In March 1979, a wildfire broke out in Hongcheon, South Korea. It started when an elderly man carelessly discarded a cigarette while gathering wild herbs. The fire burned around 66,000 square meters (16.31 acres) of government-owned forest before it was finally extinguished. As a result, the man was sentenced to five months in prison and fined 1.23 million KRW—a massive amount at the time, when a government employee’s starting monthly salary was less than 100,000 won.
Consumed by guilt, the elderly man worked as a day laborer after his release but passed away from a stroke in 1984. Before he died, he left his wife with one final request: “If I don’t repay the fine, our children will be responsible for it. Please make sure to pay it back.” Despite being much younger than her husband and now left alone to raise four young children, his wife took on the burden of the debt. She was determined to keep the promise, no matter the cost. She worked in rice fields during the day and at a night diner in the evenings, slowly repaying the fine bit by bit. It took her 22 years of hard labor, scraping together meager wages, to finally repay the debt in full while also raising her children.
When asked if she ever resented her husband, she simply said: “Resent him? What’s the point? What’s done is done. He felt terrible about causing that fire until the day he died.”
Her perseverance wasn’t just about duty; it was an expression of deep, unwavering love for her husband.