A Pair Of Tickets

The short story, "A Pair of Tickets", by Amy Tan is about a Chinese-American girl named Jing-Mei, raised in San Francisco, which struggles with identity early in her life. Jing-Mei can be similar to a banana, yellow on the outside but white on the inside. Now 36 years old, she is on a train going back to China to meet her twin sisters that she never knew until her mother pasted away. She suffered from a blood vessel that busted in her brain. This secret has been kept from her until the family received a letter from China. Her father Canning Woo explained the whole situation to her and why her mother left the twins back in China. Throughout the story, she remembers and has flashbacks of her mother Suyuan, expressing the important history of their heritage that she doesn't understand. Now that she has the opportunity to go back and appreciate the importance of her Chinese heritage, it brings back a lot of memories of her mother and the struggles of understanding who she truly is.

Early in Jing-Mei's life, she grew up in a Caucasian environment in San Francisco. She went to school with Caucasians and was really Americanized. She didn't understand her Chinese heritage because she never new what it meant to be Chinese. In the story, Tan writes "Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese" (169). Her mother was a complete example of what she is looking for now. It could just be the simplest things like bargaining with the store owners or pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public. Tan makes her feels abandoned and depressed at this stage of the story because she was the only one that did not know about the twin sisters. This pushes her away from understanding her culture because she doesn't know why this secret was kept only from her. She feels distant from the rest of the family because everyone else is raised the traditional Chinese way. In the attempt to get closer to her deceased mother, she attempts to go to China to fulfill her mothers dream to reunite with the long lost twin sisters.

When her and her father makes their first stop in Guangzhou to meet her grand aunt, she is puzzled by the surroundings. She stands extremely tall compared to everyone around her feeling misplaced. She says "even if she even without make up, I could never pass for a true Chinese" (172). When they finally find her grand aunt Aiyi, her father rush greet each other while Jing-Mei stands back and watches her dad shake hands. She stands there until Aiyi approaches her with gifts and shows her love. She looks around and everyone is greeting each other with smiles and excitement. She has a new feeling about her Chinese family. She has been avoiding this moment since she was a little girl because her mother always wanted her to go back to China. She didn't want to go because of selfish reasons. If she had known that her mother had wanted to go back not just for fun but to look for her lost daughters, she would probably reacted differently.

As they rest at the hotel in Guangzhou, Mr. Woo and Aiyi were talking about the twins. Jing-Mei started to pay a little more attention because all she knows about her sisters is that they were abandoned because her mother couldn't