Two Asian-American children are left to fend for themselves when their mother goes missing in director Tze Chun's accomplished, semi-autobiographical feature.

Single mother Elaine Cheng lives outside Boston with her two young children, Raymond and Tina. Broke and struggling (dad, who lives in Hong Kong, is a deadbeat), the family is evicted from their house, but with a friend’s help they end up squatting in an unoccupied apartment complex. When a seemingly lucrative opportunity arises — a pyramid scheme of incredibly dubious merit — Elaine naively signs up. She proves an effective recruit but when she goes to collect her first paycheck, she disappears. Left with nothing but ramen noodles and in danger of being found alone in the apartment, Raymond takes Tina into the city so he can withdraw his savings of $300 to buy materials to fabricate his own invention — a spaghetti twirler made with a plastic fork and hand-held fan — and sell it for big money. Chun’s superbly acted indie (based on his own mother's disastrous experiments with pyramid and get-rich-quick schemes during his childhood) is by turns suspenseful, funny, heartbreaking and inspirational, representing the good, bad, selfish and compassionate within our multicultural society. -- Lawrence Ferber