Park

오빠 — twenty looks good on you. I have, since 2007, been four years older than you, which gives me the right (eomma's word, not mine) to say the following: you are kinder than you were at nineteen, you laugh more than you did at eighteen, and your hair is — finally, finally — the right length. Soo-jin is good for you. Minho is, against my better judgement, also good for you. Halmoni is making seaweed soup on the day. I will be there on the Saturday with the cake. Don't cry in front of halmoni this year — she has been practising not crying back. We are all going to fail, oppa. It is okay. — Yujin.

PARK JIHOON. TWENTY. We are TWENTY. Do you remember on the first day of OT in 2024 when you were the only one who refused to do the icebreaker game and I sat down next to you on the cafeteria floor in the Yonsei student union and said "ya, you are going to be my problem now," and you said, very calmly, "I am going to be your problem for four years," and we both thought it was a joke? IT WAS NOT A JOKE. I have been your problem for two years and I have eighteen more to go (we agreed on twenty, you cannot back out now, there are WITNESSES). Happy birthday brother. The cafe at Hongdae has saved the corner booth on Saturday. I have, in advance, ordered the iced americano you don't actually like because watching you drink it sadly is the funniest part of my Saturdays. SOO-JIN IS BRINGING THE CAKE. I will, as always, bring the chaos. — Minho.

우리 손자 지훈아 — Halmoni is writing this on the kitchen table at the apartment in Busan, slowly, because the eomma of your eomma is, as you know, eighty-three this year and the pen is heavier than it used to be. Yujin is helping me with the English parts. You were born in the spring and you have always been a spring child. Quiet in the cold, loud in the warm. The year you turned five we walked together to see the cherry blossoms at Yongdusan and you said, halmoni, do the flowers fall on purpose? and I said, yes, they fall on purpose, so that we can see them. You remembered for years. You are twenty. Twenty is the age of the rest of your life. Be kind, my grandson. Eat slowly. Sleep enough. Call halmoni on a Sunday when the weather is nice. Bring Soo-jin to Busan in the summer — Yujin tells me about her, and I want to feed her seaweed soup and look at her hands. 사랑한다, 지훈아. From your halmoni, who held you the morning you came home from the hospital and has, in every spring since, watched the flowers fall on purpose for you. — Halmoni.

jihoon-ah — Doyeon here, from Daewon Foreign Language High School, class of 2024. I am writing this from the medical school library at SNU on a Wednesday at 11pm because I am, technically, supposed to be studying for an anatomy exam (Soo-jin will sympathise, tell her I said hi — yes, Minho told me, yes, the whole school group chat knows, no, we are not going to tease you about it, much). I think about the bench outside the third-year classroom in 2023 a lot. We were studying for the suneung and you were, I think, the only person in our class who had genuinely accepted that the suneung was just a Saturday in November and not a referendum on our worth as human beings. I asked you how you were so calm about it and you said, "Doyeon, in three years none of us will remember what we got, but we will remember whether we were kind to each other in the library." I remember. I am being kind to people in the library, jihoon-ah. I am trying. It is hard at medical school. Your sentence helps. Happy twentieth, friend. The Hongdae cafe on Saturday — I will be there. I will bring the macarons from the place near my dorm. — Doyeon.

박 지훈 일병에게 — Junseo here, from the unit. I will keep this short because (1) I am still not very good at long sentences in writing, (2) the army taught us to keep things short, and (3) Yujin-nim asked us all to keep it under four hundred words. (We do not, in the unit, take orders from older sisters. Except in this case.) I was your bunk neighbour for fourteen months. You snore. You knew. We talked about it. I am putting it in writing now, on the record, in case anyone — Soo-jin? — needs to know. Marriage is a long sentence. The snoring is forever. I am doing her a favour. More seriously, brother. You were the calmest person in our unit. The night in February 2025 when the senior sergeant was, frankly, being unreasonable to the kid from Daegu who had just joined — you were the one who stood up at the table and very quietly said, "선임, that's enough," in the tone you have, that you do not raise, that everyone in the room hears anyway. I have, since I was discharged, been trying to learn how you do that. I have not, yet, figured it out. Happy twentieth, brother. I am in Incheon at my company now. I cannot make it to the Saturday. I have, instead, sent the seaweed soup ingredients to your halmoni by courier, with instructions. Eat well. Sleep well. Tell Soo-jin I said hello. — 이준서.

JIHOON HYUNG!! It is me, Eunwoo, from the first-year Business intake at Yonsei this year. I am writing this in a panic on a Tuesday at 1am because Yujin-noona somehow found me in the school group chat (HOW) and asked me to write this. I have, in my life, never written a birthday card before. I am sorry if this is bad. Hyung, you do not actually know this, but you are the reason I made it through midterms in November. The Thursday before the macroeconomics exam, you saw me at the back of the library at 2am with my head in my hands, and you sat down next to me without saying anything, and you opened your laptop, and you worked next to me for three hours until the library closed, and when we were leaving you said, very quietly, "Eunwoo-ya, you are going to be fine. Walk home. Sleep. The exam is on Saturday." I got a B+. I have never told you. Now I have told you. Happy twentieth birthday, hyung. The Hongdae cafe on Saturday — I will be there. I will bring two iced americanos. One for you. One for me. (One for Minho-hyung. Three iced americanos.) — Eunwoo.

jihoon-ah — This is the first birthday card I have written you, which is, when you say it out loud, a slightly enormous sentence. We have been together three months. Three months is the length of a season. The season we have been together is winter into spring, which feels, in the way Korean dramas keep telling us things feel, important. I met you at the cafe in Hongdae on a Tuesday in January because Minho — who I have, before you, known since high school — insisted I come and meet "the quiet one." You were reading. You did not look up for forty-five minutes. I sat at the next table and worked on my anatomy notes (I am pre-med, in case you have, in three months, somehow forgotten) and when you finally looked up you said, "you have been here a long time," and I said, "yes," and you said, "I noticed at minute twelve." I think about minute twelve often. Happy twentieth birthday, jihoon-ah. The cafe will be there on Saturday. I will be there on Saturday. I made you a small thing — it is not a big thing, it is the right size of thing — and I will give it to you when nobody is looking. — Soo-jin.

Jihoon! It's Tessa — your Manchester girl from the spring exchange last year. I am writing this from my flat in Fallowfield on a rainy Sunday in March which feels, climate-wise, deeply on-brand for me writing this and not on-brand at all for you. Sorry about that. I keep thinking about the Tuesday afternoons at the cafe near Sinchon when you taught me how to say things like "괜찮아" and "잘 자" and (your favourite) "배고파" properly. You were patient in the way only people who have actually learned a second language are patient — you never laughed at my pronunciation, you just gently said it again, and gently said it again, and gently said it again, until I got it. I have, in the eleven months since, kept up with my Korean by texting Minho (sorry, he didn't tell you, but yes) and watching far too many K-dramas. Last week I successfully ordered a 김치찌개 in Manchester's only proper Korean restaurant entirely in Korean. The ajumma running the place asked me where I learned. I said, a friend in Seoul. I meant: you. Happy twentieth, friend. From a rainy English Sunday to a soft Korean Saturday. Eat the cake. — Tessa.