Major Winston Yu

Major Winston Yu
Biographical Information
Title	Major
Physical Information
Status	Deceased
Nationality	Chinese/British
Gender	Male
Hair	White/bald
Relationship Information
Family	Unnamed mother and father
Affiliations	Snakehead (gang),SCORPIA
Series Information
First Appearance	Snakehead (novel)
Last Appearance	Snakehead (novel)

Major Winston Yu is the main antagonist in the seventh Alex Rider novel, Snakehead.

About

Major Yu is one of the twelve founding executives of the criminal organization SCORPIA, and he has a great love of Britain (his mother actually named him after Winston Churchill). He is an extremely cold and ruthless killer, and he does not take failure well. Some of his employees, such as Bill Tanner and Captain de Wynter, prefer to commit suicide rather than suffer Yu's ghastly punishments.

However, Yu also prefers to display a degree of class, sportsmanship and tact when dealing with his enemies. He has a great respect for Alex Rider due to him being English, and he wants to get rid of the boy with a flourish.

He is also very narcissistic, naming his scam snakehead company after himself and making it into an anagram.

Appearance

He is described as being extremely delicate and fragile. His overall appearance is Chinese, yet he has a head of hair which has gone white, which is remarked upon as being unusual for a Chinese man. His favourite colour seems to be white, as he is often seen in a white suit, and he also wears gray gloves to protect his fragile hands.

Biography

Winston Yu was born in China [1] in extreme poverty. His father was a rich Englishman who impregnated his mother, then abandoned her. She never lost sight of her dreams of living in England [2]. She volunteered to become an assassin for the local Snakehead so that she could move to England and give Yu a better education. She would kill a person every time fees were due. He later wound up at Harrow School.

He then joined the Army, where he attained the rank of Major, but acquired a rare form of osteoporosis known as brittle-bone disease, which forced him to leave the Army.

He now has to wear gloves to protect his hands, and he also carries a cane. He then joined MI6 but was only doing low-level information processing, so he approached the Snakehead his mother had worked for, and sold information to them. He later resigned from MI6, as the Snakehead was paying him a lot more. He then became head of the most powerful Snakehead in Southeast Asia.

Hearing rumors of a new organization starting up, he approached them and became one of the founders of SCORPIA. Major Yu was given the task of commanding Operation Reef Encounter by Zeljan Kurst, an even higher member of SCORPIA. He stole a British bomb called Royal Blue and planned to use it to cause a tsunami in order to wipe out eight celebrities on Reef Island, as part of a scheme formed by SCORPIA.

When Alex Rider and the ASIS attacked the oil rig where Royal Blue was located, called Dragon Nine, Alex confronted Major Yu and his godfather Ash, who was in fact working for Yu. Yu escaped in a speedboat, and Alex was then able to detonate Royal Blue before due time. This stopped the threat of a tsunami, but the explosion did cause an enormous shock wave. Yu died when the shock wave hit both him and his boat and caused every bone in his body to break at the same time, due to his osteoporosis.

Snakehead

In Snakehead, Major Yu was given the task by SCORPIA to "accidentally" kill the eight celebrities on Reef Island trying to make the world a better place, for their client did not agree with their aims. He stole a bomb prototype called Royal Blue from MI6, and planned to drop it on a fault line where the tectonic plates in the Earth's crust were most vulnerable, causing a tsunami. The celebrities had to be killed in a way which seemed totally natural, and a tsunami was the most efficient option.

Yu captured Alex Rider in Darwin thanks to his traitorous godfather Ash, and Yu then told Alex of his intentions before sending him to one of his private facilities to take out Alex's organs and sell them on the black market. He claimed that Alex would be left alive but non-vital organs would be taken from him on a regular basis, such as his eyes or one of his kidneys. Eventually, when only his vital organs remained, Alex would finally be allowed to die. Yu's reason for doing this was mainly because Alex had cost him a lot of money by damaging his boat, the Liberian Star, and this was his method of making up for it. Alex escaped from the facility by riding down white water rapids and along with Ben Daniels and the ASIS, they were able to stop the attack and kill Yu.

Personality

Yu was cold, sly and aggressive towards characters such as Captain de Wynter and Alex Rider. Being on the executive board of Scorpia, he was callous, ruthless, arrogant and sociopathic. He was also vengeful, shown in his encounter with Alex Rider. He was sadistic and emotionally detached, shown when he interrogated Alex Rider and almost qualmlessly commented making money out of the latter's corpse.

Yu was vain, naming Unwin Toys after himself, it being an anagram of Winston Yu. He was very self-centred and wanted to make his stand in the pages of history. He claims to be one of the few people on the executive board of Scorpia to vote against Invisible Sword and, a second time, against sending a marksman to murder Alex Rider. This may or may not have been simply a psychological effect, but it shows that Major Yu has some degree of emotion.

Trivia

• Yu owns a company called Unwin Toys, which happens to be an anagram of 'Winston Yu'.

Sources

• Photo: none
• General information: various sources, including but not limited to:
  • Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz