‘Kim’s Convenience’ star embraces his identity
There’s an inherent injustice to being a “representative” TV show, or to put it plainly, a show that’s not centred on white people and their stories.
Shows such as the ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” the Netflix show “Master of None” or the CBC sitcom “Kim’s Convenience” don’t have the luxury of being just a show.
They face a binary critique that goes like this: If they display certain characteristics about a group of people (based on professions, accents, cultural norms, beliefs, etc.) they’re accused of stereotyping. If they don’t, they’re accused of whitewashing reality.
Such a show must navigate this tightrope unselfconsciously and, by God, it had better be a success. Not just for financial reasons. Failure ends any chance of another show with a non-white lens making it. That’s a ridiculous burden to bear.
“Why is it 20 years between ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ and ‘AllAmerican Girl’?” asks Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, who plays a lead role in “Kim’s Convenience.” “All-American Girl” was an ABC sitcom in 1994 with an Asian-American lead that only ran one season.
It can seem nonintuitive, but success for such a show is also a limiter.
“We think well, we’ve got that one Asian show. And they’re doing great. Do we really need another one?” Lee says. “It’s like, I’m sorry, how many cop shows do you have on the air? How many procedurals do you have on the air? How many white families do you have on the air?”
Lee and I were discussing the privilege of failure recently, days after he delivered a TEDx Toronto talk at which he had said immigrants have few opportunities to succeed and even fewer to fail.
“By that I mean if you are a white actor and you’re given a dream part and you weren’t so good in it you are given another opportunity to be another part,” he tells me.
“Representation” is often discussed in terms of who is allowed to be at the table or whose voice is being heard. However, who — or which group — is consistently allowed to fail and bounce back is also a marker of equality, or lack thereof, in our society.
“Sometimes you only get one shot because of the colour of your skin,” Lee says.
He knows. As a young actor in the ’90s and the ’00s, trying to get work was frustrating because there were parts that were always closed off to him. Always. “And all I would ask for would be the opportunity to audition for these roles. So to never even be considered for them is hard.”
This is how he came to make a pact with himself that so many slighted by injustice arrive at. “If I ever got any opportunity to succeed, I wouldn’t fail because I wasn’t ready. I would do everything I could to excel. If it meant working five times harder than anybody else I was going to put in the work.”
Yes, he knows this mantra, of having to “knock it out of the ballpark every time because you have to be so excellent that they cannot ignore you,” is an unfair reality.
“I always say that it is s---ty.” Yet, Lee found the way to break paths with expectations is to “embrace your identity.”
To listen to Lee’s journey of “embracing your identity” en route to success — fulfilment, rather — is to understand that it is a complex and layered process, akin to peeling an onion, tears included.
It’s in the attempts of an outsider to fit into Calgary society as a child. No sleepovers, no parties. “My parents tried, but for them a sleepover was foreign. And they were busy working, working crazy hours to make a living for the family. These are things you don’t understand when you’re a kid.”
It’s in the glimmer of understanding after his first trip to Seoul in Grade 6 and being dazzled by the teeming, glasstowered modernity of the metropolis. His shame that he could barely speak any Korean while his cousins knew some English. “For a lot of people who make fun of immigrants or people who are just learning the language … we forget that this person might not speak English perfectly, but they can speak three other languages. Can you?”
The homesickness in university, missing his mom’s cooking.
But the big turnaround came when his kids began asking questions such as, “Well, where did you come from? What about halmeoni and halabeoji (Grandma and Grandpa)? And I couldn’t answer the questions.
“And then I felt like I had lost so much time and so many opportunities to embrace where I came from. Because I was so — I guess ashamed is the word? I wanted to reject that because I wanted to be part of the dominant culture, which was my day-to-day life.
Lee says his TEDx talk was inspired by thinking about how beholden we are to the idea that we have to fulfil everyone’s expectations of us and how that limits our capabilities and possibilities as well.
“I think the real key is selfawareness and knowing where you’ve come from and embracing that, and not being embarrassed by it, but using it as a strength to give you roots.”
An actor of colour, or any BIPOC individual, needs that strength. For success when it comes can often simply gild the cage.
When Lee first came across the role of Appa, the patriarch of the store-owning family of “Kim’s Convenience,” he bonded with his character instantly. “I knew this guy. And I have never ever seen him accurately portrayed in such a loving and an honest way.”
The result was success. Every once in a while an actor becomes immortalized in a certain role. James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano comes to mind. So it is with Lee and Appa. But the typecasting is even more narrowed for an actor of colour.
Lee, the actor whose portrayal of a convenience store owner filled up a character that is otherwise flattened in media portrayals, found himself flattened in real life as “the Asian guy.” But he’s not interested in playing derivative versions of Appa.
“Sometimes I feel like I am held prisoner by him. I am grateful (for the role), but I’m also much more. I don’t want to be the accent guy. I am a professional actor and I want to stretch myself artistically as well.”
Lee got the chance to shrug out of that mould with a role as a rebel fighter pilot in the “Star Wars” spinoff series “The Mandalorian.” “There was not even the mention of an accent, which I love,” he says.
His talk, he says, was not about not only breaking free of expectations but also not placing people in little boxes. About letting them be who they are. Listening, being curious, questioning and supportive, too.
“We’ve come a long way, but we have quite a long way to go.”