In the 1960s and 1970s, people who couldn’t find hope in South Korea left for the United States in the hope of finding the American Dream. In a country where they didn’t speak the language, people opened liquor shops and formed their own community with integrity and responsibility despite difficult conditions including racism and armed robberies. And the “liquor store babies” who were born and raised there, like the director of this film, have a different American dream of their own—one imbued with ambivalence toward their parents’ generation and the Korean American community in LA. While various incidents, such as the LA riots in the 1990s, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the collapse of the local community due to the Covid pandemic and new hope, as well as generational gap about the Korean identity, bring laughter and tears, the audience can naturally discover the current state of Korean society.
