"Su Yao's Dazzling Counterattack Chapter 114"
The salt breeze carried the scent of seaweed over Jeju Island's volcanic cliffs, where black lava rocks jutted into the turquoise sea and haenyeo (sea women) in yellow rubber suits emerged from the waves, their baskets brimming with abalone and kelp. Su Yao's car wound along coastal roads, passing stone dol hareubang (grandfather statues) and fields of tangerine trees, until it reached a village of thatched-roof hanok houses clustered near a cove. In a courtyard where drying seaweed hung like green curtains, a group of women sat on wooden benches, pounding kelp fibers into thin, slippery threads.
Their leader, 65-year-old Halmeoni Kim, looked up from her work, her face weathered by decades of sun and salt. She wore a jeogori (traditional jacket) dyed with indigo, its hem embroidered with waves, and held up a finished gudeul (seaweed cloth)—a fabric as tough as burlap but with a subtle iridescence, woven from kelp and cotton. "This is our haenyeo mandeul (sea women's craft)," she said in Jeju dialect, her voice rough as barnacle-encrusted rock. "It remembers the tides that feed us, the storms that test us, the sea that gives and takes."
Gudeul making, a Jeju tradition dating back to the Joseon era, is a labor of resilience. The process begins with harvesting miyeok (kelp) during the saeu jeongi (spring tide), when the seaweed is thickest. The kelp is boiled in seawater for three days, then laid out on lava rocks to dry, where the sun and wind break down its fibers. "We pound for hours with wooden mallets," Halmeoni Kim's granddaughter, 26-year-old Yeonmi, explained, showing a bundle of kelp threads. "Too hard, and they turn to slime; too soft, and the cloth frays. My halmeoni says the rhythm must match the waves—crash, pull back, crash again."
The threads are woven on backstrap looms, often set up right on the beach, with women singing haenyeo norae (sea women's songs) to keep their hands moving. The patterns are simple—stripes for tides, diamonds for volcanic rocks—but each has meaning: a blue stripe down the center honors the dragon king of the sea, while red threads (dyed with yeongdeung flowers) ward off sharks. "We weave during jangmi ttae (full moon)," Yeonmi said, passing a shuttle through the warp. "The moon pulls the tides, and it pulls the threads tight too. A gudeul made under a new moon will never hold water."
Su Yao's team arrived after their Rajasthan project, drawn to gudeul's unique fusion of marine materials and practicality. They brought samples of seaweed-metal threads blended with kelp fibers, hoping to create a fabric that retained the cloth's water resistance while adding flexibility. But when Lin displayed a machine-pounded sample with synthetic fibers, Halmeoni Kim's brother, 70-year-old Harabeoji Park—a retired haenyeo diver with a missing finger (bitten off by an octopus, he liked to joke)—slammed his fist on the table. "Your machine works without haenyeo sim (sea women's spirit)," he said, tossing the fabric into a bucket of seawater. "Our gudeul remembers the hands that harvested it, the songs that pounded it, the sea that grew it. This thing is plastic—it drowns in the waves."
Tensions erupted when a sudden tsunami warning sent villagers fleeing to higher ground. Though the worst of the wave spared the village, the surge flooded the kelp drying grounds and swept away baskets of spun threads. The looms, set up near the shore, were smashed against the rocks, their wooden frames splintered. "The sea rejects your metal thread," Harabeoji Park muttered as men dragged debris from the cove, his voice trembling with anger. With the Yeongdeungje (sea goddess festival) approaching—when new gudeul is offered to appease the spirits of the deep—the community faced disaster. "Without offerings, Yeongdeung will send more storms," Halmeoni Kim said, staring at the ruined kelp piles. "And without gudeul, our haenyeo can't mend their diving nets."
That night, Su Yao sat with Halmeoni Kim in her hanok, where a pot of miyeok guk (seaweed soup) simmered over a fire. The walls were hung with gudeul rugs stitched with the names of diver ancestors, and a small shrine held a clay statue of Yeongdeung, draped in a gudeul scarf. "I know this cloth isn't just for warmth," Su Yao said, sipping sujeonggwa (persimmon punch) from a ceramic cup. "It's a bond between your people and the sea. We want to strengthen that bond, not break it."
Halmeoni Kim smiled, passing her a plate of hongeo (fermented skate). "My samchon (great-aunt) used to say that even broken kelp can be rethreaded, if you let the sea guide you," she said. "But your metal—maybe it's a sign. Young girls don't want to dive anymore, don't want to pound kelp. They think gudeul is old-fashioned. We need to show them the sea's craft still has power."
Over the next three weeks, the team worked alongside the haenyeo. They helped rebuild the drying racks with lava stone, their hands blistered from lifting rocks, and joined Yeonmi in diving for fresh kelp during low tide, learning to hold their breath like the sea women and chant the Yeongdeung prayer as they surfaced. "Haesim manse, yeongdeung manse (Long live the sea spirit, long live Yeongdeung)," they sang, their voices mixing with the Jeju dialect until the rhythm felt like the crash of waves.
Lin experimented with coating the seaweed-metal threads in seasnail mucus and tangerine oil—a mixture Jeju women use to waterproof fishing nets. "It needs to move like kelp in current," she said, showing Halmeoni Kim a swatch where the metal threads had merged with the seaweed, adding strength without making the fabric stiff. Halmeoni Kim dipped it in seawater, then wrung it out. "The sea accepts this," she said.
Fiona collaborated with Yeonmi to design a new pattern: haenyeo divers descending into waves, with metal threads outlining their figures to make them shimmer like sunlight on water. "It honors your divers and our shared sea," Fiona explained, and Harabeoji Park nodded, tracing a diver's silhouette with his gnarled finger. "The haenyeo and the sea are one," he said. "This cloth understands that."
On the day of Yeongdeungje, the women gathered at the cove, where their collaborative gudeul was spread over a rock altar, surrounded by offerings of tangerines and abalone. The fabric glowed in the sun: divers in brown kelp thread, their bodies merging into waves woven with metal that caught the light like fish scales. Halmeoni Kim draped a corner over Su Yao's shoulders—a diver and a wave, stitched together with kelp and seaweed-metal thread. "Now you're haenyeo dongi (sea women's friend)," she said.
As the team's car drove away, they could hear the haenyeo norae rising on the breeze, and through the window, Yeonmi was teaching a group of teenagers to pound kelp, the metal thread spooled beside her mallet. Su Yao thought of the new kelp beds, growing thick in the cove, and the way the metal threads had learned to work with the seaweed—how innovation, when rooted in respect for a people's struggle with the elements, becomes part of their survival.
Her phone buzzed with a message from Rajasthan: Meera had sold their collaborative bandhani to a cultural center, funding a knotting workshop for girls. Su Yao smiled, typing back: "We've added new threads in Jeju—your turn to weave something that honors the sea and the land."
Somewhere in the distance, the haenyeo songs merged with the crash of waves on lava rocks, a harmony as old as Jeju's cliffs and as endless as the horizon.