Eleven-year-old Yumi Chung is at a Koreatown beauty parlor with her mother. She wants a short haircut, but her mother insists on a perm, the same as always. Yumi’s mom informs her that her parents can’t afford the steep tuition at the Winston Preparatory Academy. Yumi is secretly delighted since she feels like an outsider at the exclusive Beverly Hills prep school. However, her mother says she can qualify for a scholarship if she passes an SSAT exam at the end of August. Mrs. Chung has enrolled Yumi in hagwon classes to prepare her for the test. This will take three hours a day and kill the balance of her summer vacation. Yumi doesn’t object because nobody would listen to her anyway.

After the beauty salon, Yumi and her mother return to the family’s Koreatown restaurant. The neighborhood is changing and becoming gentrified, so Chung’s Barbecue is struggling to survive. Yumi helps out at the restaurant, and her 20-year-old sister Yuri is working there today too. Yuri is already in UCLA medical school and is the family paragon, while Yumi isn’t.