‘Kim’s Convenience’ star Jean Yoon details ‘painful’ experience on set and ‘overtly racist’ storylines after co-star Simu Liu’s criticism

As the groundbreaking sitcom “Kim’s Convenience” wraps with what should have been a celebratory fifth and final season, its stars are instead sharing tragic stories from the set of the Korean-Canadian family show.

Simu Liu, who stars as oldest son Jung and is set to lead the upcoming Marvel movie “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” opened the floodgates when the show was canceled, criticizing the CBC for the abrupt ending despite an earlier renewal.

“What pains me more than anything is that we built a wonderful audience that has been so supportive and so excursive in their praise of the show, and we aren’t able to give them the ending they deserve,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “It really does suck. That being said, I can still, at the end of the day, feel proud of our accomplishments and our achievement.”

Liu also expressed concern that the only planned spinoff, “Strays,” follows the lone white lead, Shannon (Nicole Power), rather than the show’s diverse ensemble cast.

“I love and am proud of Nicole, and I want the show to succeed for her… but I remain resentful of all of the circumstances that led to the one non-Asian character getting her own show,” he wrote on Facebook. “And not that they would ever ask, but I will adamantly refuse to reprise my role in any capacity.”

On Sunday, co-star Jean Yoon, who plays Liu’s character’s mother on the show, opened up about her own resentment about how the cult favorite, which found new life on Netflix, ended.

“As a Korean-Canadian woman [with] more experience and knowledge of the world of my characters, the lack of Asian female, especially Korean writers in the writers room of ‘Kim’s’ made my life VERY DIFFICULT & the experience of working on the show painful,” she tweeted.

Yoon pointed to specific jokes in the fifth season and a medical storyline that would have been almost impossible.

“And hey, if I hadn’t spoken up all the Korean food in the show would have been WRONG. (Co-creator Ins Choi) 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,” Yoon tweeted.

Choi is Korean, but took a backseat to co-creator Kevin White, Yoon wrote, before a “crisis” before the fifth season in which he resumed control of the show. Under Choi, scripts were rewritten to restore “the core values” of the show and remove the “overtly racist” storylines.

“If an Asian actor says, ‘Hey this isn’t cool,’ then maybe should just fix it, and say THANK YOU,” Yoon tweeted.

In an apparent response to Yoon’s comments, the Twitter account for “Kim’s Convenience” shared a series of screenshots from Anita Kapila, one of the writers on the show, with a list of the “women and BIPOC” on staff.