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Jin-Soo Kwon is a character on the television series Lost, created by J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. He is played by Daniel Dae Kim, and has been present on the show since the 2004 pilot. The character is notable in that he is the one survivor who is entirely unable to speak English. By contrast, Korean-born actor Kim was raised in Pennsylvania, and thus speaks "unaccented" American English in real life.
A Korean man under the employ of Sun's father, the wealthy industrialist Mr. Paik, Jin-Soo Kwon is the only non-English speaking survivor. His inability to communicate sets him apart from the other castaways and he usually stays away from the others, who think of him as violent and abusive to his wife. Jin and Michael shared an often violent adversarial relationship which started by Jin attacking Michael for a watch and culminated in Michael attacking Jin for the alleged destruction of the raft he was building. Having set aside their issues for now, Jin aids Michael on constructing a new raft. Jin has a gift for working harder than most people without tiring and can even catch fish from the ocean using his own hands. His skill at fishing was presumably learned in his childhood when he worked with his father on a fishing boat in a rural village in Pusan, a lifestyle he denounced and left behind upon coming to work for Paik.
Jin's strained relationship with his wife, Sun, stems from his employment to her unscrupulous father, who is not above using bribery, blackmail and extortion to succeed. When Jin came home one night with blood on his hands, Sun grew afraid of him and what kind of work he was doing for Mr. Paik. Jin had 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 beat the man in order to save his life. Jin, however, was unable to bring himself to tell Sun about her father's shady dealings and disillusion her about the source of her wealth, and his silence before the crash led to the dissolution of their relationship. The discovery that Sun speaks English only further widened the gap between them. The separation seemed serious as Jin became part of the raft party that would soon be leaving the island.
Jin was assigned a secret mission to deliver watches to Mr. Paik's associates in Sydney and then Los Angeles. Sun had assumed 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 became Jin's initial plan until he was confronted by an associate of Mr. Paik in an airport restroom before boarding the doomed flight. The spy informed Jin that his plan to flee with Sun had been found out and he threatened to take Sun away from him should they run away.
Before Jin left on the raft, he and Sun reconciled. She gave him a book that she wrote containing phonetic spellings, in Korean, of common English words.
When Sawyer was shot by the men who kidnapped Walt and fell into the water, Jin jumped into the ocean to rescue him. There has been no resolution as to whether or not he survived.
First season episodes that feature flashbacks from Jin are ... In Translation and Exodus: Parts 2 & 3. He also features strongly in House of the Rising Sun, in Sun's flashbacks.
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