From I’m the One That I Want to Kim’s Convenience

In this chapter, I examine the “implicit yellowvoice performances” by Asian American and Asian Canadian performers as well as the racial implications of such performative acts. In particular, I pay close attention to Margaret Cho’s “Mom” persona in stand-up comic routines and Ins Choi’s “Appa” (Dad) character in Kim’s Convenience (played by Paul Sun-Hyun Lee in CBC’s sitcom adaptation of the play). Ultimately, I argue that while accents play a key role in dramatizing generational and cultural differences between immigrant parents and their assimilated children, the excessive use of exaggerated accents (faked by native speakers, members of speech outgroup) contributes to perpetuating “employment discrimination, anxiety about miscegenation, the necessity of misrecognition, mocking humor…and Orientalist cultural imaginings” (Ono and Pham, 2009).