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The story of domestic help who work for rich households. No Soon Geum is one of these housekeepers; despite the master-maid heirarchy, she's bold, fearless, and unafraid of doing hard work in order to support herself. As a child, Soon Geum had dreamt of living a grand life in a Cinderella story, complete with her own white knight, but that dream had faded as reality took over. However, she reaches a turning point in her life when she is hired as a maid for the rich and handsome Kang Gun Woo.

Since 2007, the Hong Kong Health Authority has implemented an anti-smoking law that bans smoking in all indoor areas. This pushes office smokers to take their cigarette breaks in the street. Smokers from neighboring buildings gradually bond and form a new community known as "Hot Pot Pack," as they would gather around a trash bin with an ashtray, sharing small talks with raunchy jokes like they are at a hot pot dinner. Jimmy is a mild mannered advertising executive in his twenties. While smoking in an alley packed with booming loudmouth co-workers and sharing explicit gossips and horror stories, he befriends a misfit cosmetics salesgirl Cherie who also likes to light up. An awkward romance soon blossoms amidst the anxiety of their nicotine rush. As they become more attached to each other, they also find themselves moving farther away from their regular hot pot pack into their own private alley, where their conversations suggest more emotional depths, covering the collision of reality and delightfully trivial matters of the bizarre people around them.

The film's main theme is the conflict between work and family commitments in modern Japan. It focuses on a successful internet entrepreneur Nagai, whose wife Akira and young daughter Kaai left him because he neglected them for his business. A...