Jim by Bex Hill

1. To start with Jim lives a rich life, going to a private school, driven by a chauffeur and attending pool parties, cocktails and nice dinners.
"as he rode home in his parents' Packard. Yang, the fast-talking chaffeur, had once worked as an extra in a locally made film,"
"Lowering the window, Yang lashed with his leather riding crop at the thoughtless pedestrians"

This shows us that Jim was rich as he had a chaffeur to drive him around and his parents had a Packard. It also shows the wealth when the chaffeur has a riding crop to whip pedestrians. This shows how the less fortunate were treated by the rich.

2. He is very interested in aircrafts and he likes to find out all the names of them and then name the ones he sees.
"'Mitsubishi... Zero-Sen...ah...Nakajima...ah...'
Jim lay in his cot and listened to the young Japanese Soldier call out the names of the aircraft flying over the hospital."
"He thought of the American aircraft he had seen in the clouds above Shanghai."
"But Jim was glad that the Mustangs were so close. His eyes feasted on every rivet in their fuselages on the gun ports in their wings, on the huge ventral radiators that Jim was sure had been put there for reasons of style alone."
"I've seen American planes, Curtiss bombers and Boeings"

From this we can tell that Jim's hobby and his main focus is in planes as he has learnt many of the names of the planes, American and Japanese. He dreams about them and when he was at a party he sat in a plane near the aerodrome. He also had model aircrafts in his bedroom and he used to take one round with him and play with it. It shows that he also took an interest in the war because he liked to name both the American and Japanese aircrafts. He is also interested in the beauty of the planes, and the style of them.

3. The life he has to live during the war is very different to the life he lived before and he has to endure illness, starvation and poverty.
"Jim knew that most of the inmates of the detention centre had been sent there because they were very old or were expected to die, either of dynsentery and typhoid, or whatever fever he and Private Blake had caught from the foul water."
"We should eat the weevils...we need the protein"
"The already modest food ration had been cut to a single meal each day."
"with knobbed shoulders and birdcage ribs"
"He ate every scrap he could find, aware of the rising numbers of deaths from beri beri and malaria."

We can tell from this that many of the prisoners that were with Jim in the camps died of diseases and although Jim had caught a fever, he had not yet died. We can also see that his life is different in the sense that before, he could have whatever food was in his house and even when his parents had gone and he was wandering around Shanghai alone he was still eating pretty well until the food had run out. But he was even eating the weevils to give him more protein as they only ate a sweet potato and some cracked wheat a day. All the prisoners were starving and were mal-nutritioned which led to illness and their death.

4.He is quite a lively boy and likes to talk and think a lot.
"Jim...! Stop thinking...!"
"Both agreed that he sould never miss a class, if only, Jim suspected, to give themsleves a break from his restless energy."

I think the fact that Jim is young and wants to know about the world and is really interested in planes and the war makes him a bit of a handful and a bit of a pain. He is not depressed like many of the other prisoners although he is starved and probably ill in some way. He has a lot of energy and does many jobs for other people to help out. He thinks about planes a lot of the time and sometimes day dreams about it. He is very chatty and likes to know things so he asks a lot of questions but alos tells a lot of stories and facts to other people.

5. Jim faces reality as he knows that he may not be able to see his parents for a while and he may not recognise them.
"This unknown English couple...had almost become his mother and father. Jim knew that they were complete strangers, but he kept the pretence alive, so that in turn he could keep alive the lost memory of his parents."
"To his surprise he felt a moment of regret, of sadness that his quest for his mother and father would soon be over. As long as he searched for them he was prepared to be hungry and ill."

To start with, as soon as he has lost his parents he is on a desperate search to get back to them and he thinks that he will be sent to the same camp as them. He then realises that he may not be able to see them for a long time and he starts to forget what they look like. He has a picture in his bunk in Lunghua of a British couple and they remind him of his parents. I think that he starts to mature during the story as he is growing older so he realises that things are not very simple and his parents could be a long way away from him and that he may never get to see them or it may be a long time and they might not recognise him.