Grandma

Grandma is the eldest adult in Lara Jean’s family and a central presence in its observance of Korean New Year. Her role is shown through concrete acts of inheritance: she bought the girls their hanboks during a visit to Korea, takes her place at the head of the family’s New Year bowing, and gives them money as part of the celebration. She also connects the family’s present-day meals and plans to Korea and to memories of Lara Jean’s late mother. The book offers no personal name or separate account of Grandma’s life; instead, it reveals her through these recurring ties among generations, custom, and remembrance.

Identity and Family Traditions

The hanboks Grandma bought on her last visit to Korea give the sisters a visible part in the New Year celebration. Margot’s has a yellow jacket and apple-green skirt, while Lara Jean’s is hot pink with an ivory-white jacket and a long embroidered bow. Kitty complains that her own outfit fits differently: its skirt ends at her ankles, unlike the floor-length skirt of Lara Jean’s. The clothes are both gifts from Grandma and garments the girls negotiate in their own way, down to Lara Jean struggling to tie her bow after repeatedly consulting a YouTube video.

That small domestic fuss precedes the family’s formal observance. In the custom Lara Jean describes, younger family members bow to elders on New Year’s Day and wish them luck; the elders give money in return. The order follows age. Grandma, the oldest adult, sits on the couch first, and the other adults and children bow in succession, with Kitty last. The scene places Grandma at the center of the ritual without separating her from the family: her authority is expressed through the order everyone follows and through the exchange of respectful bows and gifts.

New Year, Loss, and Kinship

Grandma’s position in the ritual also brings the family’s absence into view. When Lara Jean’s father sits to receive bows, the cushion beside him is empty, as it has been every New Year’s Day since Lara Jean’s mother died. He smiles and hands out ten-dollar bills, but Lara Jean feels a pang at seeing him alone. Grandma catches her eye, and Lara Jean understands that Grandma shares the recognition. Neither needs to say it aloud. When Lara Jean later kneels to bow, she vows that her father will not sit alone on that couch the following year; the vow belongs to Lara Jean, but Grandma’s silent acknowledgment makes the grief a perception shared across generations.

The money exchanged makes the custom practical as well as ceremonial. Lara Jean and her sisters receive ten dollars each from their father and from two relatives on the mother’s side, and twenty dollars from Grandma. Lara Jean notes that the amount from the aunts and uncles has risen from five dollars apiece the previous year. Her account treats the cash with a child’s matter-of-fact pleasure, but the detail also shows how the gathering binds a wide family network through repeated, recognizable gestures. Grandma’s gift is part of that exchange, not a detached token: it comes within the same ordered ritual that affirms her place as the eldest.

Food, Memory, and Korea

Food supplies another route through which family history is carried forward. At a dinner centered on galbi jjim, Lara Jean’s father compares his version with Grandma’s and explains that he tenderized the meat as Grandma had told him, though he still thinks it is not tender enough. His comments make her cooking a standard he is trying to reproduce. The meal turns toward the girls’ mother when he recalls taking her to a Korean restaurant on their first date, where she ordered in Korean and explained each dish. This is his memory, not a story Grandma tells, but the reference to her instructions places Grandma within the living chain of culinary knowledge through which the family remembers its past.

Grandma is also associated with ingredients and provisions brought from Korea. Lara Jean’s father suggests that Margot take seaweed and some ginseng tea Grandma brought back from there. He then imagines a family vacation to Korea, a trip the girls’ mother had wanted to take with them, and says that Grandma would make a good tour guide. Kitty asks whether Grandma could come; her father welcomes the idea. The exchange makes Grandma’s connection to Korea more than a matter of remembered origin or stored food: within the family’s conversation, she is someone who could accompany the next generation and help them encounter a place where they still have relatives.

Narrative Significance

Grandma’s characterization is built from recurring acts rather than extended description. A garment bought on a trip, a place at the head of a New Year ritual, a cash gift, remembered cooking instructions, and tea brought home from Korea give her a presence across the family’s everyday and ceremonial life. These details connect cultural practice to particular relationships: the sisters wear what she bought, the father follows what she taught him, and the family imagines her guiding a journey they might make together.

Her quiet look toward Lara Jean during the bowing ceremony gives that continuity an emotional counterpoint. The ritual proceeds according to age and tradition, yet the empty cushion beside Lara Jean’s father makes the mother’s absence impossible to overlook. Grandma recognizes the same absence without interrupting the ceremony. In this way, she is associated both with what the family continues to inherit and with what it cannot restore. The evidence leaves the proposed trip unresolved, but Grandma’s imagined place on it captures her role in the family: not only a link to what came before, but a possible companion in carrying that inheritance forward.