I’ve been making my way through the last season of Kim’s Convenience, which is up on Netflix now. It was really disheartening to read about some of the behind-the-scenes stuff on that show, and it’s admitted colored my opinion of a number of the season 5 episodes I’ve watched so far. However, I’m reminded anew of how delightful the Kim family patriarch can be.
A near-permanent fixture in the store, Mr. Kim can regularly be found stocking shelves, making small-talk with customers that frequently takes a turn for the awkward, or hyping up products that aren’t moving well enough. He’s a workaholic whose store is pretty much his third child, and he’s a stern but oddly-lovable taskmaster to his daughter Janet and her friend Gerald, his main employees.
Mr. Kim is an enterprising guy who’s often dreaming up ideas for how to improve or streamline things, and he’s also a proud guy who definitely wants recognition for said ideas. He can be wildly stubborn, especially when it comes to admitting he’s wrong (or worse, admitting someone else is right!), and he can be more than a little oblivious when it comes to things that are outside his usual purview. He nearly always means well, but his bluntness regularly gets him into trouble.
Naturally, these traits open him up to plenty of comedy. The sitcom hijinks he stumbles into are neverending. The time he thinks Janet’s art-school photographs are too gloomy, so he takes some pictures of his own but then gets mad when customers want to buy Janet’s, not his. The time he makes nice with the annoying owner of the gym next door in a bid to piggyback off of the free WiFi. The time he gets completely hung up on an online review for the store that refers to him as a “cutie pie.” There are many occasions in which Mr. Kim makes himself the joke because of how he reacts to something or the way he refuses to quit when he’s ahead.
But for all of his pride, stubbornness, and sternness, Mr. Kim also has one of the largest hearts of any character on the show. While he’s not always great at admitting it, he cares very deeply for his family and wants nothing but the best for them. His fumbling, sometimes-shy ways of awkwardly expressing his love are just a constant, heart-warming delight. The time he turns Janet’s old bedroom into a “bachelor pad” where he can stay up late watching sports and eating snacks, but then he realizes how much he misses cuddling in bed with Mrs. Kim while they talk about their day. The time he not-so-accidentally gets a peek at Janet’s journal, reads some of the nice things she writes about him, and spends the rest of the episode trying to “subtly” convince her to say those thoughts aloud instead of write them down.
The best, biggest “aww” moments come from Mr. Kim’s fraught relationship with his son Jung. The rift between them is long-standing, and both are too proud to admit their part in it while also still feeling too hurt by the other to fully let bygones be bygones. But they miss each other, genuinely. For Mr. Kim, this comes out in sweetly-funny ways. The time Mrs. Kim brings home a cardboard cutout of Jung from the car-rental place where he works and Mr. Kim takes to chatting with it in the stockroom. The time Mr. Kim offers a dad-like helping hand to Jung’s roommate while Jung is out and can’t resist going into Jung’s room, where he accidentally takes a bunch of selfies while looking at the family photos on Jung’s laptop. At moments like this, even as I’m fully aware that Mr. Kim is getting in his own way by refusing to reach out directly to his son, I still really feel for him and hope that they’ll find a way to patch things up.
No comments:
Post a Comment