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Kim's Convenience Play Stereotypes

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Many viewers of the show think it is racist and offensive, even some of the actors and actresses believe this. How wouldn’t the show be controversial? Kim’s Convenience is a Toronto-based play about a family of Koreans who own a convenience store. The play covers the struggles that they go through, some of which can be considered stereotypical. The stereotypes used in the play are offensive and offer no insight into the Asian community. Kim’s Convenience reproduces racist stereotypes that provide a limited perspective of minority communities in terms of how accents are abused to emphasize race, how Asian parents’ expectations are depicted, and how racist stereotypes are used just for comedic effect. To start, different accents in the play are …show more content…

Grouping an ethnic group is unfair because assuming something about an ethnicity you do not understand is stereotyping. Categorizing an ethnicity based on the way they speak also gives the audience no insight or information about that ethnicity. The above shows how Kim’s Convenience utilizes accents wrongly and categorizes how all people of a certain ethnicity speak. Next, the expectations of Asian parents for their children are depicted as strict and stubborn, in reality, this is not true. Janet, the daughter of Appa, wants to pursue a photography career, but Appa does not want her to. APPA: Me and Umma struggle to make life for you. We do what we have to do, hope you can be a doctor, lawyer, big success, but what do you do? Take a picture of the sand. We don’t have to come to Canada for you to take pictures. You can even take pictures in North Korea. This demonstrates that the expectations of the parents in the show are firm and inflexible, which is a common Asian stereotype. In reality, the expectations of Asian parents aren’t firm and inflexible, but supportive. This stereotype gives a misleading and inaccurate depiction of how Asian parents treat their

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