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.
Themes
Embracing Multicultural Identity
June May is on a journey of discovering and accepting her Chinese identity. This is a part of herself that she has denied. She notes that even her Caucasian friends think she is just “about as Chinese as they were” (293); however, the opening paragraph of the story finds June May thinking, “The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. […] I am becoming Chinese” (293).
Another instance of June May beginning to identify with her Chinese heritage is when she is at the customs station in Guangzhou. Here she compares her present appearance to the photo of herself captured on her American passport. She looks different in China, without make-up and with her hair unstyled and flattened from the humidity. Although she no longer identifies with the American version of herself in the passport photo, she still doesn’t quite think of herself as “true Chinese.” She says, “Even without makeup, I could never pass for true Chinese” (296), reflecting on her above-average height, possibly due to Mongol heritage.
Yet the more time June May spends in China with her Chinese family, the greater her interest in her Chinese heritage and identity becomes. One such indication of this is when she asks her father what her Chinese name, Jing-mei, means. Similarly, during that same conversation, she asks her father to tell her the story of how her mother became separated from the twin daughters that they are currently on their way to meet, and she asks him to tell the story in Chinese. By the end of the story, she notes, “I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. And it is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go” (306).
The Complexity of Grief
Grief is a major theme of Amy Tan’s “A Pair of Tickets.” The three main characters who experience grief are Suyuan, June May, and Canning. The story presents June May and Canning grieving the recent death of Suyuan. June May comments on her grief directly twice in the story. First, she says, “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). This reveals June May’s complicated experience with grief over the death of her mother. She also reveals her grief indirectly when she explains to Auntie Lindo that she fears her sisters will believe she is responsible for the death of their mother “because I didn’t appreciate her” (296).
Later in the narrative, upon learning the meaning of her mother’s name (“Long-Cherished Wish”) and the full story of how she became separated from her twin daughters, June May notes, “I think about this. My mother’s long-cherished wish. Me, the younger sister who was supposed to be the essence of the others. I feed myself with the old grief, wondering how disappointed my mother must have been” (302). In many ways, June May’s journey is about processing her grief and coming to a new appreciation of her mother through the acceptance of her own Chinese identity.
Canning also grieves the loss of his wife. His grief is revealed in a few ways. First, when he is telling June May about how he used to tease Suyuan about the dual meanings of her name—“Long-Cherished Wish” and “Long-Held Grudge”—Canning looks at June May, “moist-eyed” as he says, “Your mother get angry with me, I tell her her name should be Grudge” (301). Later, Canning reveals that Suyuan asked him to go back to China with her, and he told her it was too late. He says, “I just thought she wanted to be a tourist! I didn’t know she wanted to go look for her daughters. So when I said it was too late, that must have put a terrible thought in her head that her daughters might be dead. And I think this possibility grew bigger and bigger in her head until it killed her” (304-05). Here we see Canning processing his grief in a similar way to June May, blaming himself for Suyuan’s death.
Of course, Suyuan also feels grief over the loss of her daughters and the rest of her family who were killed by a bomb that fell on their house. June May recalls a time when Suyuan told her the story of how “so many generations [died] in one instant” (296). June May remembers that “she had said this so matter-of-factly that I thought she had long since gotten over any grief she had” (296). Yet the more June May learns about her mother, the story of her separation from her girls, and the death of her extended family, the more June May comes to recognize the grief her mother kept hidden while she was alive.
Memory and Loss
“A Pair of Tickets” explores the role of memory in loss. June May and Canning both rely on memories to process and live with the loss of their loved one, Suyuan. Throughout the story, many flashbacks serve to reveal Suyuan as a character and also reflect the way that June May and Canning remember her.
June May’s memories early in the story are surface-level; she remembers arguments with her mother about her Chinese identity where June May says that she “vigorously denied I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin” (293), and she remembers the things that her mother did to embarrass her, like haggling with store owners and cleaning her teeth in public.
As the narrative progresses, the way that June May remembers her mother becomes more complex. She starts asking questions like, “What was that pork stuff she used to make that had the texture of sawdust? What were the names of the uncles who died in Shanghai? What had she dreamt all these years about her other daughters?” (300). The memories of family meals and conflict become mixed with speculations and genuine inquiries into the parts of her mother that she had never come to know or understand.
Ultimately, June May’s memories shift to the more complicated conversations she had with her mother, specifically those around the death of her family when their home in Kweilin was bombed. She remembers her mother speaking angrily when June May suggested the family may still be alive somewhere. She says, “[H]er frown was washed over by a puzzled blank look” (297).
She listens intently to her father’s tale of how her mother became separated from her young twin daughters, and how Suyuan searched for those daughters for the rest of her life. June May is disabused of the notion that her mother had “long since gotten over any grief she had” (296) and comes to know her mother more fully only after the loss of her. Ultimately, this collective set of memories—Canning and June May’s together—is the way the lost twins will come to know their mother.
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