Yolk

Jayne Baek is a Korean American college student at a fashion school in Manhattan, struggling with loneliness, financial stress, and an eating disorder she hides from nearly everyone. Her older sister, June, is a seemingly accomplished hedge fund worker living in a sleek high-rise apartment near Jayne's campus. The two have been estranged for years, their rift tracing back to their childhoods in Seoul and later San Antonio, Texas, where their immigrant parents ran a family restaurant.

While Jayne is at a trendy French restaurant with her ex, Jeremy, and his new companion Rae, June appears unexpectedly, having tracked Jayne through geotagged Instagram posts. June is dressed oddly in workout clothes and rubber clogs, and she insists they need to talk. When Jayne returns from the bathroom, Jeremy and Rae have left without her. That evening at June's apartment, June tells Jayne she has cancer, likely uterine or ovarian. Jayne's mind spirals to imagining June's funeral. June makes Jayne promise not to tell their mother, fearing she will launch into a prayer-circle frenzy.

Jayne's life in New York is precarious. She lives in a cheap, illegal sublet in Brooklyn with Jeremy, who answered her Craigslist roommate ad and is not her boyfriend, though she is drawn to him. He has stopped paying rent and brings other women home. Jayne privately battles bulimia: bingeing on roommates' food and replacing it to cover her tracks, purging in secret, and skipping meals in public. Her therapist, Gina Lombardi, a social worker on the Upper West Side, has identified Jayne as a perfectionist who abandons anything she cannot do flawlessly, but Jayne has not disclosed the eating disorder.

As June navigates medical appointments, Jayne begins spending more time at her sister's apartment. June makes mapo tofu, a spicy tofu dish that was their father's favorite, and the two eat together on the couch. While June is away, Jayne cleans the neglected refrigerator. June fires off cutting remarks about Jayne's choices, but something is loosening between them. They watch Gilmore Girls and settle into a fragile domestic routine.

Jayne reconnects with Patrick, a Korean American boy she knew from church in Texas, who now works as a creative director in the East Village. They meet at a dive bar on Halloween. Patrick is warm and sincere in ways that unsettle Jayne. She drunkenly kisses him; he gently pulls away. At his apartment, he lends her sweats, cooks spaghetti, and they talk for hours about immigrant family dynamics. That night they lie together holding hands, and Jayne feels safe for the first time.

The situation escalates when Jayne discovers a health insurance bill addressed to her own name listing cancer procedures she never received. June confesses: She was fired nine weeks earlier, lost her insurance, and has been using Jayne's student health plan by stealing her Texas ID. Jayne storms out but deliberately leaves the ID on the counter for June to use.

After confronting Jeremy and packing her belongings, Jayne moves into June's apartment. She follows June to an oncology appointment, where each sister flashes the other's ID at security and nobody notices. Posing as "June, her older sister," Jayne meets Dr. Ramirez, the gynecologic oncology surgeon, who explains that June needs a total hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy: the removal of her uterus, ovaries, and fallopian tubes. After the appointment, their fight reaches its peak. June, sobbing, says they both know Jayne is sicker than June. Jayne counters with the stakes she has been carrying: If June dies under Jayne's name, Jayne will be legally dead. "If you die, I die," she tells her sister.

June announces a trip to Texas to see their parents before treatment. At home in San Antonio, the sisters fall back into familiar dynamics. Mom inspects their bodies for weight changes. They attend Saturday evening Mass at the Church of the Korean Martyrs, where Mom leads the choir. A flashback reveals the traumatic day their mother disappeared when Jayne was 15. Mom gave her a gold ring with two rubies, set a table of favorite foods, and fed Jayne generously before vanishing for three months. Two weeks before leaving, Mom had slapped Jayne across the face for trying on her hanbok, a traditional Korean wedding dress, screaming that her daughters did not get to have everything. Jayne never told anyone she witnessed Mom's departure, and the guilt catalyzed her eating disorder: a desperate need to purge what she had consumed, to undo the meal that felt like a bribe.

Back in New York, Patrick and Jayne grow closer. He reveals that Aliyah, a woman Jayne assumed was his girlfriend, is his ex. They spend a night together, and for the first time Jayne stays present in her body during sex. She cries afterward from an unfamiliar sense of safety. Patrick tells her he likes her and that she does not have to feel like she is overstaying her welcome.

One morning Jayne returns to June's apartment to find her sister in a blood-filled bathtub, not from self-harm but from a devastating period caused by her uterine cancer. Jayne washes June's hair as June cries silently. The scene triggers Jayne's guilt over a high school incident when June bled through her clothes and students tormented her; Jayne, desperate for social acceptance, had hidden rather than defending her sister.

After a devastating binge-purge episode at her old Brooklyn apartment, Jayne confesses to Gina that she makes herself throw up and has not had her period in a year. She slides her apartment key under the door and leaves for good. At June's apartment, June has installed a bookcase to partition off a room for Jayne but sets a condition: Jayne must stop hurting herself. June reveals she has known about the bulimia since high school, when she found bags of vomit hidden under Jayne's bed.

Jayne attends her first eating disorder recovery meeting in the West Village, where a speaker's story of disordered eating mirrors her own. In the hallway, she encounters Ingrid, a thin woman she has been watching near school for months, who turns out to be a recovering bulimic. Ingrid tells Jayne she is only as sick as her secrets.

On the day of June's surgery, Jayne secretly calls their mother, who flies in overnight on two connecting flights. When Mom walks in, June sobs. Mom tells Jayne privately that she understands about the insurance switch and does not judge them. Before June is wheeled into the operating room, Jayne tells her "I love you" for the first time. June replies: "Fuck, same. I love you. I love you, Mom."

While waiting during surgery, Mom reveals where she went when she disappeared: She returned to Korea to grieve at the grave of Ji-soo, the baby she lost between June and Jayne. She visited the grave daily until the weight lifted and she knew it was time to come home. Mom tells Jayne that when she has children someday, she will need to use June's name, since medical records under "Jayne" will now show a hysterectomy. The sisters will have to help each other again.

After the surgery, June reveals why colleagues nicknamed her "Selina," after Selina Kyle, the comic book character Catwoman: She stole an ashtray from the sexist boss who fired her, and no one could figure out how. Jayne asks Mom the meaning of Ji-soo's name. Mom traces the characters on Jayne's palm, and the answer remains between them, unspoken on the page.