Korea is not depicted as a place the family visits during the story; it reaches the narrative through objects, rituals, meals, language, and a proposed family trip. Its significance lies in the way the Covey family remembers and practices a connection to relatives and traditions there, while also confronting gaps in what the younger generation has inherited. Korea is at once part of the family’s past and a destination they have yet to make their own.

Family Heritage and Hanboks

The sisters’ hanboks make that connection visible at home. Grandma bought the garments on her last visit to Korea: Margot Song Covey’s has a yellow jacket and apple-green skirt, while Lara Jean Song Covey’s is hot pink with an ivory-white jacket and a long, embroidered bow. Kitty Covey complains that her sleeves and skirt are too short, contrasting the way her growing body fits the clothing with the older sisters’ better-fitting outfits. Lara Jean has watched a YouTube video repeatedly to tie her own bow, yet it still looks lopsided to her. The detail gives the garment a double character: it is a cherished gift carrying a family connection, but wearing it also involves practical discomfort and learned effort.

At the New Year gathering, Aunt Carrie explains that Haven refused to wear her hanbok, while the Covey sisters arrive dressed in theirs. The clothing is not treated as a costume detached from family life; it accompanies a ritual in which relatives gather and observe a particular order of respect. At the same time, the scene shows that participation is not identical for everyone present. The sisters wear the garments Grandma brought back, while another young relative declines to do so. Korea’s presence is therefore conveyed through choices and relationships as well as through a recognizable object.

Ritual, Family, and Loss

The family’s New Year bowing is described as a Korean cultural practice: on New Year’s Day, younger relatives bow to elders and wish them luck, and the elders give money in return. The order runs from oldest to youngest. Grandma sits first, followed by the other adults, and the sequence eventually reaches Kitty, the youngest. The ritual gives the gathering an orderly shape and links the generations through repeated gestures of respect and exchange.

Its emotional force is inseparable from absence. When Lara Jean’s father sits to receive the bows, the cushion beside him is empty, as it has been every New Year since Lara Jean’s mother died. He smiles and hands out ten-dollar bills, while Grandma and Lara Jean silently recognize the loss. When Lara Jean takes her turn, kneeling with her hands folded before her forehead, she resolves that her father will not be alone on that couch the next year. The custom thus becomes more than a ceremonial expression of heritage: it gives Lara Jean a moment in which to register family grief and imagine changing her father’s future.

The exchange of money also makes the ritual concrete for the children. Each receives ten dollars from Aunt Carrie and Uncle Victor, ten from her father, ten from Aunt Min and Uncle Sam, and twenty from Grandma. The amounts are remembered alongside the bowing, not as a replacement for it but as part of how the occasion is experienced. The scene grounds cultural practice in the children’s perspective: solemn respect, family affection, and the practical pleasure of receiving New Year money coexist.

Food, Language, and What Was Not Passed On

Korea is also recalled at the dinner table through galbi jjim and Lara Jean’s father’s memory of the sisters’ mother. He compares his version of the dish with Grandma’s, worrying that the meat is not tender enough to fall from the bone. As he remembers his first date with his wife, he recalls that she took him to a Korean restaurant, ordered everything in Korean, and explained each dish. The memory connects food and language to the beginning of their relationship: her knowledge was part of how he first experienced her, and the meal remains vivid to him.

That recollection carries regret. Lara Jean’s father wishes the girls had continued Korean school, making clear that the family’s connection is not simply a complete inheritance passed down without interruption. Lara Jean responds that she would take Korean at the University of Virginia (UVA) if she gets in. Her intention is a future possibility rather than proof that she already speaks the language; nevertheless, it turns her father’s memory into a point of contact between his hopes and her plans. His response, that her mother would have loved the idea, folds the absent mother into that prospect as well.

A Future Visit Imagined

The possibility of travel emerges during the same meal. Lara Jean’s father suggests that the family could take a vacation in Korea, recalling that the girls’ mother always wanted to bring them there and noting that they still have many relatives there. The destination is therefore tied to both family continuity and a wish left unrealized. Kitty asks whether Grandma could come, and her father agrees that she would make a good guide. The exchange imagines the trip as a family undertaking, with an older generation helping the younger one encounter relatives and places they have not yet visited.

Lara Jean and Margot exchange a small smile at the thought of Grandma accompanying them; their private amusement sits alongside their interest in going. Lara Jean’s excitement turns quickly to stationery, clothes, hairpins, and BB cream, while Margot proposes that their father take a Korean cooking class. Their different ideas make the imagined journey personal rather than abstract: it could mean shopping and discovery for Lara Jean, practical learning for their father, and time together as a family. He suggests considering it for the summer, while acknowledging that everyone’s schedules matter and asking whether Margot will be home. The trip remains a plan, not an event that occurs in the narrated action.

Across these scenes, Korea is made present through what the family wears, how it gathers, what it eats, and what it hopes to learn or visit. Those details resist reducing heritage to a single emblem: the hanbok can be both treasured and awkward, the New Year ritual both communal and shadowed by bereavement, and language both a source of the father’s memories and a skill the daughters may still pursue. The country’s narrative significance rests in this unfinished connection, held between inherited practice, remembered family history, and a journey still imagined.