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Jean Yoon of 'Kim's Convenience' on behind-the-scenes struggles with racism, representation


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SOURCE: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/jean-yoon-kims-convenience-scenes-struggles-racism-representation-rcna1461
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SectionsTVFeaturedMore from NBC Follow NBC News In a memorable episode from the first season of "Kim’s Convenience," the hit Canadian sitcom about a Korean immigrant family running a corner store, two characters got food poisoning after eating galbijjim, or braised short ribs. But star Jean Yoon, who played the matriarch, Umma, said the original script included a glaring error.“The original dish they had was kimchi,” Yoon said in an interview a month after the show aired its fifth and final season on Netflix. That’s why we changed it to a meat dish.”The moment is indicative of systemic issues that plagued "Kim’s Convenience" throughout its half-decade run, which ended in a storm of controversy in early June when numerous cast members shared details about a toxic work environment.In a since-deleted Facebook post, Simu Liu, who played Jung, alleged that the show’s mostly white writers refused to accept creative input from the core Asian cast members, who he said were paid a “horsepoop rate.”But the more explosive missive came from Yoon. (“You are 5x more likely to get a blood clot from the AZ vaccine than you are to get MS if you're Korean,” she wrote.)By pulling back the curtain on the production of the show — which was abruptly canceled after the departure of co-creators Ins Choi and Kevin White — Yoon, 59, exposed the chasm between on-screen representation and creative authority for Asians in the entertainment industry.“As an Asian Canadian woman, a Korean-Canadian woman w more experience and knowledge of the world of my characters,” she tweeted, “the lack of Asian female, especially Korean writers in the writers room of Kims made my life VERY DIFFICULT & the experience of working on the show painful.” In her first interview since the show ended, Yoon spoke about the behind-the-scenes racism she endured and the complicated legacy of "Kim’s Convenience." The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. (Thunderbird Entertainment, the production company behind "Kim’s Convenience," did not respond to a request for comment about Yoon’s claims.)   NBC Asian America: Your Twitter thread was in response to an op-ed by Canadian critic John Doyle, who criticized Simu Liu’s Facebook post as “unfair” and “mean-spirited.” Why did you feel compelled to share your experience on the show?Yoon: There’s never been a doubt in my mind that I was going to try and take some of the things we learned from "Kim’s Convenience" and put it into a form to help our industry navigate better and more constructively. I had to explain to Ins and Kevin that because kimchi is fermented with so much garlic and red pepper, it’s prepared in a way to fend off any bacteria.

As said here by Claire Wang