TheatreHe couldn’t get his foot in the door as an actor, so wrote his own play based on working in his uncle’s grocery store. Thirteen years and a global sitcom hit later he’s reopening the shop
“This story is my love letter to my parents and to all first-generation immigrants who have made the country they’ve settled in their home,” Ins Choi tells me from his house in Toronto. He is referring to his groundbreaking play, Kim’s Convenience, which arrives on the UK stage for the first time this week, more than 12 years after it premiered in Canada. “I hope it serves as a reminder that there’s a whole life behind someone working behind the counter at a convenience store – a life full of dignity, joy and dreams.”
Choi first started in the industry as a twentysomething struggling actor in the late 1990s, desperately trying, and failing, to get his foot in the door. He couldn’t land the roles he auditioned for – as an east Asian actor, there “weren’t that many opportunities to be on stage and there were a lot of barriers” – so he wrote his own story. Kim’s Convenience, Choi’s debut play (which he also directed, produced and starred in), premiered at the Toronto fringe in 2011. A comedy-drama that portrays a day in the life of a Korean-Canadian family running a convenience store in Toronto while grappling with changes in the neighbourhood, it earned the festival’s Patron’s Pick award, and would go on to tour cities across Canada and the US for the next six years. The play’s success led to an even more successful TV adaptation, on which Choi served as a writer and executive producer.
Now 49, the Korean-Canadian actor, scriptwriter and playwright feels as if he has come full circle. In the original play, Choi played the role of Jung, the store-owner’s son (a role played in the TV adaptation by Simu Liu). Now, with kids of his own, Choi has graduated to the role of Appa, the dad (originally played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee in the play and TV show). Director Esther Jun, who was originally cast as Janet, the daughter, in the original run, jokingly labels the play as a “period drama” as so much has happened since 2011 – a time before Korean culture took the world by storm with the likes of BTS, Parasite and Squid Game.
“I was pretty nervous reprising this show since there’s a higher expectation and bigger profile now,” Choi says. He recently completed a two-week run of Kim’s Convenience at the Grand theatre in London, Ontario, in November. “Returning to where it all started, having the opportunity to grow old with the role, felt like the most natural thing. It was like a homecoming.”
Choi was born in South Korea, to a North Korean father (who emigrated south as a youngster) and a South Korean mother. The family moved to Scarborough, Ontario, when Choi was one. Choi graduated from the theatre programme at Canada’s York University and started his career at Fu-Gen, an Asian-Canadian theatre company.
“Every week, I would read plays and spend time with 20 other young Asian creatives. Doing such a simple act was so empowering and significant,” he says, and it was here wherethat he first conceived the idea for Kim’s Convenience. “We’d meet in church basements because they were cheap and free. Being there showed me who I really was and what I wanted to express in the world of art.”
When I finished writing, I really felt like I had something. But no one wanted it. It was such a huge disappointmentChoi spent his formative years working at his uncle’s convenience store, called Kim’s Grocer (his uncle is now retired and the shop is run by a Somali family). Some of his earliest memories of Canada were filled with the scents of candy, chocolate and money. “It was part game and part child labour,” he laughs. “My uncle gave us a dollar for helping take stock, clean and count money stacks in the basement. We would count, wrap the money with a rubber band and then stack it into neat piles like a little drug-dealing company.” He would use his observations of the customers who came through the doorwho came in, as well as his dad’s friends at church, as inspiration for his work.
Initially, every major theatre company in Toronto turned the play down. “When I finished , I really felt like I had something. I made a little package and sent it to all the theatre companies and no one wanted it. It was such a huge disappointment,” Choi says. “I just wanted to see it on stage, any stage.”
After years of rejection after rejection, Choi took the play to the Toronto fringe. He remembers on opening day nervously peeking through the curtain to gauge the audience’s reaction, listening out for the first laugh. The play took off, and many of the Canadian theatres that had initially turned Choi down changed their minds. Choi’s parents, having supported him through the highs and lows of his career, attended shows despite their limited proficiency in English.
“For the longest time, I felt my mom couldn’t talk about me. She had nothing to brag about at church,” Choi says. “When they came to see Kim’s I felt like that was the first time they understood the power of theatre, the power of art and the power of representation. What I was trying to do, and failing at miserably, before. After that, she started bragging.”
Choi’s mum had more to brag about with the launch of the Kim’s Convenience TV remake, which premiered on the Canadian state broadcaster CBC in 2016 and aired for five seasons. At its peak, the show garnered nearly 1 million viewers an episode and earned multiple Canadian Screen awards. As with fellow Canadian comedy series Schitt’s Creek, it gained global popularity when it was picked up by Netflix. Its popularity, and importance in representing south-east Asians in Canada, was underlined when the country’s finance minister Chrystia Freeland gave a Kim’s Convenience T-shirt to South Korean president Moon Jae-in at 2019’s G20 summit in Osaka.
The show has been lauded for its Asian representation and accurate depiction of the immigrant experience, managing skilfully to capture the intricate dynamics of push-pull family relationships: trivial misunderstandings, cultural differences and generational divides. Food is an underlying theme peppered throughout the show, from containers of kimbap and kimchi, to gori gomtang (Korean oxtail soup) and yakbap (a sweet, flat glutinous rice cake with nuts).
As much as the TV show Kim’s Convenience broke boundaries, it wasn’t without its controversies. In the lead-up to the fifth, and ultimately final, season, Time magazine shared concerns from members of the show’s cast and crew of an alleged racist work environment, including a lack of behind-the-camera representation, and issues with the predominantly white writer’s room producing scripts with details that felt “insensitive and false”.
Stars Liu and Jean Yoon, spoke out on Twitter (now X) highlighting the absence of Asian female writers, especially Koreans, making their time on the show difficult. Yoon also noted Choi’s diminished presence on set, with another producer acting as showrunner duties. A since-cancelled spin-off series, Strays, also sparked controversy, due to its focus being on the only non-Asian majority character in the TV version of Kim’s Convenience, one who didn’t appear in Choi’s original stage play. The production company did not respond to requests for comment from the BBC and US media at the time.
“It was a difficult time,” Choi says, with a heavy sigh. An awkward silence fills the air as he appears lost in his thoughts, searches for the right words. “I don’t like to talk about it and I want to move on. Things should’ve happened very differently and that’s all I can really say about that.”
Since the show’s end, its cast has moved on to new projects. Most notably, Liu has appeared in last year’s biggest film, Barbie, and has made history as the first Asian superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. And Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, original dad of the Kim’s Convenience stage play and TV show, is part of the universes of Avatar and Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian. “I’m so happy and proud for all of them, they’re killing it,” Choi says, beaming.
As for Choi, he’s been eager to dive back into work since the writers’ strike ended in November. While he continues to write plays and develop TV projects in various stages, he has rediscovered his joy in acting. “I love the social element,” he says. “It’s playful and whimsical. It’s like having a pretend and imagination day at school.”
“I think it’s always been in my blood to just make stuff,” Choi adds. “I love writing scripts, poems and songs, being collaborative and exercising that creative muscle. I’ll probably keep creating until I can’t any more.”
Kim’s Convenience is at the Park theatre, London, 8 January to 10 February.
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