Actress Jean Yoon is opening up once again about the representational issues on- and off-screen on the canceled CBC comedy Kim’s Convenience.
In an interview with NBC News, Yoon expounded on previous claims around the show’s lack of diversity in the writers room, saying that while “the show started out so well,” eventually “gender parity had eroded by seasons four and five, and we never got to 50-50 with BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of color] parity.”
“We really thought we had found the balance of collaboration between a team with original stories and a specific cultural context, and a well-established producing team,” Yoon said of the show’s early days. “But as the show continued, the power shifted.”
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Yoon also clarified her tweet, in which she wrote, “[I]f I hadn’t spoken up all the Korean food in the show would have been WRONG.” The actress said she was referencing a season one episode that involved Umma and Jung cooking for a church potluck, which ultimately featured the characters Janet and Appa getting sick.
“The original dish they had was kimchi,” Yoon said. “I had to explain to [co-creators] Ins [Choi] and Kevin [White] that because kimchi is fermented with so much garlic and red pepper, it’s prepared in a way to fend off any bacteria. It is probiotic, antibacterial and acidic, so the only way that it could possibly make you sick is if it were poisoned. That’s why we changed it to a meat dish.”
“Also, kimchi is so central to Korean culture and survival, if a Korean woman made kimchi that made everybody sick, she would be shunned — forever,” she continued.
The tweet thread was posted in response to a published article by The Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle, who argued Kim’s Convenience star Simu Liu’s criticisms of the show’s “East Asian and female representation,” writing staff, cast pay and spinoff choice in a since-deleted Facebook post were “unfair,” among other things.
Following both Liu and Yoon’s social posts, the show’s official Twitter account shared screenshots of social media posts from Anita Kapila, the show’s “South Asian award-winning writer and co-executive producer,” responding to the actors’ claims about underrepresentation within the writers room on the show and naming “the women and BIPOC I was honoured to work alongside.”
During a keynote at the virtual Banff World Media Festival, Liu addressed his original social media posts, stating that he was “not out to cancel anyone, to end anybody’s career by singling any one person out.
“People have been telling me to suck it up and be grateful for my entire career, and certainly during the entire run of the show,” he said. “I can see how I may have come off as entitled and spoiled. But I built a brand and a career on being outspoken.”
As for what Yoon thinks the industry can learn from the Kim’s Convenience situation, the actress told NBC News that the “big lesson” is about hiring and its direct relationship to systemic racism.
“The big lesson for me is that you cannot do a show about a minority experience, have it run by a white person and expect it to be OK,” she said. “Sometimes the white mainstream thinks when we ask for equity, we just want the jobs. But this affects the intrinsic moral values of the work we do. A lack of respect for a culture manifests as systemic racism.”
