Introduction

Hundreds of people are believed to have been killed or injured when a department store collapsed in South Korea. Sun Min Lee, who's 18 years old, is working her final shift at the glitzy shopping mall called the Sampong Department Store. It may have seemed like the collapse came out of nowhere, but it wasn't an isolated incident. The country was left in ruins by the Korean War, which ended in 1953. A military dictatorship took hold of the country in the early 1960s and piled everything into economic development. More jobs meant a new middle-class lifestyle.