Jean Yoon, Mrs. Kim (or "Umma") on the hit Canadian sitcom, Kim's Convenience, is supporting her TV son, Simu Liu, in his complaints about how the cast of the sitcom was treated and that the lack of Asian voices in the writer's room made the working experience on the show very difficult, especially some planned stories for Season 5 that she deemed offensively racist.
Yoon chose to speak up herself after John Doyle, the TV critic for The Globe and Mail, wrote an article taking issue with some of the recent complaints that Liu had made about the sitcom, which was abruptly canceled after its fifth season despite being previously renewed for two more seasons after Season 4.
Liu (who is set to star as the lead character in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) had complained about the makeup of the writing staff of the series (the show was based on the play, Kim's Convenience, by show co-creator, Ins Choi, a Korean writer and actor, but the showrunner on the series was the co-creator of the show, Kevin White, a White writer), stating on Facebook, "Our writer's room lacked both East Asian and female representation, and also lacked a pipeline to introduce diverse talents. Aside from Ins, there were no other Korean voices in the room. And personally I do not think he did enough to be a champion for those voices (including ours). When he left (without so much as a goodbye note to the cast), he left no protege, no padawan learner, no Korean talent that could have replaced him."
After Doyle criticized Liu for downplaying the influence of Choi, Yoon tweeted at him, "Dear sir, as an Asian Canadian woman, a Korean-Canadian woman w more experience and knowledge of the world of my characters, 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. Your attack on my cast mate @SimuLiu, in the defense of my fellow Korean artist Ins Choi is neither helpful nor merited. Mr. Choi wrote the play, I was in in [sic]. He created the TV show, but his co-creator Mr. Kevin White was the showrunner, and clearly set the parameters. This is a FACT that was concealed from us as a cast. It was evident from Mr. Choi's diminished presence on set, or in response to script questions. Between S4 and S5, this FACT became a crisis, and in S5 we were told Mr. Choi was resuming control of the show. The cast received drafts of all S5 scripts in advance of shooting BECAUSE of Covid, at which time we discovered storylines that were OVERTLY RACIST, and so extremely culturally inaccurate that the cast came together and expressed concerns collectively."
Yoon gave an example of an offensive proposed storyline, "To give you an idea of what we are talking about, here is one scene from the original S5 drafted under Mr. White's leadership. Pastor Nina comes to the story [sic] to pick up Mrs. Kim for a Zumba class. Mrs. Kim is wearing NUDE shorts, and Pastor Nina is to embarrassed to tell her she looks naked from the waist down. Mr. Kim enters, and the joke is that if you're married you can say anything. No one, esp. Mrs. Kim, would be unaware that a garment makes her look naked. Unless she is suddenly cognitively impaired. or STUPID. Stripping someone naked is the first act before public humiliation or rape. So what was so funny about that? At my request, Mr. Choi cut he scene. THAT scene would have aired hours after 8 people, 6 Asian women, were shot in Atlanta, GA in a hate crime spree that shocked the nation. THIS IS WHY IT MATTERS. If an Asian actor says, 'Hey this isn't cool,' then maybe should just fix it, and say THANK YOU."
In addition, Yoon took issue with her character developing Multiple Scelrosis, "And I'm sick of holding this back-Koreans hardly ever get MS: 0.1/100,000 or one in a million. You are 5x more likely to get a blood clot from the AZ vaccine than you are to get MS if you're Korean. The producers: "But why does it matter?"And "Jean doesn't understand comedy.'"
She also complained that it fell to the actors to make the food on the show accurate, "And hey, if I hadn't spoken up all the Korean food in the show would have been WRONG. Ins doesn't know how to cook or how things are cooked, no one else in the writers room were Korean, and THEY HAD NO KOREAN CULTURAL RESOURCES IN THE WRITERS ROOM AT ALL. What I find tragic about this situation was the refusal to believe the urgency with which we advocated for inclusion in the writers room. The failure to send us treatments, outlines, the resistance to cultural corrections & feedback. There is so much I am proud of. But S3 & S4 in particular had many moments of dismissal & disrespect as an actor, where it mattered, with the writers. And the more successfully I advocated for my character, the more resistance and suspicion I earned from the Writers/Producers. In the final bedroom scene in S5, Mrs. Kim weeps because she believes that God has abandoned her. The more she prays for something, the more certain it will get worse. That's what it felt like. The love died."
Source: Twitter