deep that when her palms get cut by the thorns the blood is invisible as it slides along her translucent skin. Drops of it are speckled onto the snow—the whole collage reminds her of the red, white, and orange ice deserts she had in Vietnam. Except that the orange was mango then.

The skies are a whitish blue, cloudless but so cold that the sun seems unreal, merely a painting over the horizon line of the East China Sea. By day's end so many oranges left on the trees that they multiply the sunset through the leaves. This is not good. They will need more pickers than the two farmhands they have now. When it is dark, husband and wife retreat inside their home, heat rising from the floorboards as if from the center of the earth. She washes the crusted blood off her hands so as to tend to dinner. Jun must be so tired that he does not help her, as he usually insists on doing. She steams his favourite type of rice, a rustic purple as if bruises have been mixed in. Dried fish, kimchi, and seaweed on the side. When dinner is over he settles into the couch with the television on, but not her favourite soap opera, the one that she sometimes holds responsible for bringing her to this country. So she slips out the back door for a walk, putting on her winter jacket. She had never worn anything so heavy back in Vietnam. Jun does not say a thing when she leaves. He is not that type of husband.

She walks down to the sea. The smell of oranges still lingers, as if embedded inside her nostrils. The sea is never very far away, no matter where she is on this island. She heads to the cove that belongs to the haenyo, the old mermaids. She steps off a path worn down by tourists and clambers down rock beaten jagged by the waves. It is a volcanic rock that glints more brightly with reflected moonlight than during the day, when its blackness just sucks up all the sun.

Right now there is not another soul. When she reaches the bottom of the cove the air is heavy with a salt that stabs her lungs, and then the sound of pounding waves wipes away all other sensation. She comes down to a flat landing by a small pool of standing water, protected on the far side by a sheer slab of rock that takes the brunt of the waves. It is here where she takes off her winter jacket, her shoes, and strips down to her underwear. Her bare skin feels electrified. In Vietnam she was a competitive swimmer in high school, which was not so long ago. When Thuy was a child she swam in the brown streams of her village and in the sparkling South China Sea. She was older when she entered an indoor pool for the first time, and the feeling over her body of completely still water was a revelation, like touching a sleeping beast in captivity.

Now she jumps in feet first, the sharp teeth of water tearing into her skin. Somehow she manages this thought: that the East and South China Sea, though separated by thousands of kilometers, are really one body and therefore this moment is tied to her childhood despite the gaping passage of time. This is both a feat of the imagination, as she is swallowed up by this acid chill, and also the truth.

She is immersed in the sea for only a moment, but when she emerges she feels whole and new. Only briefly though, before the greater chill of damp...