Vietnamese-Canadian actor Andrew Phung, most well known for playing Kimchee Han on the hit Asian-Canadian show Kim’s Convenience has recently created and starred in the new CBC Gem sitcom Run the Burbs.
While there has been a lot of talk about the cancellation of Kim’s Convenience with many of Andrews’s co-stars on the show. In response to that Andrew says “There were frustrations at times because we felt that on the front of the show it was us, but behind the scenes, it wasn’t our voices”
However when it comes to Andrew’s current show, Run The Burbs, that isn’t the case. Andrew made an effort to make sure that Run The Burbs was just as diverse behind that camera as it was in front of it.
“It started with Rakhee Morzaria, who plays my wife on the show, was a writer on the show, then it was hiring cultural consultations, it was bringing on directors of colour and giving them roles where they were included in the development of the style of the show,” said Andrew.
All that time and care put into the show added to its quality and on top of that, the show focuses on something that has quite possibly never been done before in western television, a Vietnamese-South Asian family.
“That in itself is this groundbreaking thing, we’ve never seen it. I get messages from people saying that they never thought they’d see this family on TV.”
Andrew also wants to show another side to the suburbs that don’t usually get shown. In most TV shows suburbs are generally portrayed as boring but he wants to show the side of the suburbs where families of colour are living it up.
Andrew also wanted to tell a story about a family of colour that wasn’t based on the trauma and pain of the family. “I want to see the kids of immigrants raising their kids and see how they do it”
Andrews then talks about how he raises his kids and how he raises them in the way that he didn’t get raised by his immigrant parents. Andrew then gets into the common stereotype of Asian parents and other parents of colour being hard on their kids and how he raised his kids differently from the way that his parents raised him.
Andrew also talks about how he noticed that his parents would now spoil their grandkids and treat them entirely differently than they treated him growing up. “I said to him dad, where the hell did this come from and he said ‘that wasn’t my job, my job then was to raise you right and now my job is to spoil them’ and it made me realize that they wanted to love us like that but they couldn’t they had to raise us right.”
Andrew then talks about how originally, comedy was just a hobby he did on a side and he actually expected to go into economics. He actually did comedy to help him become a better public speaker.
Andrew says that his parents were actually very supportive of his choice to go into acting because they were exposed to it. “My parents never saw acting as more than a hobby to keep him out of trouble but then I started inviting them to shows and they would say ‘Andrew, you sold the place out’ and I introduced my parents during them,” Andrew said.
