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Lisa See on The Island of Sea Women
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A torn-out paragraph and eight years of waitingThe project began not with a research trip or a commission but with a single image in a waiting room. She kept what she found for roughly eight years, finishing other books while the clipping sat with her, until she had space to act on it.
It was just one paragraph and a small photo. But I just ripped that out of the magazine and brought it home with me. I knew that one day I would write about them.
A 2016 UNESCO designation placing haenyeo culture on its intangible world heritage list came with a countdown. Most of the surviving divers were already in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, and the women who had lived through the Japanese occupation were the ones running out of time.
This is a culture that is dying out. In about 15 years it will be gone.
Research on Jeju surfaced a history she had not anticipated: the 4.3 Incident, a period from 1948 to 1954 during which South Korean security forces and right-wing groups killed between 30,000 and 80,000 people on the island, followed by more than fifty years of government suppression. The discovery forced her to reckon with what a book about Jeju could not responsibly omit.
How can I not write about this? How can I write a book about Jeju Island, and not tell this story? [paraphrased from audio]
Before settling on the haenyeo as her subject, she had already decided on the moral question she wanted to examine. She had circled it in earlier novels without fully committing, and this book was where she resolved to stop deflecting.
I knew that I wanted to write about forgiveness. I feel like forgiveness is something I’ve tiptoed around in several of my books. This time I wanted to look at it straight on.
How she wrote it
Shoes off at the door, eight hours on the floorHer deepest Jeju interviews happened in the women’s homes, where she and a translator would sit on the floor for two to eight hours. One of the longest sittings produced an unexpected witness: a woman’s adult daughter, who had served as translator throughout and discovered, at the end of that day, that she had learned more about her own mother than in her entire life.
They’d be either like, ‘Yes, sit down,’ or ‘Go away, I’m busy.’ [paraphrased from audio]
That directness shaped more than the interview sessions. The women sitting on the beach sorting seaweed between dives turned out to be so generative that she added a contemporary narrative strand she had never planned. The opening scene of the novel, an old woman sorting algae at the shore, came directly from those unscheduled conversations.
She tested every implausible detail by asking the same question to multiple women in different settings. A haenyeo who described diving off Vladivostok in winter while heavily pregnant, finding the freezing water soothing, seemed at first like someone having fun with a foreign visitor. The account held up.
I thought maybe she was pulling my leg. That cannot be true.
She kept pressing the same question to other women who had worked along the Soviet coast, and they gave her the same story each time. That method, hold the surprising claim and ask again elsewhere, ran through the entire research phase.
The underwater world was the hardest passage to render because she had no physical reference point. She is not a diver, and the problem was less about anatomy than about a sensory environment that has no equivalent on land.
It is a different world. Everything is different. It’s not just that you can’t breathe. It’s how things move, the currents, what it looks like, how light filters down … it’s like writing about outer space.
One structural decision was made before she wrote a single scene. Knowing her destination in advance is not a plot strategy for her but an emotional one: the final sentence functions as a compass bearing for the whole draft.
I always write the last sentence first. I may not necessarily know what the plot is or who all the characters are, but I always write the last sentence first. And it’s because I want to know where I’m going to end emotionally. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
What the older women could not say for fifty yearsThe 4.3 Incident was suppressed so completely that for decades speaking about it on the island carried criminal consequences extending to children and grandchildren. When she sat with the surviving generation, the prohibition had officially lifted, but its weight had not.
When I was there the pain was palpable, especially in the more private interviews with older people who lived through it. Everyone was affected in some way. And they could not talk about it. For more than 50 years, if you talked about it you could go to jail. Your children could be punished. Your grandchildren could be punished.
The haenyeo’s buddy system, in which two women pair off and are responsible for each other’s survival every time they enter the water, gave the friendship between Young-sook and Mi-ja a physical dimension that most literary friendships lack. The novel’s central rupture takes place against that background of daily, bodily trust.
Not only are Young-sook and Mi-ja friends, but every time they enter the sea, they’re literally putting their lives in each other’s hands. I think that took that idea of friendship to a whole new level.
What she wants us to sit with
Letting go as the only way forwardThe novel’s argument about forgiveness cuts against the version most people inherit, in which forgiveness is a gift to the person who caused harm. She reframes it as something the person who was harmed does for her own survival, and she was explicit about this in her annotations.
Forgiveness can be viewed as an act of self-preservation. That at the moment of letting go of anger, pain, the act of violence, or whatever the terrible thing was that happened, we are also releasing ourselves from being prisoners of the past.
The scale of what forgiveness covers, in her framing, ranges from a domestic quarrel to a war, without changing its essential structure. She pressed this point in the LA Times conversation precisely because the novel’s timeline spans colonialism, massacre, and a fifty-year friendship undone by a single act.
For whatever it is — from an argument with a husband to a world war, and everything in between — the moment of letting go of the terrible thing that happened, that’s when you’re no longer a prisoner of the past. It allows you to move forward.
The haenyeo kept diving through the Japanese occupation, through the 4.3 killings, through decades of silence about what they had witnessed. That continuity, not just the diving itself but the refusal to stop, is what she wants readers to carry into their own lives.
What I think we can learn from the haenyeo is that no matter what tragedies or struggles we face, we must continue on for ourselves, for our families, and for the larger society that we’re a part of.