My father-in-law was a pre-teen during the devastating Korean War - orphaned during the war and grew up in poverty. Got into vegetable wholesaling during the be

My father-in-law was a pre-teen during the devastating Korean War - orphaned during the war and grew up in poverty. Got into vegetable wholesaling during the beginning of the boom years and made enough money to get into real estate speculation which then boomed even bigger -- making him a nice bit of money along the way. He's now semi-retired, plays golf, lives in a luxury house his son built for him and my mother-in-law, drives a nice foreign car and splits his "work time" between maintaining undeveloped property his U.S. friends have purchased for investment and buying and selling small apartment buildings. He once took me to a small museum where they had on display various "traditional" cooking and houseware items. Wood, stone, woven rice straw rope, a bit of metal here and there for blades and things that needed weight. I thought these were relics from maybe the 17th or 18th century (or earlier) since they were "traditional" -- and in truth lots of it looked like late Iron Age level technology. He said that he grew up with that stuff, cooking in handmade pots, wearing woven hay sandals and rough woven fabric clothes. By the time my wife's generation was born, Korea's industrialization was well underway. It wasn't maybe "first world", but 20 years after a war which completely flattened the country, my wife was born into a world with running water, electricity, cars, schools, colleges, coffee shops, restaurants, telephones, high-rise apartment buildings, cheap and secure food...as a young girl she grew up on American schlock-80s imported TV like MacGuyver, A-Team and so on, they had regular video game arcades, home computers, boutique coffee shops, designer clothing, malls, department stores, a robust television, film and entertainment industry and so on. Her 80s childhood would have been not much different than a kid growing up in New York City. That's 30 years after the war. Korea had joined the "developed" world when that first generation was young and had ascended to first-world before that generation was out of working years.