A Pair of Tickets

“The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I think, my mother was right. I am becoming Chinese.”

These opening lines reveal one of the story’s central conflicts—June May’s struggle with Embracing Multicultural Identity—and establish its setting. These lines also reveal the first inkling of change in the protagonist. Readers may wonder: What is this “familiar old pain,” and how does one “become Chinese”?

“I saw myself transforming like a werewolf, mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, replicating itself into a syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all those things my mother did to embarrass me—haggling with store owners, pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes.”

This quote demonstrates June May’s resistance to her Chinese identity. Some of her mother’s behaviors embarrass her, and she associates them with her Chinese upbringing. June May fears that the same behaviors could be latent in her, about to break out if she in any way embraces her Chinese heritage.

“And it was only this year that someone found them and wrote with this joyful news. A letter came from Shanghai, addressed to my mother.”

This is another instance of how Tan uses irony to heighten the stakes of the story. The letter from the daughters serves as the inciting incident that leads June May and Canning to travel to China to find the daughters. It is ironic because Suyuan searched for her daughters for her whole life, but they were located only after she died.

“When I first heard about this, that they were alive, I imagined my identical sisters transforming from little babies into six-year-old-girls.”

Until the arrival of the letter from the adult twin girls, June May allowed them to remain babies in her memory. This reveals a certain lack of insight and empathy for the conflict and grief that Suyuan experienced her whole life; certainly, Suyuan imagined her girls at all ages as they grew up without their mother.

“‘You don’t understand…They’ll think I’m responsible, that she died because I didn’t appreciate her.’ And Auntie Lindo looked satisfied and sad at the same time, as if this was true and I had finally realized it.”

June May confesses her grief and related guilt to a family friend, Auntie Lindo, who knew Suyuan well. This passage reveals the complexity of June May’s emotional experience regarding her mother’s death. She not only experiences grief, but she also fears that others will hold her somehow responsible.

The taxi stops and I assume we’ve arrived, but then I peer out at what looks like a grander version of the Hyatt Regency. ‘This is communist China?’ I wonder out loud. And then I shake my head toward my father. ‘This must be the wrong hotel.’”

June May’s surprise at the opulence of communist China is first revealed here. The grandeur of the hotel leads June May to believe the taxi driver has made a mistake, because she requested an affordable option. This moment in the narrative captures the misconceptions June May has about China.

“I have been envisioning my first real Chinese feast for many days already, a big banquet with one of those soups steaming out of a carved winter melon, chicken wrapped in clay, Peking duck, the works.”

June May imagines Chinese cuisine to be one thing. She had not suspected that there would be a room-service menu with American food options like hamburgers and apple pie. Here, again, June May reveals her stereotypical thinking about China.

“The hotel has provided little packets of shampoo which, upon opening, I discover is the consistency of hoisin sauce. This is more like it, I think. This is China. And I rub some in my damp hair.”

Hoisin sauce is a common ingredient in Chinese cuisine. It is thin and watery. June May notes the packets of shampoo, as they confirm her stereotypes about communist China. While the hotel is unexpectedly grand, the shampoo represents the kind of low-quality products she expected to find in China. Her comment expresses her desire to see those stereotypes confirmed as a way of reaffirming her American identity.

“‘Jing’ like excellent jing. Not just good, it’s something pure, essential, the best quality. Jing is good leftover stuff when you take impurities out of something like gold, or rice, or salt. So what is left—just pure essence. And ‘Mei,’ this is common mei, as in meimei, ‘younger sister.’”

June May learns the meaning of her Chinese name, Jing-mei. She has previously rejected the name and the identity it signals; however, at this moment in the story, June May is eager to understand what her mother had in mind when she named her, and the translation of her name stirs tender feelings in her. Even before meeting her half sisters, she has begun to identify with her Chinese heritage through her mother.

“No, tell me in Chinese […] Really, I can understand.”

This is a key moment in the character development of June May. She interrupts her father, who is about to tell the full tale of how her mother came to leave her twin daughters on the side of the road in 1944. Since language is a hallmark of any culture, June May’s insistence that the story of her mother’s loss be told in Chinese signals not only the embrace of her Chinese identity but also a new-found respect for her mother’s Chinese identity.

“‘Look at these clothes,’ she said, and I saw she had on a rather unusual dress for wartime. It was silk satin, quite dirty, but there was no doubt it was a beautiful dress. […] ‘I wondered which I would lose next. Clothes or hope? Hope or clothes?’”

This scene in the hospital where Canning meets Suyuan reveals the grief that Suyuan carries after leaving her babies. Somewhat surprised to find herself alive, she is trying to maintain hope that she will be reunited with her daughters, a hope she clings to for the rest of her life.

“When she arrived in Chungking, she learned her husband had died two weeks before. She told me later she laughed when the officers told her this news, she was so delirious with madness and disease. To come so far, to lose so much and to find nothing.”

Tan employs irony to heighten the stakes of the story for Suyuan and to make her more sympathetic to the reader and to the other characters in the story. Suyuan set out with her children to find her husband, but he was likely already dead at the time she started her journey from Kweilin. She sacrificed everything and was left utterly alone in the end, a reality that would enhance the grief she carried for the rest of her days.

“When we finally left in 1949 for the United States, I think she was even looking for them on the boat. But when we arrived, she no longer talked about them. I thought, At last, they have died in her heart.”

Canning tells this story to June May at the hotel in Guangzhou. As he reveals the reality of Suyuan’s grief and search for her lost children, Canning also reveals how he misunderstood Suyuan’s struggle, going back as far as 1949. She continued to search for her daughters for the remainder of her life, showing that although they were married for decades, Canning did not understand his wife well.