On the island:
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 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.
Before the crash:
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 curry 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 Mr. Paik. 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".
Jin is 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.
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