Page 166 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

hunted pearls. But she said "traditional" without a whiff of sneering.

As a child, she asked, Doesn't it hurt them, ripping them open? Shoving rocks down

their throats?

This made her grandmother feel like a sapling in an earthquake. At the factory, they

said they were helping oysters: oyster farming for cultured pearls helped the oyster

population to recover from previous generations' over-harvesting. Maybe they were

right, but so was Sumiko. Torturing oysters was no better than killing them.

Sumiko didn't know it, but this was her first exposure to the feeling that drove every ama

to frustration — the sense that their efforts to conserve were all for nothing.

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The co-op allowed each household one wetsuit. Sumiko's mother claimed it, a skillful

funado who breastfed Sumiko on the beach between dives. Reminiscing, she said:

We were already diving five, six hours every day. If all of us stayed even longer, toasty

warm in our wetsuits, think how many more awabi would've died.

Sumiko had no opportunity to wriggle into a wetsuit till she was almost thirty. Growing

up, she dove in cotton shorts and a bandanna, imitating her mother's straight-down

dive, feet skyward shooting. Her mother taught her, as she'd learned from her mother,

to live and dive and die in the current that commingled predators and prey and