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<br> Daniel Dae Kim as Jin
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"''''"
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N/A
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"''''", "'' And Found ''"
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Jin-Soo Kwon
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Unknown
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Namhae , South Korea
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Businessman/enforcer for Mr Paik, formerly bellhop and waiter
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Secret mission to deliver watches for Mr Paik's associates in Sydney
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Secret mission to deliver watches for Mr Paik's associates in Los Angeles and possibly escape from Paik's radar with Sun
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Daniel Dae Kim
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is a
Fictional Character on the
ABC television series ''
Lost ''. He is played by
Daniel Dae Kim .
Jin-Soo Kwon is a Korean man under the employ of his wife
Sun 's father, the wealthy industrialist Mr. Paik. He was born into relatively poor circumstances and, as a child, worked with his father on a fishing boat in a rural village in
Namhae . One of his first jobs in the city is at the luxurious
Seoul Gateway Hotel managed by an intolerant man named Mr. Kim, who deduces Jin's meager origins, and in hiring Jin as a doorman, instructs him not to allow "people like him" into the hotel. Jin works in this position briefly, quitting after Mr. Kim rebukes him for allowing a slightly disheveled man into the hotel so the man's young son could use the hotel lobby's bathroom. Leaving the hotel after his resignation, Jin runs into a beautiful woman, Sun, who eventually becomes his wife. Upon coming to work for Mr. Paik, Jin denounces and leaves behind his peasant background so as to carry favor with Mr. Paik, and obtain Sun's hand in marriage.
Jin's strained relationship with Sun stems from his employment to her unscrupulous father, who is not above using
Bribery ,
Blackmail ,
Extortion and possibly even
Murder to succeed. When Jin comes home one night with blood on his hands, Sun grows afraid of him and the kind of work she fears he is doing for her father. Jin has been assigned to intimidate a government official into overlooking
Environmental Regulation violated by one of Paik's factories; rather than allow one of Paik's cruelly efficient
Hit Men to simply kill the official, Jin violently beats the man in order to save his life. Jin, however, is unable to bring himself to tell Sun about her father's shady dealings and disillusion her about the source of her wealth and replies, "I do what your father tells me".
Despite the growing problems in their relationship, Jin and Sun still want to have children together. However, Sun is unable to become pregnant, which frustrates Jin because he hopes giving Sun's father a grandchild will please him to the point of giving Jin a safer and more legitimate job. When Jin finds out from a doctor that Sun will never be able to become pregnant, he grows angry and yells at Sun, believing that she knew about her condition all along and hid it from him.
Jin is soon assigned a secret mission to deliver watches to Mr. Paik's associates in
Sydney and then
Los Angeles ; Sun assumes that it was a vacation. Before leaving
South Korea for Sydney, Jin visits his father. Jin tells his father about the turmoil that has plagued his life since being employed by Mr. Paik. Jin's father advises that he and Sun should stay in the United States once they get there and never return to Korea. This becomes Jin's initial plan until he is confronted by an associate of Mr. Paik in an airport
Washroom before boarding the doomed flight. The spy informs Jin that his plan to flee with Sun has been found out and he threatens to take Sun away from him should they run away.
Jin has a gift for working harder than most people without tiring and is the best fisher in the group, a skill which he acquired perhaps from his father.
Note: Two largely ignored facets of Jin's personal history involves the mandatory military service (
Conscription ) required of all native born South Korean males from the age of 19 for a minimum period of 24 months, and the fact that a Korean man of his age would have had six years of training in English in school, and more if he attended a university. However, the latter may be explained by his poor roots; perhaps he did not attend school or the school systems in his area were unable to fit government standards.
Jin's inability to communicate sets him apart from the other castaways and he usually stays away from the others, who initially think of him as violent and abusive to his wife. Jin and
Michael share an adversarial relationship for most of the first season, which twice explodes into physical violence. Their initial enmity begins in "House of the Rising Sun" when Jin attacks Michael to retrieve his father-in-law's watch, which Michael has found. Michael is the first to learn that Sun speaks English, which she had learned when preparing to leave Jin, though she eventually changed her mind. This discovery occurs because Sun wanted to explain to Michael why Jin attacked him. Michael seems to form a mutual understanding with Jin by the end of that episode, but their tension later erupts in "...In Translation", in which Michael attacks Jin for the alleged destruction of the raft he is building, not knowing that the raft was actually burned by Michael's son Walt, who does not want to leave the island. Having eventually set aside their issues, Jin aids Michael in constructing a new raft. The two set off on the raft together, along with Walt and fellow castaway
Sawyer , and although their attempt to find shipping lanes fails, Michael and Jin have become good friends, with Jin looking after both him and Sawyer.
Jin has a single handcuff on his left wrist for the first season; this dates from his assault on Michael, after which Jin is handcuffed to some wreckage using handcuffs previously owned by the
U.S. Marshal (and presumably worn by
Kate Austen during the flight and discarded by her in the jungle after the crash, where
Walt Lloyd finds them). Michael frees Jin by cutting the chain with an axe, but with the key lost, Jin still wore the handcuff until the second season.
The public revelation in “…In Translation” that Sun speaks English only further widens the gap between Jin and Sun, and they separate. The separation seems serious when Jin becomes part of the raft party that intends to leave the island, but before Jin leaves on the raft, he and Sun reconcile. She gives him a notebook that she has written, containing phonetic spellings, in
Korean , of common English words.
When Sawyer is shot by the men who kidnapped
Walt and falls into the water, Jin jumps into the ocean to rescue him. He ends up washing ashore and is captured by the tail-end survivors, or “Tailies”, until he escapes, only to find Michael and Sawyer, who have drifted back to the island on the raft’s remnants. The Tailies, who themselves have been attacked by the Others, hold Jin, Sawyer and Michael in a makeshift prison, thinking them to be members of the Others, until Michael convinces them that they are also the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. In one episode, Jin is shown speaking perfect English in Hurley's dream sequence.
Jin becomes better friends with Michael as they build the second raft together. He also befriends Sawyer following the destruction of the raft, and he looks out for both of them during their journey with the tail-section survivors.
While searching for Michael in the jungle, Jin gets a close up view of the mysterious "
Others "... but only their feet.
Jin is reunited with Sun and the other fuselage survivors when the tail-section survivors join that camp. Using a bolt-cutter found in the hatch, Locke is able to remove the remaining handcuff from Jin's wrist.
In
The Hunting Party , Hurley tells Sun and Jin that Michael "went all commando" to go look for Walt again. Jin hears the word "Walt" and suddenly begins packing to go find Michael. Sun asks why he is packing, and he tells her that Michael is his friend, but Sun reminds him that she is his wife. Sun tells Jin that she did not like being told what to do for the past four years of their marriage and was very worried when Jin was on the raft, and Jin decides to stay with her instead of risking danger.
Sun is almost kidnapped during an apparent attack from the Others in
The Long Con , which causes Jin to become very protective of her. This causes a huge fight between them, and Jin ends up tearing apart Sun's garden. He feels guilty for what he did, and tells Sun that he is sorry and that he needs her because he does not understand what anyone is saying on the island. Sun reveals to Jin that she is pregnant, and that their doctor told her in private that Jin is actually the one who is sterile (he was afraid to tell this to Jin in person because he was an enforcer for Sun's father). Sun then promises Jin that she was never with another man, confirming that the baby is in fact Jin's. Jin believes that the pregnancy is a miracle.
Jin is notable in that he is the only major character who was unable to speak
English before arriving on the island. By contrast,
Korean -born actor Daniel Dae Kim was raised in
Pennsylvania , and thus in reality speaks
American English fluently and
Korean with an American accent. He is coached on set by a dialect coach and co-star
Yunjin Kim to speak Korean without the American accent.
