When Ins Choi was first starting his career as an actor in Toronto, he couldn’t find any roles written for Asians.
The son of a pastor, Choi grew up in the Korean church and was surrounded by “parents who spoke Korean and kids who spoke English.” It was at church that Choi caught the acting bug, participating in skits and choir and any other opportunities there were to be creative, he tells RepresentASIAN Project.
It was the aughts, and roles for Asian actors were extremely limited—almost non-existent. “I’d be auditioning for TV, film, even theatre and it was very slim pickings,” Choi recalls. “When you’re young and getting rejected, you think it’s because you’re not good enough and your confidence wanes.”
Things turned around for Choi when he joined fu-GEN, a Toronto theatre company that’s devoted to Asian Canadian theatre artists. “We were all single, in our 20s, and we’d just read plays and go out to eat, talk and dream together,” he says. He hadn’t written any plays of his own, but Nina Lee Aquino—the then founding artistic director of fu-GEN who’s now the artistic director of the National Theatre in Canada—invited Choi to join a writing group.
That’s when he got the idea for Kim’s Convenience. The play followed a Korean Canadian family—Appa, Umma, Jung and Janet—who run a convenience store in Toronto. While Choi’s family didn’t run a convenience store, the characters were ones he knew very well. Growing up, many of his friends’ families from church ran convenience stores. He was inspired by a friend who had also gotten in with “the wrong crowd,” like Jung. And he took some of the pushback from his family about his artistic aspirations to inspire the character of Janet.
“I wanted to showcase that Asians were funny and our families are not the model minority and we’re not all put together.”
Crucially, the play is funny. “All the Asian-centric plays back then were very heavy: like, about suicide, historical injustice and tragedies. Great plays, just very tragic,” he says. “So I wanted to showcase that Asians were funny and our families are not the model minority and we’re not all put together.”
For Choi, writing his own play was also about giving himself a role and sharing stories from his community. It was what all his peers, who couldn’t find acting gigs because of the dismal Asian representation of the time, did. “I wasn’t working,” he says. “It felt like the world didn’t want me, or just wanted me in the background.”
Six years after Aquino invited him to write, Choi finished Kim’s Convenience and submitted it to all the theatre companies in town. They all rejected him. “The gatekeepers at the time just said no.”
Choi eventually submitted the play to Toronto Fringe Festival’s New Play Contest, where it won and was staged. It was a scrappy endeavour: Choi couldn’t find a director, so he directed and produced it himself. He also starred in the play as Jung. He called in favours from his theatre community and rehearsed in church basements and friends’ living rooms. When Kim’s Convenience premiered at the 2011 Fringe Festival, it was an instant smash hit. That first show, the cast and crew were so stunned and overworked that they hadn’t even rehearsed a curtain call.
Soon, the theatre companies that’d rejected the play were hitting Choi up, wanting to put on Kim’s. They first mounted the show at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre in 2012—and it became the company’s most commercially successful production.
“It felt like the world didn’t want me, or just wanted me in the background.”
The show then went on tour in Canada and the U.S. and eventually, it caught the attention of TV studios. The resulting sitcom, which began as a moderately successful show on Canada’s national broadcaster, became a huge hit once the show hit Netflix internationally, launching the careers of its predominantly Asian cast into the stratosphere. Actors like Simu Liu (who played Jung) and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (who played Mr. Kim/Appa, as he did in the original Soulpepper production) are now fixtures in some of the biggest projects in Hollywood from Marvel movies to the Star Wars franchise. “I was so happy to have Asians on TV,” Choi says.
Now, Kim’s Convenience, the play, is back in Toronto. With Choi playing Appa, the play will run at the Soulpepper Theatre from January 30th to March 2nd. For Choi, being able to bring the show home has been a surreal experience. It’s not just that he’s grown from playing Jung in 2011 to now being Appa, almost 15 years later—it’s also been surreal to watch the industry grow to be more inclusive as well. “The best thing about playing Appa is that I get to see all these young Asian actors auditioning for Janet and for Jung,” says Choi. “It’s just so touching for me. When I first started the play, there weren’t a lot of Asian actors, let alone Korean actors. This time around, it was incredible to see the talent and the number of actors.”
Zooming out, Choi says it’s been incredible to see how much the culture has changed in the past 15 years. Today, Korean culture dominates pop culture, with ultra-successful shows and movies like Squid Games and Parasite, and acts like BTS and Blackpink among the biggest in the world. “In the play, Appa has a list of proud moments in history. It wasn’t that long,” he says, referring to the list he wrote a decade and a half ago. “Now, we have a very, very long list.”
Up next, Choi is taking Kim’s to San Francisco. He’s also working on a new play called Son of a Preacher Man that’ll be staged at Vancouver’s Pacific Theatre at the beginning of April.
Reflecting on his journey with the show and the Kim family’s homecoming, Choi says that he’s never been more ready for any role. “My kids are 17 and 14 now, and when they were born I introduced myself to them as Appa,” says Choi. “They’ve been getting me ready for this role their whole life.”
Kim’s Convenience will be staged at Soulpepper Theatre (50 Tank House Lane) from January 30th to March 2nd. You can buy tickets here.
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