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# Chapter 11: What the Haenyeo Said
The development company’s business card had been sitting on the edge of the counter for three days, and Sohyun still hadn’t thrown it away.
She wasn’t sure what that meant. Probably nothing. Probably the same thing it meant when she kept a dead pen in the drawer for six months — not sentiment, just the particular inertia of a person who was always too busy to deal with small things when there were large things demanding attention. She had simply set it there when the two men in their mainland coats had left on Monday, and then Tuesday had happened, and Wednesday, and now it was Thursday morning and the card was still there between the ceramic sugar jar and the small vase where she kept a sprig of dried lavender, its corner lifting slightly whenever the door opened and closed.
Kim Minsoo, it read. Regional Director, Haneul Construction. A Seoul number. A Jeju number. A title that took up the same amount of space as his name, as if the two were equally important.
It doesn’t mean anything, she thought, pulling her attention back to the portafilter. You haven’t decided anything.
The milk steamer hissed. Thursday morning, and the café had been open for forty minutes, and Sohyun was making her third tangerine latte of the day — this one for Hiker Kim, who came in every Thursday before his Olle trail walk with the particular cheerfulness of a retired schoolteacher who had discovered, late in life, that the body could be a source of pleasure rather than obligation. He was seventy-one years old and wore the same orange windbreaker every week and always asked for the latte with an extra shot, a detail that had surprised Sohyun the first time and now seemed entirely consistent with who he was.
“Espresso’s ready,” she called, and he looked up from the trail map he’d been studying at the counter.
“You remembered the double shot.”
“I always remember.”
He smiled the way people smiled when they’d been seen accurately, which was different from the way they smiled when they were being complimented. “Your grandfather used to say the same thing,” he said. “About the tangerines. He knew every tree on that farm by name.”
Sohyun set the latte on the counter. “He still does.”
A small silence. Hiker Kim took the cup and wrapped both hands around it. Outside, the morning light was doing the thing it did in March — arriving sideways, low and amber through the old glass of the front windows, making everything in the café look like it was lit from within. The grain of the wooden tables. The pale stone of the floor. The dried tangerine peels she’d threaded on a string above the counter, which she changed every month and which smelled, right now, faintly of something between citrus and wood smoke.
“He still does,” she said again, more quietly, and went back to the espresso machine.
Mi-yeong had told her everything and nothing yesterday morning.
Sohyun replayed it now, the way she’d been replaying it since, in the gaps between orders and cleaning and the small mechanical acts of keeping a café running — the way Mi-yeong had sat at the counter with her red bean rice cake and her expression of someone who had assembled a puzzle but wasn’t certain all the pieces belonged to the same picture.
Haenyeo Grandma Boksun says the development men have been down at Hwasun Beach three times this month. Walking the shoreline, taking photographs. One of them had a measuring tape.
A measuring tape.
And Gwang-sik — you know Gwang-sik from the hardware store — he says his cousin in Seogwipo heard they’ve already bought two plots near the Olle path. Not announced. Just done.
Sohyun had asked: “Which plots?”
And Mi-yeong had looked at her with the particular expression of someone who had been hoping not to have to say the next thing. One is old Choi’s field. He’s been wanting to sell for years, everyone knows. But the other one —
She’d stopped.
The other one is between your grandfather’s farm and the coast road. The buffer land. If they get that, they’ve got access to both sides.
Sohyun had not said anything. She had looked at her coffee.
Sohyun-ah.
I know.
Your grandfather doesn’t—
I know, Mi-yeong eonni.
She had smiled, the way she smiled when she needed people to stop worrying about her, and Mi-yeong had not been fooled by it but had let it pass, which was one of the things Sohyun valued most about her — she knew when to push and when to let a person have their composure for a few more minutes.
What she hadn’t told Mi-yeong, and what she had been sitting with since, was that the buffer land was not just between the farm and the coast road.
The café’s lease included a right-of-way across that land.
Without it, the delivery trucks couldn’t reach the back entrance. Without it, the lane from the main road was too narrow for the citrus supply van, which meant she’d be carrying thirty-kilo crates of tangerines by hand from the street. Without it, technically, the café could still operate — but barely, and at a cost that would eat into margins she was already managing with surgical precision.
She had not thought about this when she’d signed the lease two years ago. Why would she have? The land had always been there. Old-growth hedgerow on one side, volcanic stone wall on the other, the coast road beyond. It had seemed as permanent as the stone.
It doesn’t mean anything yet, she told herself again. They haven’t bought it. It’s still a rumor.
The front door opened and three hikers came in, trailing the smell of sea wind and sunscreen, and Sohyun put her smile on and went to take their order.
Park Jihun arrived at ten past ten, which was when he usually arrived on days when he had morning shoots.
She knew this not because she was tracking his schedule — she was absolutely not tracking his schedule — but because the café had rhythms, and people settled into them whether they meant to or not, and Jihun had settled into the Thursday rhythm of: arrive late morning, order coffee, sit at the corner table by the window, write in the notebook until noon, sometimes eat the tangerine tart if she put one on the counter near him without saying anything, leave by one for afternoon shooting.
He was wearing the same grey jacket he always wore, the one that had a slight fraying at the left cuff that he either hadn’t noticed or had decided was not his problem. The film camera was around his neck. He came in with the slightly distracted look of someone whose mind was still in the previous location, whatever that had been this morning, and he ordered the tangerine latte with three sugars — three — and took his usual table.
Sohyun made the latte and brought it over without being asked, which was what she did for all the regulars, and which was not a special thing for him specifically.
“You were at the beach this morning,” she said, setting the cup down. The camera had salt-dried air on the lens housing — she could see it from here.
He looked up. “Hwasun. The haenyeo work early.”
“They do.”
A pause in which she should have gone back to the counter.
“How was the shoot?”
He tilted his head slightly — not a shake, not a nod, something between. “Complicated,” he said. “One of the divers — Grandma Okja — she’s been doing it for fifty-three years. She went under three times this morning and came up with nothing.” He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn, an unconscious gesture. “She wasn’t bothered. She kept saying the sea has its own schedule. But her daughter was there and the daughter was upset, and the dynamic between them was—” He stopped. “Complicated.”
“The daughter wants her to stop.”
He looked at her. “You know them?”
“Grandma Okja comes in sometimes after the morning dive. She gets the barley tea and the tangerine cake.” Sohyun considered. “She’s never mentioned a daughter.”
“She doesn’t,” he said. “I got the daughter’s name from the village office records. She lives in Busan now. She drove down last week and she’s been showing up at the beach every morning, just — standing there. Watching.”
Sohyun thought about this. “And Grandma Okja doesn’t acknowledge her?”
“She doesn’t look at her.”
“That’s its own kind of conversation.”
He went quiet for a moment, the way he went quiet when something landed differently than he’d expected. Then he said, “Yes. Exactly that.”
She went back to the counter. But she thought about Grandma Okja going under and coming up and going under again, the daughter standing on the shore, and the particular weight of being watched by someone who loves you and is afraid for you, and how those two things — love and fear — could look, from the outside, identical to each other and like nothing at all.
The second difficult thing happened at eleven forty-five.
The door opened, and Sohyun looked up expecting another hiker, and it was not a hiker.
It was a woman she hadn’t seen before — mid-thirties, mainland look to her coat, the kind of practical-expensive that signaled someone who spent a lot of time in offices and occasionally outdoors but not quite enough to know the difference between gear and fashion. She was carrying a leather portfolio under one arm and she looked around the café with the expression of someone who had been given directions and was checking that the directions were correct.
Then she saw Sohyun and came to the counter.
“Han Sohyun-ssi?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from Haneul Construction.” She placed a business card on the counter with both hands, the gesture formal and slightly stiff, as if she’d been coached in politeness rather than grown it. “Yoon Jiseon. I work under Director Kim Minsoo.” A pause. “He asked me to come personally.”
Sohyun looked at the business card. Then at the one already sitting by the sugar jar.
She did not reach for either of them.
“We’re not currently serving the lunch menu,” she said, pleasantly. “But the tangerine latte is available, and the citrus cake.”
Yoon Jiseon blinked. “I’m not here for—” She recalibrated. “Director Kim wanted to discuss the proposal he mentioned on Monday. He thought a personal follow-up might be more comfortable than a formal meeting.”
“He mentioned it,” Sohyun said. “I told him I wasn’t interested.”
“He thought perhaps, given a few days to consider—”
“I’m not interested,” Sohyun said, “in the same way I wasn’t interested on Monday. The amount of time that has passed doesn’t change what I think about it.”
A pause. Yoon Jiseon’s expression remained professional, but something in it shifted — a minor recalibration, the look of a person who had been told to expect resistance and was now actually encountering it and finding it slightly different from the version they’d been briefed on.
From the corner table, Jihun was very still. He was not looking at them — his eyes were on the notebook — but the pen wasn’t moving.
“Director Kim’s concern,” Yoon Jiseon said carefully, “is that the current development timeline means certain decisions will need to be made whether or not local businesses participate. He wanted you to be aware of that. He felt it was more respectful to come in person.”
“That’s very thoughtful of him,” Sohyun said.
The pleasantness of her voice was not, she was aware, entirely convincing. But it was the kind of pleasantness that was also a wall — smooth on the surface, nothing to get purchase on.
“If the development proceeds as planned,” Yoon Jiseon said, “the access lane on the eastern side will be incorporated into the construction zone. There are provisions in the plan for alternative access routes to be—”
“The access lane,” Sohyun said.
“Yes. The easement that crosses the—”
“I know what an easement is.” Her voice had not changed in volume. It had changed in temperature. “And I know that easement is part of my lease agreement, and that any alteration to it would require my landlord’s consent, which would require my knowledge, which means you’re here telling me this because you don’t have that consent yet.”
Yoon Jiseon was quiet for a moment.
“Director Kim thought it would be better to discuss it directly with you,” she said, “rather than proceed through purely legal channels.”
“I appreciate his thoughtfulness,” Sohyun said, in the same pleasant, wall-smooth tone. “Tell him I’ll need to review the development plan documentation before any further conversation. In writing. To the address on my lease.”
A beat.
“Of course,” Yoon Jiseon said. She picked up her portfolio. Did not take her business card back from the counter. “I’ll let him know.”
She left. The door closed.
The café was very quiet. Hiker Kim had left an hour ago. The three hikers were gone. There was only Jihun at the corner table, still very still, and the sound of the March wind outside pressing against the old glass, and the smell of the espresso machine cooling down toward its mid-morning idle.
Sohyun put both hands flat on the counter and stared at the two business cards sitting there side by side, same logo, different names.
Her hands were not shaking. She was making sure of that.
“You heard all of that,” she said.
She wasn’t asking. Jihun had put the pen down and was looking at her from across the café with the direct, careful attention she’d noticed the first day — the quality of someone who watched people for a living and had decided, in this moment, to not pretend otherwise.
“I heard it,” he said.
“Then you know what they’re doing.”
“The easement.” He closed the notebook. “If they get the buffer land and incorporate the access lane into the construction zone, they can reroute it or make it functionally unusable. Your café can still operate but the supply chain becomes difficult enough that—”
“That it becomes easier to sell,” she finished. “Or to close.”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.
Sohyun came out from behind the counter. Not toward him — she moved to the front window, standing at an angle to the glass, looking out at the lane. The stone wall. The mandarin trees over the top. The business-card woman’s car was still visible at the end of the lane, idling. Then it pulled out and was gone.
“Mi-yeong told me yesterday that they’ve been at Hwasun Beach,” she said. “Taking measurements.”
“I know. I saw them Tuesday.”
She turned. “You saw them and didn’t say anything?”
A short silence.
“I didn’t know what they were doing on Tuesday,” he said. “I thought they might be surveyors for the coastal infrastructure project. There’s a seawall maintenance program this year.” He paused. “I should have mentioned it anyway.”
She looked at him for a moment, trying to decide if she was annoyed and concluding that she wasn’t — not with him, not about that. He hadn’t known. She hadn’t known either, not all of it, not until Mi-yeong had assembled the pieces.
“My grandfather’s farm,” she said. “The buffer land is between the farm and the coast road. If they get it—”
“Do you know who owns it?”
“Lee Jongcheol. He’s been in Gwangju for ten years, his son manages the property. Or used to.” She pressed two fingers against her lips, thinking. “I don’t know if he’s been approached.”
“Would your grandfather know?”
The question sat in the air between them. Would her grandfather know. Would her grandfather remember. Would her grandfather be having a good day or a bad day, and which of those things was it acceptable to plan around when you were trying to protect something he’d spent his whole life building.
“I’ll go see him this afternoon,” she said.
Jihun was quiet for a moment. Then: “Can I come?”
She looked at him.
“I’m not asking as—” He stopped. Started again. “Not for the documentary. I just.” He looked at the notebook on the table. “He mentioned the tangerine trees last week. When I was there for the shoot. He talked about which variety does best in the east field versus the west, the light difference. He talked for twenty minutes.” A brief pause. “He seemed to enjoy it.”
Sohyun thought about her grandfather talking about tangerine trees for twenty minutes to a man with a film camera. She could picture it exactly — her grandfather crouching at the base of a tree, pointing at the root structure, using the particular vocabulary of someone who had grown up with these trees and knew them the way you knew the faces of people you loved.
She thought about what Hiker Kim had said that morning. He knew every tree on that farm by name.
“All right,” she said. “Three o’clock. I close early on Thursdays.”
He nodded.
Outside, the wind shifted, and the dried tangerine peel above the counter moved on its string, and the café filled briefly with the smell of old citrus and something that had survived a long winter and was still, stubbornly, fragrant.
She almost didn’t notice the car.
It was parked on the main road above the farm — a black sedan, mainland plates, sitting in the lay-by where people usually stopped to take photographs of the coastal view. She registered it the way you registered most things when you were driving a familiar road: peripheral, filed, dismissed.
Then she saw the window was cracked open an inch, and the angle of the wing mirror was wrong for someone looking at the view.
It was pointed at the farm entrance.
Okay, she thought. Okay.
She parked and got out and did not look at the car again, because looking at it would tell whoever was in it something about what she knew and what she didn’t, and she was not ready to give them that information.
Jihun had followed in his rental car. He pulled up behind her and got out, and she said very quietly, without turning her head: “Black sedan on the main road. Don’t look directly.”
He didn’t. But she caught, from the corner of her eye, the slight change in how he held himself — the stillness that settled over him, the same stillness she’d seen in the café when the development company woman had been there. Attention, pulled inward and focused.
“How long has it been there?” he murmured.
“I don’t know. I just noticed.”
They walked through the farm gate. The afternoon light was laying long and yellow across the rows of trees, the kind of light that made everything look temporary and precious, and Sohyun felt it the way she always felt it coming here — the particular combination of love and grief that the farm produced in her, which was different from the feeling she got anywhere else and which she had never fully explained to herself, let alone to anyone else.
Her grandfather was in the east field. He was wearing the dark green work jacket and the wide-brimmed hat he’d worn for as long as she could remember, and he was doing something to the base of one of the hallabong trees — checking the soil, it looked like, pressing his fingers in and examining what came up.
He didn’t look up when they came through the gate. He was talking quietly to the tree. Not in sentences — just sounds, the low murmuring that farmers used, the same frequency as humming, that wasn’t quite either.
Sohyun stood at the edge of the row and waited.
After a moment, he looked up.
“Sohyun-ah,” he said. And then, seeing Jihun: “The camera boy.”
“Annyeonghaseyo, harabeoji,” Jihun said, with a small bow. He had left the film camera in the car.
Her grandfather looked at this — at the absence of the camera, at the fact of Jihun having come without it — and seemed to file it as meaningful. He stood up slowly, brushing earth from his knees. “Come and see this,” he said, pointing at the tree. “The soil’s too dry. We need rain.”
They crouched beside him. He showed them the root collar of the tree, the texture of the soil, the way the bark looked at the base. He talked for several minutes about the difference between drought stress and root disease, using the Jeju vocabulary for these things, the old words that Sohyun had grown up hearing and which still lived in her somewhere below language.
And then, in the middle of explaining about the east field drainage, he stopped.
He was looking at the coast road.
At the black sedan, visible over the stone wall, still parked in the lay-by.
“They came last week,” he said. “Two men. They wanted to talk about the land next door.” He said it the same way he’d said everything else — in the same even, untroubled voice, like a farmer assessing weather. “I told them to talk to you.”
Sohyun felt something move in her chest — relief and alarm arriving at the same time, which was one of the stranger sensations she’d learned to sit with in the past year.
“Harabeoji,” she said. “What did they say exactly? When you told them to talk to me.”
Her grandfather was quiet for a moment. He pressed his fingers into the soil again, checking something only he could feel.
“They said,” he said slowly, “that you already knew.”
The words landed in the silence of the east field, among the tangerine trees and the late afternoon light and the distant sound of the coast road where a car was parked at an angle that made no sense for someone looking at the view.
They said you already knew.
Sohyun looked at Jihun.
He was very still, his eyes on her grandfather, and his expression was the one she was starting to recognize — the one that meant he was watching something and understanding it fully and had already decided what he thought about it, and was waiting, with the patience of someone trained to wait, to see what she was going to do.
Her grandfather picked up a handful of dry soil and let it sift through his fingers.
“We need rain,” he said again. “Soon.”