Those who had never heard of the county Wanju, found around 112 miles south of Seoul, until now, will say the contrary now. All because of this 69-year old woman who lives alone on the mountain in the village of Sinchon. As funny is her name Cha Sa-soon, as extraordinary is her story. She has become a rather unusual national celebrity.
The reason for her popularity is very intriguing.
Ms. Cha wanted to get her driving license, but failed the latter for hundreds of times, but without ever giving up. She finally succeeded on her 950th try. She started since April 2005, by taking the test once a day five days a week. Eventually, she reduced the pace to twice a week on encountering failures upon failures, but she was determined she will succeed one day.
One of her instructor, Park Su-yeon mentioned, “When she finally got her license, we all went out in cheers and hugged her, giving her flowers.” Another instruct said that Ms. Cha should not indulge in driving to be a danger to others on the road, because she had only passed in the written test and had yet to pass through the real driving test.
Words of her numerous failures spread out like fire and reporters started tracing her even though the route was difficultly accessible, only via a narrow street with public transportation as the only means of transport. While she got the license, Hyundai gifted her a $16,800 car. A pure coincidence it is, the name of Ms.Cha in Korean
meaning is “vehicle”.
Ms.Cha said that she envied people driving and also wanted to drive, but its only in the 60s that she started working to get the license. She started late, as she had to look after her four children and her husband. Its only when the latter died and her kids grew and went away that she could finally get some time for herself. Her wish was to get the license so that she could drive her grandchildren to the zoo.
The written test consisted of 40 multiple-choice questions to be tackled within 50 minutes was a real headache for Ms. Cha. So she memorized as many questions and their answers as possible without knowing what they meant. But it is difficult to succeed this way, however it paid on the 950th attempt with 60 out of 100.
In my opinion, this should have been in the Guiness Book of World Records, but unfortunately, it’s not the case. Maybe, one day it will be there, and you could try to break her record, but you have a long way to go up to 951 times. And sometimes when you deliberately try to fail a test, it can be very difficult to do so.
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