Star of Kim's Convenience says he draws on an immigrant experience that "lives just under the surface"
James Yi sees his Korean parents’ struggles in his shopkeeper role, but finds the show speaks to a universal audience
James Yi is getting to know every corner of his shop in Kim’s Convenience again. Photo by David Cooper
The Arts Club Theatre Company presents Kim’s Convenience at the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage from February 24 to March 27
VANCOUVER ACTOR JAMES YI is starting to feel at home in every nook and aisle of his convenience store again—at least the one he inhabits onstage.
On and off since 2018, he’s played Appa, the gruff and hilariously obstinate Korean-Canadian shop owner in Kim’s Convenience.
In the play, his character, who comes into conflict with his second-generation children, spends the bulk of his life in a store that’s now threatened by gentrification. Yi started playing Appa over three years ago, with Pacific Theatre’s hit production of Ins Choi’s play, then took part in stints in Chemainus and Seattle, before getting behind the counter again for the Arts Club Theatre Company’s touring version in 2020. That show came to a halt when the pandemic hit. But the production, based on the Pacific Theatre rendition, is now revived and ready to hit the historic Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage.
It may take a while for Yi to get familiar with the physical space again, with its neatly stacked ketchup bottles, candy bars, Pringles tins, and lottery tickets. (The set had to be rebuilt after damage during storage during the Abbottsford floods, but that’s another story.) And yet Yi says it hasn’t taken much for him to feel comfortable living in the shoes of his character.
“That’s not hard because, being a Korean person and a son of immigrant parents, I see very closely this Appa in my father, or in people of his generation,” the affable actor says on a break from rehearsal. “I saw the immigrant struggle firsthand—I saw how hard it is to start over in a new country when you don't speak the language. So that lives just under the surface. I can connect the motivation behind what he's going after; it’s not hard to go there.”
Yi moved to Cleveland from Korea with his parents when he was five years old. He later relocated to Alaska before settling in Vancouver to take a shot at an acting career. But he draws on his parents’ early struggles for his role as the shopkeeper.
“As a kid, it was hard to understand everything at the time, but the longer you go and the more they tell you, you just realize how much your parents sacrificed,” he begins. “They’re a lot like Appa: they don't say ‘I love you’ a lot, they just show it to you by providing. And because they lived through a war, they didn't have the luxury of what we have in the West of being educated about a lot of things. It was just survival for them. And so being survivors of a war and then starting a family, there's a lot of dysfunction there, right?
“So I just saw all the challenges they faced but the resilience in the Korean people when they move to a completely foreign country. Like I’m so impressed at how tough they are—maybe because of the war,” he continues. “That’s why I love Kim, because I’ve seen a lot of second-generation ethnic works, especially when it comes to Koreans, where they are very hard on their parents’ generation. The ‘Look what you did to me’ kind of perspective. But what Ins does is he empathizes.”
Yi has a deep and long connection to Choi’s play, long before it got turned into a wildly successful TV sit-com that spawned a legion of fans called Kimbits. He happened to be doing film work in Toronto when the original production premiered at that city’s Fringe festival in 2012. Yi attended the closing night show and went out for dinner afterward with the cast. Seeing Kim’s Convenience had a huge impact on him.
“It was such a masterpiece from start to finish, and just the talent up on stage and how they represented people like myself that I never see on stage,” he recalls.
Yi not only eventually got to step into the work himself, but he has appeared in the now cancelled TV show as a recurring character named Jimmy Young— a car dealership owner and parishioner at the Kims' church. (For the screen version, the shopkeeper Appa is played by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee.) And so Yi has revelled in the wild popularity of the show, which went viral when Netflix picked it up. One of his proudest moments came watching Saturday Night Live’s Bowen Yang plug saving the show during a joke segment on “Weekend Update”. Toward the end of the sketch, Yang shouted “Save Kim’s Convenience!” and set off a viral hashtag. “I couldn’t believe it! I thought that was pretty cool!” Yi says.
But Yi stresses he constantly notices how different people find the play after watching the TV show. “I mean a lot of the jokes are the same and a lot of the humour is familiar, but it goes to different places than the TV show,” he says. “I think it’s because it isn’t limited to a comedy genre. It’s a play and it can go anywhere it wants.”
In other words, you may find yourself deeply moved by what transpires amid the Kim family and in the rift that divides the generations—and you don’t need to have the specific ethnic background that Yi has, to relate.
“We can all laugh at ourselves together, but the reason why I think it's so special is that, when it does go to the more emotional moments in the play, it just does something,” he explains. “In the audience, you can hear a lot of collective sniffles and, well, weeping. I've seen grown men–grown men!—just bawling their eyes out at the show.
"And then there’s people coming up to me in the parking lot as I’m trying to go home, and they spot me and go, ‘Are you the guy that was just onstage?’ And when I say ‘Yeah,’ they say, ‘I just have to tell you that was my story.’ And they aren’t even Korean!" he continues. "And then maybe they will say, ‘Can I hug you?’ That's when I realize it: Wow. This play just does something to people's hearts when they watch it.”
Related Articles
