A Heavy Price to Learn a Lesson in John-Jin

John-Jin by Rose Tremain is a short story with two main characters. We have John-Jin himself, who was Chinese and born with a disease that held back his growth. He would only grow in minute little bursts. When John-Jin became older his adopted parents took him to Manchester to see a specialist who then started him on treatments of growth hormone shots. Things started to look up but after ten years when John-Jin was 12, the shots took a bad affect on him and he developed Creutzfeldt and Jacob disease. This disease is more commonly known as Mad-Cow disease.

As for the narrator of the story, her name is Susan. She was 10 years old when John-Jin came into her family. She wanted to become a great Spanish dancer. She viewed John-Jin as beautiful as a flower. She goes into great detail as to why she thought that.

The pavilion that her father and herself would go and play miniature golf at, earlier in the story moved 5 inches out to sea and made it unsafe to use. Her father would wish at a wishing well there for John-Jin. Two years later the pavilion was rebuilt with help from girders purchased by the locals with a name engraved on them. Suzan’s parents bought one with John-Jin’s name on it.

In my own view, the pavilion stood for mortality. Meaning that nothing lasts forever and everything has its end. When the pavilion was there at the beginning of the story, Susan showed great excitement for going there and described it as a fun place to be. Toward the end of the story she didn’t describe the pavilion as a great place to be anymore. Instead, she walked to the end of the pier and looked down wondering if someone was