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 on Kim’s Convenience
As he was growing up, Ins Choi’s biggest role model was his father, a pastor of a Korean immigrant church in Toronto. Choi recalled, “I loved how he told stories, making people laugh, and constantly asking the big questions. Why we were? Who we were? And how to live?” But when Choi’s own turn came to go out in the world, the stories he could tell were limited to the stereotypical and background characters available for him to play as an East Asian actor in the late 1990s. He soon joined the playwriting unit of the fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company and started writing his own stories, based upon the people and community he knew. The first such effort became Kim’s Convenience. When he could not find a theatre company to produce the play, he took on that task himself. He entered it into the Toronto Fringe Festival and directed and produced it, while playing the young adult son of the family. It won the festival’s 2011 new play award. Choi described what happened next as “an incredible, euphoric buzz surrounding the show” that led to a sold-out run at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre Company, national tours, multiple subsequent productions, and a sitcom, coauthored by Choi and inspired by the play, that aired on Canadian television from 2016 – 2021. In 2024, Choi returned to performing in the play, this time as Appa, the family’s patriarch.
Appa differs from the characters Choi was asked to play early in his career. As the playwright explained, “Appa is quirky, he’s weird, but I know many men like that, whom I love. I don’t think he’s a stereotype. What also makes the difference is that he’s the protagonist, he’s not just in the background.” Appa and Umma—Korean for father and mother—immigrated to Canada from Korea and started their family business. But their young adult children have grown up in Toronto and have their own ideas about the lives they wish to create for themselves. Choi sees this arc of the play in terms of his observation that “the first generation to come to a new country sacrifice themselves so the second generation have the luxury of choosing what they want to do.” The story of Kim’s Convenience is also defined by the relationships of family members to their neighborhood in Toronto’s Regent Park. As Korean Canadians, they are part of an immigrant community that Choi knew well. His own parents “arrived in Canada in 1975 with two hundred dollars, three kids, and a lot of hope.” The decade prior to their arrival in Canada saw the establishment of the first Korean church in that country, as well as the Ontario Korean Businessmen’s Association (OKBA) that offered group purchasing to small businesses and serviced many Korean convenience store owners. These churches and stores spread throughout Toronto and helped support the growth in the population of Koreans in Canada from seventy in 1965 to over 200,000 in 2011. Given this network of friendship and support, Choi has always considered the church and the store to be the Umma and the Appa of Korean communities in Canada. That community, however, was just one part of the immigrant and multiracial urban neighborhood depicted in Kim’s Convenience. Professor Coleen Kim Daniher’s study of racial dynamics in the play highlights its exploration of the daily social exchanges and economic transactions between Korean immigrant store owners and Black patrons. She notes the ways in which the play acknowledges the historic tensions between Korean and Black communities across North America that form a backdrop of their interactions. At the same time, the varied interactions between the family and Black customers, neighbors, and friends defy expectations that might accompany this background and show how diverse communities flourish.
Everyman Theatre shares this story with our audiences for all the ways it reverberates across place and time. We do so as a co-production with Indiana Repertory Theatre, where the production’s director cara hinh serves as associate artistic director, and Portland Center Stage. For hinh, “this piece of art has resonance in all three communities in the United States” and that is good reason to “take this story across the country.” The production begins with rehearsals and an opening run here in Baltimore, with our own history of immigrant and multiracial community conflict and cooperation.Baltimore’s Korean community mirrors Toronto’s in the timeline of a wave of immigration in the 1960s and 1970s, and the influential role of small businesses and the church within that community. Like Choi, Baltimoreans continue to tell the story of those immigrants through art, from the mural of Mr. Kim on North Charles and 20th Streets (the largest portrait mural on the East Coast) to the annual Asia North Festival in Baltimore’s Station North Arts District. But we also take this story across the United States at a very different moment in time than when the play was written. When asked how today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric impacts the stories he wants to tell , Choi responded, “If anything, it fuels what I’m already writing. I think well-told stories with humor allow audiences into the shoes of others, and imbue empathy. Enough hearts changed can change societies.”
Robyn Quick
Resident Dramaturg
Kris Yue Photography, “Aging Youth Gang by Norman Yeung.” Fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre Company 2024 Potluck Festival. https://www.fu-gen.org/current-projects.
Works Consulted
Choi, Ins. “Introduction.” Kim’s Convenience. House of Anansi Press, 2012.
Daniher, Colleen Kim. “On Teaching Kim’s Convenience: Asian American Studies, Asian Canadian Studies, and the Politics of Race in Asian Canadian Theatre and Performance Studies.” Theatre Research in Canada, vol. 39, no. 1, Mar. 2018, pp. 8–27.
“Korean American Community History.” Asian Arts and Culture Center. Towson University. https://www.towson.edu/campus/artsculture/centers/asianarts/collection-resources/baltimore-asian-community-history/korean-american/
Saville, Alice. “Actor and playwright Ins Choi: ‘If a character is written truthfully, lovingly, it’s not a stereotype.'” Guardian, 9 Sept. 2024.