Jeff Yan's latest "Asian Pop" column for SF Gate is all about Daniel Dae Kim, who's riding high off a solid six-year run on Lost, one of the greatest TV shows ever, and entering into his new job on the remake of Hawaii Five-0. Best of all, the guy gets to stick around Hawaii: The book of Daniel. Lucky bastard.
It's a good article, delving deep into the powerful evolution of Daniel's character on Lost, and the show's profound significance for Asian actors on television as a whole. I particularly appreciated this piece of insight on the man we have grown to love as Jin-Soo Kwon:
"This character honestly required more work than any other character I've ever played," says Kim. "Trying to find his humanity was something of a challenge, which was compounded by having to act in Korean. But you see this remarkable growth in him over the series; you see him connecting to others, discovering his voice. Over six years, he changes and develops in ways I'm not sure you've ever seen before in an Asian character on American TV."Now, on to new endeavors. I recently watched the pilot episode of Hawaii Five-0, and overall, I liked it. It's definitely an action show, and Daniel and Grace Park round out the quartet of the show's main cast quite nicely. But I wasn't particularly thrilled with the first episode's human trafficking plot, which included a not-so-nice Will Yun Lee as a villainous Chinese snakehead. Still, the show is pretty promising. I'll be tuning in.
And if the quest for redemption is central to "Lost"'s core, of all the main cast members, Jin has the hardest road to get there. None of the others has so rocky a personal narrative, or so many forces arrayed against him -- as we find out in flashback, from the low circumstances of his birth, to the evil scheming of his hoodlum father-in-law, to his wife's infidelity, and even his physical inability to sire the child he so desperately wants, events have conspired to pave his road to hell. He can't solely blame karma, of course; during the course of the series, Jin makes more bad decisions and big mistakes than anyone (with the exception of Jack, for whom bad decisions and big mistakes are fundamental character traits). Yet in the end, Jin overcomes both the barreling momentum of his past and the misguided actions of his present to redeem himself in the eyes of his companions -- and, more importantly, his beloved.
"It's an amazing thing that the producers put a prime-time spotlight on the marriage of an Asian couple for six years," he says. Married for nearly two decades to his wife Mia, also Korean American, the dynamics of the TV relationship felt keenly real: "Set aside the sci-fi, and the relationship between Jin and Sun is all about the push and pull, the work required to make love work, both in times when things seem like they're on autopilot and in times of conflict and crisis."