The Korean New Year Custom of Bowing to Elders

The Korean New Year Custom of Bowing to Elders is a family ritual that joins respect for age with New Year’s wishes and gifts of money. At the Covey gathering, its ordered bows become more than a formality: they expose the family’s continuing grief over Lara Jean’s Mother and give Lara Jean a reason to imagine changing the next New Year’s Day.

Order and Exchange

The family performs the bows before moving on to the meal. As the oldest adult, Grandma sits on the couch first; Aunt Carrie and Uncle Victor bow, followed by Daddy, and the sequence proceeds down the line to Kitty, the youngest. The practice is described as age-ordered: younger relatives bow to their elders, wish them luck in the coming year, and receive money in return.

The exchange is both ceremonial and tangible. Aunt Carrie and Uncle Victor each give ten dollars, as do Daddy and Aunt Min and Uncle Sam; Grandma gives twenty. The girls do not receive extra for wearing hanboks, though the total is still welcome. The narrator notes that the aunts and uncles had given only five dollars apiece the previous year, making the gift amounts part of the children’s own cheerful accounting of the holiday.

The Empty Place in the Ritual

The sequence carries an ache for Lara Jean because Daddy’s couch has had an empty cushion beside him every New Year’s Day since Lara Jean’s Mother died. As he sits to receive the bows, he smiles and hands out ten-dollar bills, but the empty place makes his solitude conspicuous. Grandma catches Lara Jean’s eye, and the two silently recognize the absence.

When Lara Jean takes her turn, she kneels with her hands folded in front of her forehead and privately vows that Daddy will not be alone on that couch next year. The bow thus becomes a moment of resolve as well as respect: a repeated family custom gives her a visible measure of what has remained unchanged, and a specific hope for what might change.

New Year’s Wishes

The bows take place alongside other New Year’s observances. The family eats rice cake soup for good luck, and as Lara Jean begins her bowl, she makes a wish that things will work out with Peter. The scene places her private romantic hope within a crowded family celebration, where inherited ritual, gifts, food, and the memory of her mother all meet.