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At this time of year, college graduates start their new lives and tally up their gifts. A personalized flask, perhaps. A newspaper subscription. Maybe something strong to drink after reading this summer’s mind-boggling headlines.

A message to those graduates: You ought to be buying gifts, too — for your parents.

Nobody ever told me this, not even my mother, the retired Neiman Marcus personal shopper who never met an occasion that did not call for a gift and helped scores of people buy them for others over the decades.

Instead, I picked up the parent present idea from Korean-American friends. In their families, handing over a gift on the occasion of receiving their first paycheck (or, in some cases, handing over the paycheck itself) is practically compulsory.

But it’s also a source of great pride for both the giver and the recipient, a chance to express gratitude at the end of what has often been a long journey. And given the price of college (or the work that is necessary to get into one that will give you a full ride), what parents wouldn’t want a pat on the back for the role they played?

The tradition of the parent gift may not have its roots in South Korea, for many other Asian and Asian-American children hand out presents or take their parents and their friends out for dinner when they first earn some money. One Confucian text, the Classic of Filial Piety, makes it crystal clear that delivering the “utmost pleasure” unto one’s parents is something that you just do, lest you be a rebel against virtue and propriety.

After the Korean War, for reasons that are not completely clear, it became common for young adults to buy their parents red thermal underwear. Korean studies scholars suggest a number of possible explanations. The red may have represented warmth, or it may have simply been the cheapest dye or the easiest to use. Long johns were useful during the postwar period when both money and proper heating systems were scarce.

The underwear tradition lives on, at least a bit. One ad in South Korea for an underwear manufacturer suggests giving its products to parents because it offers special protection for sensitive parts of their bodies.

Sophia Lee, the owner of the Miss Korea restaurant in Manhattan, still has the pink negligee her son got her when he graduated from college in 2005. While he knew about the red thermal tradition, he wanted something a bit more elevated for her now that he was out of the house. “He said ‘Mommy, you always wear the underwear that looks like grandmommy’s something,’” she said.

Underwear can be a token of respect for elders of all sorts. Edward Shultz, a professor emeritus in the school of Asian and Pacific studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, received pastel boxer shorts from students he taught in South Korea six years ago. But when Korean friends have asked him how much his own children have given to him, he replies that it is the other way around.

Not every person can afford devoting the first paycheck to gifts, given the tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that many recent graduates face. But some recent Korean-American college graduates who can afford it (or go into more debt to do so) tend toward gifts that are luxury products.

The mother of Justine Chang, who just graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, spent many years driving a minivan dinged up from various children learning to drive in it. It had a patch over a dent that never did get painted because the family, which has had a lot of medical bills over the years, could not afford it.

So Ms. Chang, who is now a litigation assistant for an international law firm in San Francisco, put about $6,000 toward a down payment on an Audi Q7 for her. She was able to afford this thanks to an insurance settlement after her own car was destroyed in a fire, but she has been using her earnings from part-time work since she was 15 to take her family out for meals and for other gifts. “You should know intuitively how much they gave up for you and do whatever you can to make sure they have a comfortable life,” she said. “I didn’t think it was a Korean thing.”

Her mother did, however. Sunny Chong handed over her first paycheck from Captain D’s Seafood Kitchen to her own parents. “I was so proud that I could do something,” she said. “I said, ‘This is my first earnings, and it’s all yours.’” When she opened her own sushi restaurant in Lodi, Calif., she gave money to her church to celebrate the occasion.

When her daughter wanted to help with a new vehicle, Ms. Chong said that she hesitated until her husband talked her into just taking the help and being happy that her daughter could do it. “I am going to pay her back,” she insisted.

According to her daughter, Ms. Chang, gifts like these sometimes serve as a sort of social currency among competitive Korean parents, who will compare notes on who got what from which children at what point in their lives. She said her mother was not that type, however. Ms. Chong, who sees plenty of lonely people in her restaurant who do not have family nearby, said she would never want to hurt another parent’s feelings.

Simon Park, another recent Berkeley graduate, admitted to his own feelings of vanity about being able to hand his mother a $1,300 Louis Vuitton purse as he prepares to start a management consulting job.

But his pride comes from a deeper place. One of his strongest memories from his time studying abroad in South Korea was seeing the elderly women who scrubbed toilets in the dorms and academic buildings. “You see on a day-to-day level what some people are still having to go through and the commitment they make to survive,” he said.

His parents come from the generation that emigrated. When his family ordered pizza, his mother would eat the crusts and leave the rest for her children. “She’d say ‘Oh, I’m full,’” he said. But he knew she wasn’t.

So while he has never bought anything that expensive for himself, he declared that the sky was the limit for her graduation handbag. “I kind of thought of it as coming full circle, as a way to commemorate everyone’s suffering and persistence,” he said.

And though he agrees with Ms. Chang about the way that some parents tend to boast, he sees the gift as more of a private exchange. “It’s a way to say ‘Mom, you did a great job,’” he said. “I want her to be proud of herself.”