Kim’s Convenience, Ins Choi’s play about a Korean family running a convenience store in Regent Park, is a genuine homegrown hit. After wowing audiences at Toronto’s Fringe Festival 2011, the family drama about an aging father who reaches out to his estranged son when faced with giving up the store and his legacy is wrapping up a successful run (the final show ran July 4th) at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts for Soulpepper having snagged a couple Toronto Theatre Critics Awards along the way including the award for Best Canadian Play.
Hearing that the play was at the end of its run got me thinking about the people who work at the convenience stores I go to. It seemed like the average age of convenience store attendants was going down and it dawned on me that a lot of them must be the second-generation to run the family business. It’s an interesting phenomenon when the perception that bodegas are all run by new immigrants persists. This reporter wanted to know if these guys were dealing with the same kind of problems with succession as the characters in Choi’s play.
Also it was really hot. This reporter wanted a cold drink and the guy behind the counter seemed like he would be cool to talk to.
Ben Huh, 21, works at Super Queen’s Market on Queen St. W just west of Bathurst. He and his three brothers have all worked there at various times since his parents opened the store in the mid 80s. Unlike Jung, the reluctant son from Kim’s Convenience who has no interest in his father’s store, Huh enjoys working the counter.
“I love it, it’s very chill. It’s fun,” he tells me while his dad checks inventory along the back wall. “Basically I smoke, eat and read magazines… We get new magazines in every month. So my brothers and I will say, ‘Oh I read this cool article’ in whatever magazine and take it off the rack. Vanity Fair is usually pretty good, it has some economic stuff, or like a profile of the Rothschilds or something.” (Huh is very well read and was once attributed to a summary of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in a story by this publication, though he felt he was misquoted and was afraid we’d made him look stupid. We regret the error.)
Huh has this easy-going charm. When I ask him about working at his parents’ store he nervously puts his arms up behind his head, rubbing the knob of the ponytail his long black hair has been stuffed into. But he eases up and soon it’s like I’m talking to a friend from high school that I haven’t seen in a while. His affability probably comes from years of making small talk with strangers at all hours of the day. While we chat, and handful of people come to the counter to haggle over the price of mini cigars or buy lottery tickets. One woman wins $145, but Huh barely bats an eyelash. At Queen and Bathurst, one of Toronto’s crustier intersections, you get the sense that it would take a lot to surprise him.
Ben contemplates a reporter’s request for a ‘candid’ shot while his father stocks shelves in the background. Photo by Michael Kolberg.He tells me about the time his dad enlisted one of the local “crack heads” to him them help clean up some shelving. “He gave him a can of white spray paint to give the shelves a new coat of paint and the first thing he did when he handed him the can was spray it directly into his mouth, just to get high.” Thinking about it after our conversation, it sounds like a pretty frightening display of human desperation, but Huh takes it in stride and I laugh when he tells me. “It was pretty jokes,” he said.
A certain level of detachment is necessary to deal with any retail customers. Huh’s sense of humour is the kind of attitude it takes to run a store that sometimes caters to questionable clientele. He tells me his older brother Ryan has got the business of dealing with unwanted business down to a science. “It’s three words: ‘What’re you doing? You have money?’ Or, ‘You gotta go.’” Plus, the fact that it’s run by their family gives whoever’s behind the counter a certain level of autonomy. “You could be getting into it with someone talking their mouth off and it’s like, ‘You want to talk to the manager? I am the manager.’”
Huh and his family are under no delusions about the kind of drug problems or alcoholism that might be facing some of the less desirable customers, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to serve them. “My Dad is kind of a libertarian I guess. He thinks people should be able to just do what they want… I can smoke in front of him.” Ben explains that in Korean culture, smoking in front of your elders is a big no-no, but his dad doesn’t go along with those kind of traditions and tends towards a laissez-faire style of parenting. Going off on a bit of a tangent, Ben adds, “When I was a little kid I used to run up to girls and rub their legs. People would say, ‘You need to put your kid on a leash!’ but he would just shrug.”
As Huh tells it, his were not the stereotypical immigrant parents who expect their kids to become doctors. That’s not to say they didn’t make sacrifices – they did — but it wasn’t accompanied by pressure on Ben and his brothers to attain a specific type of success. Huh’s oldest brother works in film, the next oldest custom tailors suits, and his younger brother wants get into audio recording. “I used to think we were just a really arty family or something, but then I realized a lot of it had to do with my Dad willing to let us do what we wanted.”
Ben’s not really sure what he wants to do with his life. At 21 he still has lots of time to figure it out. But whether it involves taking over his parents’ store or running off to become whatever it is he decides he wants to become will be entirely up to him. For now he’ll work the counter and smoke and eat at read magazines. Another genuine homegrown success story.
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Michael Kolberg is The Sprawl Editor at Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter for jokes @mikeykolberg
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