29 pages • 58 minutes read
Amy TanA Pair of Tickets
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
June May (Jing-mei) Woo
June May, whose Chinese name is Jing-mei, is the narrator and protagonist of the story. She is 36 years old, and she has just lost her mother, Suyuan, to a brain aneurysm. June May embarks on both a physical and inner journey as she travels through China with her father, Canning Woo. This journey catalyzes change within June May, who embodies two of the novel’s core themes—Embracing Multicultural Identity and The Complexity of Grief—while discovering her Chinese heritage and processing the loss of her mother.
At the beginning of the story, June May struggles with how to properly grieve. She explains, “Right after my mother died, I asked myself a lot of things, things that couldn’t be answered, to force myself to grieve more. It seemed as if I wanted to sustain my grief, to assure myself that I had cared deeply enough” (300). June May also feels guilt related to her mother’s death. She discloses to Auntie Lindo, a woman with whom Suyuan played mahjong, that she feels she did not appreciate her mother enough.
June May is characterized not only by her own thoughts and actions but also by her Chinese name, Jing-mei. As Canning explains, this name means something very special. He tells June May:
‘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’ (301-02).
June May learns the meaning that her mother had in mind when she named her, and it is connected to her long-lost sisters whom she meets in Shanghai at the end of the story.
As the protagonist of the story, June May evolves as the result of the events and interactions with other characters in the narrative. Throughout the short story, the reader sees her come to know her mother better through memories and stories told by other people. She also comes to grieve the loss of her mother more fully. She gains greater acceptance and appreciation of her Chinese identity.
Li Suyuan
June May’s mother, Li Suyuan, has already died of a brain aneurysm at the beginning of the story. Her death is a partial catalyst for the journey that June May and Canning take through China. After Suyuan’s death, her family receives a letter from her long-lost twin daughters. Suyuan had searched for her daughters her entire life, and Canning speculates that it was June May’s “mother’s dead spirit who guided her Shanghai schoolmate to find her daughters” (305).
At the start of the story, Suyuan is characterized through June May’s limited perspective on her mother. Her daughter finds Suyuan’s “Chinese characteristics’’ to be embarrassing in the San Francisco context; however, throughout the narrative, Suyuan is revealed as a complex character whose story is much more interesting than she is first described. The reader learns that Suyuan carries the loss of her twin daughters privately. When fleeing Japanese military aggression in her hometown of Kweilin in 1944, she was forced to abandon her twin daughters as babies, and she spent the rest of her life looking for them.
Like June May, Suyuan is further characterized by her Chinese name, which, when written one way, means “Long-Cherished Wish” (301). When written with another Chinese character, the name is pronounced the same but means something different: “Long-Held Grudge” (301), a fact about which Canning, Suyuan’s second husband, teases Suyuan. Of course, Suyuan’s long-cherished wish was to find her lost daughters.
Canning Woo
Canning is the second husband of Suyuan and the father of June May. He is first described through the eyes of June May. He is 72 at the time of their journey to China, and as they depart Hong Kong by train to meet Canning’s aunt in Guangzhou (Canton), June May observes that her father looks “like he’s a young boy, so innocent and happy I want to button his sweater and pat his head” (294). As with other characters in the story, June May’s perception of Canning evolves throughout her journey.
Through telling the story of how Suyuan came to leave her twin daughters behind, Canning is revealed as an empathetic character who is grieving the loss of his wife. When describing the meanings of the names of Suyuan’s twin girls—Spring Rain and Spring Flower—he honors his wife’s memory by calling her a clever poet. He is also revealed as a man with a sense of humor who teased his wife over the dual meanings of her name when written in different Chinese characters. After he explains each of these names to his daughter, Canning’s eyes are moist with sadness. At this point in the story, June May no longer sees him as a young boy, eager to be reunited with his aunt and family; he is an aging man who is grieving the loss of his wife.
Canning, who met Suyuan in a hospital after she was separated from her daughters in 1944, stayed in China with Suyuan until 1947. During that time, they traveled to many places in search of Suyuan’s daughters before ultimately leaving in 1949 for the United States. Canning thought that their arrival in the United States signaled that the twin daughters had “died in [Suyuan’s] heart” (304), but he later learns from Suyuan’s friends that his wife never ceased searching for her daughters. In this way, Canning, too, comes to know his wife more deeply and fully through her loss.
Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa
Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa are June May’s half sisters who were left behind by their mother, Suyuan, as she fled Japanese military aggression in Kweilin in 1944. Like other characters in the story, the twins’ Chinese names carry significant meaning. Chwun Yu means “Spring Rain,” and Chwun Hwa means “Spring Flower.” As Canning Woo explains to June May, Suyuan named them poetically according to their birth order: “[O]f course rain come before flower, same order these girls are born” (301).
Beyond this explanation of the names, the twins are relayed to the reader mostly through June May. In her imagination, the sisters remained babies even as time passed. It wasn’t until her family received a letter from the twins that June May says she imagined them growing up. Here, the reader is allowed to imagine the twins growing up from the babies left on the side of the road into young children. Later, the twins are described at different ages in their lives when the woman who found and raised them first goes looking for their true parents, and again when Suyuan’s childhood friend spots them: “[T]hese two women who looked so much alike, moving down the stairs together” in a crowded shopping center (305).
Finally, the twin sisters are represented outside the imagination and stories of other characters in the final scene of the story. When first recognizing the sisters, June May sees her mother in both women, though mere moments later she says that she sees “no trace of my mother in them” (306). At last, the two women have become people in their own right, not memories, imagined babies, or carbon copies of some other family member. Yet, June May reflects “they still look familiar” (306). Meeting her two sisters helps June May reconcile her Chinese identity. She says, “It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go” (306).
Related Titles
By Amy Tan
