Location is somewhat irrelevant. Her being half Chinese is probably not. Would it make any difference if this story took place in the USA or UK?

Currently she doesn’t really have a goal. I agree with David, it’s hard to picture when it’s not clear what she actually wants. Why does she need healing? Why does the town need healing?

It reminds me quite heavily of “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar” although that film is a comedy (which I can’t imagine yours wouldn’t be to be honest… someone posing as a Chinese medicine healer…). In that film, three drag queens are on a road trip to Hollywood and along the way a cop tries to rape one of them, resulting in them knocking him unconscious (although they believe they killed him). Their car breaks down a little further down the road and they find themselves in a small conservative town and they have no choice but to wait in the town for car parts to arrive. Whilst they are there, they all learn something about themselves and they change the town too. Simple.

Your idea is similar, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but with To Wong Foo, it’s probably the car breaking down that’s the inciting incident. Their goal is to get to Hollywood, when their car breaks down their goal is to get their car fixed so they can get to Hollywood. ?The antagonistic forces are the police, certain members of the town, time (as it delays the car part) – all of these things potentially stop them going to Hollywood. Interestingly though, the drag queen’s sub-plots form a much bigger part of the whole film than the A-story.

A very similar approach could be taken for your idea. The protagonist needs to have an over-arching goal and that needs to relate more heavily to the inciting incident. Everything that happens in this town are your sub-plots and whilst they can be suggested in the logline, we actually need your whole A-story to make a good logline.

Hope this helps.

Act I should be she is already a highly skilled chef, she’s a hard ass, and isn’t well liked. Much quicker and you don’t have to worry about cramming her rise to where she is in 30mins. Chances are, before she was a great chef, she wasn’t quite as “hard-ass” and was more liked by those around her and it’s the nature of her desire to succeed that she pushed all those things aside to get to where she is. If the audience sees what she was like before she became the great chef, there’s a chance that where she ends up at the end will have less of an impact because the audience will have seen that she can be a better person already. Does that make any sense at all?

I think she should be attending meetings in act II as this is where you’re going to meet the additional characters who provide the different perspectives on her point of view. Act II is all about her fighting between who she was and who she is and there needs to be people who represent both sides of this in her life – past and future – Father and fellow disabled person. As I mentioned before, through one of these characters (the B-Story) she has a turning point that pushes the story into Act III.