The legacy of a family-owned sweet soup shop in the back alleyways of Hong Kong begins showing strains when the mom holding everything together suffers a stroke.

So May (Stephy Tang) is the elder daughter of the family, and dreams of escaping the life chained to the kitchen she was never allowed into anyway, by becoming a flight attendant. Her father (Simon Yam), highly traditional and stubborn, eternally critical and curmudgeonly, merely seems to suffer his and his families’ existence, relying almost solely on the running of their dessert soup shop as his legacy to the world. Her brother (Jeffrey Ngai) has his head immersed in video games and modern sensibilities, despite being catered to inside the house by his mom and when she’s not around, expecting his sister to do the same. The only sweetness in a rather sour family existence is mom (Mimi Kung), who is the matriarch of the house in every sense of the word, good-naturedly running after her adult children even as they try to run away from this tiny slice of their parents’ life, and making amends, apologies, and even excuses for her grouch of a husband as they run the dessert soup shop they opened together many years ago. Which means everything falls apart when mom suffers a sudden stroke and lands in the hospital.

May would like nothing more than to escape to another country with her flight attendant job, but her brother has completely shut down with mom in the hospital, refusing to even answer the phone when dad repeatedly calls demanding bro come in and help with the shop, and dad can’t do everything the shop requires alone either. Hiding her pain, May turns in her flight attendant credentials and tries to go help with the shop, attempting to learn and recreate the recipes that made her families shop famous, which earns her nothing but more censure from dad. In the grand old tradition of Asian families not actually talking to each-other about their traumas, dad long ago decided he would never insist his firstborn child would be stuck working in the shop and doing nothing else, but never bothered to tell her that, or why.

Things instantly go from bad to remarkably worse when mom sadly passes away, and though dad did kind of get to say good-bye to her, no-one in the family is equipped to deal with the gaping hole mom left when she crossed over. The unfeeling government is buying up all the small businesses in the neighborhood for development and Mays families’ shop is the last holdout, so whatever legacy mom left behind in the shop is in danger too. Dad’s gone from harsh disapproving words to almost constant beleaguered silence, and bro has stuck his head firmly in his headphones and sorrowful silence too. Only May is left to try and save the family dessert soup shop, and her frankly whats left of her family, from total collapse.

And May tries, oh she tries so hard. Despite a newcomer to her situation, a traveling writer (Kevin Kam-Yin Chu) who decides to take May up on her statement that her families red bean dessert soup is the best and right way to make such a thing and eventually ends up becoming May’s beau and shop helper too, May feels quite alone in her struggles. She takes dad to look at other locations for the shop, which of course earns her more censure; May tries to enlist her brother to help in some real way only to be told he doesn’t want to fight fate and modernization; and dear old traditional dad seems resigned to let the shop just freaking close rather than putting up any kind of real struggle. We understand everyone misses mom in helpless, hopeless sorrow, but the bleak acceptance almost right up to the very end of the film is really depressing.

Surprisingly, the film ends on a sweeter note than one might expect, given the bitterness of a great deal of the film. An acknowledged staple of many Asian cultures is that this is how a family expresses their love, their legacy, and their dreams for their children – with excellent food. And while Little Red Sweet has many other tastes running through its story, things do come full circle in a quietly loving and yes, very sweet way.