You can’t much blame a show for the variations it spawns in other media; look, or rather don’t, at the movie versions of almost any stage musical. But uplifting plays are a suspect category to begin with. The path from struggle to resolution is so well worn, albeit not often in an immigrant Korean milieu, that there is little chance of surprise or adventure. Add cute idiosyncrasies and exaggerated stereotypes, no matter how well rooted in actual behavior, and even Canada can become kitschland.

But something began to shift for me in “Kim’s Convenience” about two-thirds of the way through. A son named Jung — who had run away at 16, taking all the money in the safe — hauntingly if not surprisingly appears. (Jung is played by Mr. Choi himself.) He now works as an associate at a car rental agency and, as he confesses to his mother, who meets him secretly at church, does not like his life. He thinks of throwing it away and starting over, or maybe just throwing it away.

At the same time, a truer side of Janet’s rebellion emerges, as she confronts Appa about the years of free and dreary labor she provided in the store, only to be punished emotionally as the fruit of that labor — her freedom — neared. Her brassy entitlement started to sound to me like legitimate grievance, even as Appa’s sacrifices began to seem like something quite real, not just a comic premise. The actors were crying.

I cried, too. This was not just the magic of the fine performances, particularly Mr. Lee’s, under the direction of Weyni Mengesha. It was also my belated recognition that the story was, in part, my own. My mother grew up above, and worked most days in, her parents’ convenience store, Swartz Cut-Rate, on Front Street in North Philadelphia. My grandparents had emigrated from Eastern Europe, not Korea, and to the United States, not Canada, but so much else — not in the comedy but in the sadness — was comparable. The play’s questions of gratitude and ingratitude, and its exploration of the equivocal meanings of starting over, no longer felt rote at all.

Many New Yorkers would probably find a similar piece of themselves in “Kim’s Convenience.” And if we are too sophisticated theatrically to embrace it without ambivalence, why should we be different from the family it portrays? When the inevitable father-daughter reconciliation hug finally occurs, and goes on longer than Appa can tolerate, he says, “O.K., that’s good enough.” And I guess it is.