Eighteen-year-old Xiaobin is a recent émigré in Buenos Aires, where she’s joined her family after some time living apart. She gets a job in a deli, but her Spanish is not strong enough yet and she can’t understand the customers, and is promptly fired. Soon after, she finds work in a supermarket, which is where she meets Indian immigrant Vijay, who asks her out on a date. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her parents, who have no interest in integrating into Argentine society, Xiaobin begins taking Spanish lessons. The extremely clever conceit of The Future Perfect is that as Xiaobin learns new tenses, so her life moves from past and present to an unconditional, and even hypothetical, future.