Heidi Shin ’00 first learned about the haenyeo—the female free-divers of Jeju Island, off the coast of South Korea—from the stories her mother told her as a child. A journalist and documentary producer who worked for National Geographic, WGBH, and public radio after graduating from Wellesley, Shin had begun to miss reporting from the field while spending a year at home with her infant daughter. When Shin learned the public radio show The World was running a series on women’s economic empowerment, she remembered her mother’s stories about the haenyeo, so she pitched the idea and packed her bags.
It was only after she had arrived on Jeju, now a working mother herself, that Shin realized the haenyeo were Korea’s first working mothers: the only community in Korea where women have historically been the breadwinners, with their work dating back to the 15th century.
“Diving with the haenyeos on Jeju Island was life-transforming,” says Shin. This community of women, some in their 80s, free dive 30-plus feet under water on a single breath (no oxygen tanks!) to gather abalone, sea urchins, and other shellfish that they sell to support their families.
“These women were the driving economic force for Jeju Island, extraordinary mothers, and a collective community,” Shin says. “They personified so much of what I’d learned at Wellesley, and as a journalist and a new working mother, I thought: ‘I can do that, too.’”
Shin’s 2015 audio and visual story about the divers (“Diving with the last generation of Korea’s Mermaids”) celebrates the unique and dangerous work of this courageous matriarchy, and the challenges they put up with—both physical and societal. In the past, the haenyeo were often scorned for their work, which was seen as low-class, and for the “scandalous” diving garments they wore.
“A lot of children were embarrassed to say that their mothers were divers,” says Shin. “But now it’s the very last generation, because the commercial fisheries are taking over, and because of that, young people are saying, ‘Actually, our mothers are heroes, and they showed us what it meant to be working women.’”
Working women who look out for each other—Shin learned that if one diver doesn’t show up for work, the entire group goes to her house or the hospital to make sure she is OK. The haenyeo also spend time together in the bathhouse after their dives, gossiping and reassuring each other in a way that reminds Shin of late-night dorm chats at Wellesley.
Women supporting women is a major theme in Shin’s work as a journalist and in her own life. She serves on an arts advocacy committee for the Boston Foundation’s Asian Community Fund, where she helps to encourage Asian American women artists to develop as creative professionals. It was through the ACF’s arts and culture collaborative that Shin met Anita Yip ’07, who also serves on the committee and is currently its co-chair.
Yip leads communications for the Massachusetts Asian American & Pacific Islanders Commission and is a citizen artist, cultural strategist, and active resident of Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood. An environmental studies and media arts and sciences double major at Wellesley, Yip is interested in bringing Asian culture to “blue spaces”—such as Boston’s waterfront and beaches. “A lot of my public art comes from what I wish I had growing up,” says Yip, who grew up in Boston but says she can count on one hand the number of times she visited a beach or the waterfront as a kid, despite its proximity. When Yip learned about the Innovation Harbor grant program, which supports community-centered programming along the Boston Harbor, she immediately thought of Shin’s reporting on the haenyeo.
Much of her work focuses on her community in Chinatown, says Yip, and while the haenyeo are not Chinese, she adds, “these Korean women have a story that metaphorically could be the story of the women here in Chinatown. There are so many types of labor by women that are unseen that sustain families and neighborhoods and social movements.” Yip says she wanted to create a project that would center the Korean and Chinese communities, because both have faced “longstanding barriers to both the arts and coastal recreation.”
In January 2026, Yip applied for and received a grant to put on an event in collaboration with Shin, the Lowell Institute, the Korean Cultural Society of Boston, Project Asian Joy, and the New England Aquarium. The result was an immersive audio-photography experience celebrating the 10th anniversary of UNESCO’s recognition of haenyeo culture. Women of the Tides: Stories of Labor, Sea, and Survival was presented June 24 at the New England Aquarium’s Simons Theatre, and the evening included Shin sharing stories from her experience diving with the haenyeo, a conversation facilitated by writer and artist Saebom Kim, and an art-making experience led by Yip.
“Collaborating with other smart, creative women has been so energizing,” says Shin. “Anita is incredibly skilled at building community partnerships and spaces. In Wellesley fashion, she makes things happen.”
The event attracted a diverse audience of over 240 people: college students, artists, environmental conservationists, musicians, composers, filmmakers, Boston-area museum and New England Aquarium patrons, members of the Korean Cultural Society of Boston, Wellesley alums, and Shin’s daughter (now 13). Members of the Asian American immigrant community who attended included a contingent from Boston’s Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), many of whom were garment workers in Chinatown. Yip says the women of CPA were her inspiration for the event, and the CPA alone brought more than 70 members.
“I loved hearing how the women from different communities each connected with the haenyeo divers’ stories, namely their boldness and resilience,” says Shin. “Also, seeing my photography of the divers on an IMAX-sized screen was unimaginably cool.”
In a way, those photographs of the haenyeo ended up on that large-scale screen thanks to an English seminar Shin took with the legendary Larry Rosenwald, now Anne Pierce Rogers Professor Emeritus of American Literature, during her senior year. She says CPLT 375: Translation and the Multilingual World helped her “see that immigrant and women’s voices had a place in the Western literary canon. I learned there was a story in—and not the need for an erasure of—our ‘multilingual America,’ which in turn shaped my work as an immigration reporter in public radio.”
Yip is impressed by how deeply Shin understands “the intimacy of audio as a medium.” “She’s masterful at listening for the emotional texture in a story and building an experience that feels less like being told a story and more like being invited into someone’s world,” says Yip. “I’m grateful she welcomed me into hers, and for the care she took to honor her experience and Korean culture in the process.”
