Margot Song

Margot Song, the eldest Song sister, is both a voice of practical encouragement and someone who must reckon with the family life that continued while she was away. Studying in Scotland, she stays connected across 3,500 miles, advises Lara Jean about college and identity, and returns to a household reshaped in her absence. Her story makes belonging a two-way adjustment: she helps Lara Jean face leaving, then admits that coming home has made her feel left behind.

Identity and Life Away

At the time Lara Jean decorates Easter eggs at the kitchen table, Margot is in her dorm room in Scotland, five hours ahead and 3,500 miles away. The sisters talk by video call: Margot, wearing pajamas and a sheet mask, inspects an egg decorated with a cameo of Marie Antoinette and recommends pink glitter because it will stand out against the planned pearl border. The small exchange shows how intimacy survives distance through shared attention to ordinary projects. Margot’s hair has grown just past her shoulders; Lara Jean thinks the length suits her and suspects Margot will keep it short from then on.

Margot’s life abroad also gives her a perspective on the choices awaiting Lara Jean. She has a boyfriend of six months, Ravi, whose parents are from India and who was born in London. Lara Jean first meets him over Skype and reads his accent and background as signs of polish and sophistication; Margot counters that he is a nerd and warns her not to be misled by the accent. She plans to bring him home for spring break, where he will stay with the family for two nights before flying to Texas to see relatives, while Margot remains at home for the rest of the week. The visit is a concrete effort to connect the life she has built abroad with the people waiting for her at home.

Counsel and Lara Jean’s Future

When Lara Jean anxiously waits to hear from the University of Virginia, Margot tells her she will get in. Lara Jean has raised her SAT scores by two hundred points and worked toward the same goal her sister achieved, but still fears that effort may not be enough. Asked whether she would urge Lara Jean to choose another school to broaden her horizons, Margot says she trusts her to know what is best. That trust turns reassurance into permission: Lara Jean recognizes that she trusts her own judgment too and believes Virginia is the right choice for her.

Margot’s advice is not simply to follow a boyfriend. She tells Lara Jean to make her own friends and find her own people at a large university, since Peter’s lacrosse circle may not be the group Lara Jean would choose for herself. She also urges her to join the Asian association. Studying in a different country, Margot feels she has missed the experience of an Asian-American group and describes college as a time when people may find their racial identity. Her advice joins independence to cultural belonging: Lara Jean should build a social life of her own while seeking out a community that speaks to an aspect of her identity.

That confidence matters again after Lara Jean is rejected by Virginia. Peter proposes that she attend another school for a year and transfer, citing the example of Toney Lewis, who went from PVCC to Virginia; he imagines that she could be with him there the following year. Margot, however, asks Lara Jean directly how she feels about the rejection and challenges the transfer plan before Lara Jean has even started at William and Mary. Her question brings the decision back to Lara Jean’s own reasons, rather than accepting Peter’s imagined route as settled. Margot also tries to make the prospect of William and Mary more inviting: Lara Jean imagines working in Colonial Williamsburg, churning butter in period dress, while worrying that historical accuracy might make an Asian employee unwelcome. Margot points to Phillipa Soo, who is half-Chinese and played Eliza Hamilton, and says they would use social media if the employer refused to hire her. She places Lara Jean’s concern about representation inside a future she can still approach with excitement.

Culture, Family, and Absence

Margot’s relationship to cultural identity is shaped by distance as well as by family history. She has missed an Asian-American student group while studying abroad; at home, she is also alert to how Asian identity is invoked and who gets to decide what counts as appropriate. When Peter suggests a wedding custom he has seen in a movie, Margot clarifies that it is Thai, not Korean, and objects to the idea that Trina should incorporate Asian culture into her wedding simply because the Song sisters are Asian. Lara Jean answers that Trina wants them to feel included and has considered acknowledging their mother. The disagreement is not a rejection of family connection: it distinguishes genuine inclusion from treating Asian culture as a generic decoration or an obligation imposed on Trina.

Food makes the family stakes more immediate. Margot calls Korean food the sisters’ biggest link to Korean culture and worries that if their father stops cooking it because Trina dislikes it, the connection will disappear. She frames the marriage as bringing Trina into the whole family, with Korea part of that package. Lara Jean responds that Trina knows this and reminds Margot that the sisters will eat Korean food every day during their summer in Korea. The trip has been arranged as a graduation gift: the sisters will spend all of July with their grandmother, stay with a great-aunt in Seoul, take Korean language classes several times a week, tour places including Jeju and Busan, and attend a Korean pastry-making class. For Margot, the planned visit helps reassure her that cultural memory will remain present in the family, even as its household changes.

Yet the promise of continuity does not erase what Margot has lost. Back at home, she says it feels as if she returned to find a whole new family that she is not part of. Lara Jean understands the comparison: family life carried on without Margot, just as it will carry on without Lara Jean after she leaves for college. Margot cries and says she misses their mother. Her distress connects the changed household to bereavement, rather than reducing it to a complaint about Trina. Lara Jean recognizes that Kitty has a special bond with Trina and understands Margot’s fear that, if Korean food and Korea recede from family life, Kitty’s connection to their mother’s heritage might recede too. She reassures Margot that neither Korea nor their mother will be forgotten. Margot accepts the comfort, then notices that Lara Jean has seemed melancholy since Beach Week and asks whether something happened with Peter. Even while carrying her own grief, she remains attentive to her younger sister’s unspoken trouble.

Family Change and Narrative Role

Margot’s advice about independence sits alongside the practical negotiations of Lara Jean’s growing up. When their father worries about Lara Jean going to Beach Week without adult supervision, Trina tells him that Lara Jean is no longer a child and that the trip is practice for living on her own. Margot’s earlier insistence that Lara Jean make her own friends belongs to the same threshold: leaving home requires new judgment and self-direction, not merely following familiar relationships. The sisters face that transition on different schedules, and Margot’s return makes the unevenness visible—she once left, Lara Jean is preparing to go, and neither can assume that home will stand still for them.

At the end, a photograph gathers the sisters around Trina: Margot dabs at her eyes with a tissue, Kitty stands on a footstool to fuss with Trina’s hair, and Trina puts an arm around Lara Jean. They smile together as the family marks both an ending and a beginning. Margot’s care in the picture does not cancel her earlier feeling of exclusion or her grief for her mother; it shows her participating in a family that has expanded and changed. As Lara Jean waits for Peter, watching cars come down the street and hoping he will arrive despite believing he will not, Margot’s place in the family remains part of the larger departure scene: she is both the sister who has already crossed distance and the one who helps make a changing home feel shared again.