K-actress Song Ji-hyo happy to get ‘scolded’ when becoming a haenyeo for BBC documentary

Growing up in the coastal city of Pohang, South Korean actress Song Ji-hyo often saw her eldest aunt return from work with a basket full of seafood.

Her aunt was a haenyeo (Korean for “sea women”), a woman who freedives, without any breathing apparatus, to harvest seafood for sale.

As a child, the 43-year-old star thought it was a simple task. But taking on the challenge of becoming a haenyeo in the upcoming BBC docuseries, Deep Dive Korea: Song Ji-hyo’s Haenyeo Adventure, made her realise it was anything but.

The three-part series premieres on BBC Earth and BBC Player in Asia on May 11.  

Speaking with the help of an interpreter to The Straits Times over Zoom from Kuala Lumpur, where she was promoting the show, Song said: “I thought it was a simple routine – you go into the water, catch some seafood and then you return.

“But after experiencing it for myself, it was never an easy job. You have to dive and hold your breath with no oxygen tank, so you have to compromise with nature and take only what it allows you to take. I gained newfound respect for haenyeos after the show.”

Haenyeo, a traditional way of life with more than 400 years of history, has been recognised as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by Unesco. The craft is on the decline as it struggles to find young recruits willing to take up the arduous occupation.

Song, who starred in series like Princess Hours (2006) and The Witch’s Diner (2021), is no stranger to demanding physical challenges and the outdoors. She is nicknamed “Ace”, or star player, as part of the regular cast on the long-running South Korean game show variety series Running Man (2010 to present).

But spending a month training with Jeju Island’s experienced haenyeos, mostly elderly women aged over 60, was a whole new challenge – one she took on in hopes of getting a scolding.

Song, who made her show-business debut in 2001, said: “I realised as I was getting older, people stopped scolding or educating me because I wasn’t taking on more challenges and confronting my limits. So, I wanted to be in that position of learning and embracing new challenges again, and get scolded if necessary so that I feel as though I’m staying awake and alert (in my career).”

Freediving is certainly a new challenge and one that Song said she will be keen to continue as a hobby. She can now freedive up to 12m, though the target depth she hopes to clear one day is 20m.

Born to a mother who was a competitive swimmer, she was not scared of diving without an oxygen tank in the choppy waters surrounding Jeju Island. Aside from the watchful eye of her haenyeo seniors, she had safety measures like the taewak, a buoy that marks where each haenyeo is in the sea.

“There was no point where I felt like I wanted to surrender to the sea. I wanted to see so much more of it, but I was always running out of breath,” she recalled.

During her dives, Song suffered from hypothermia once, and bled from her nose and mouth another time because she did not manage to equalise the pressure in her ears and nose properly. She recovered from both ordeals quickly.

“It sounds scary and I think the staff around me probably thought it was dangerous looking at me (bleed), but there was no point where I thought my experience was life-threatening. The sea is dangerous, but it’s not that dangerous.”

Filming in Jeju with the island’s natives also posed another challenge – a language barrier. The Jeju dialect is notoriously difficult to understand for South Koreans who did not grow up there.

She said: “It’s so difficult to understand that Running Man even had quizzes in the past for the cast to guess what something means in the Jeju dialect.

“I tried to study it a bit prior to filming and learnt simple greetings like ‘Good job’ and ‘Thank you’, but even then, I was always repeating after the haenyeos to understand what they were saying.”

So after weeks of intensive training from some of South Korea’s best as well as veteran haenyeos, how long can Song hold her breath underwater now?

“I actually didn’t keep count but I’ll say this: when you have the incentive of catching something in the sea, you will hold your breath for longer because you are that much more motivated to.”

She added: “When I was diving, I just kept telling myself I cannot give up, not because I had to do it, but because I wanted to.”