Pair of Tickets by Amy

Pair of Tickets by Amy Tan

In the novel, "The Joy Luck Club," Amy Tan had presented the short story A Pair of Tickets, which marked the finale of Jing-Mei "June" Woo's journey towards re-discovering her roots in China by finally meeting her half-sisters. Though the story depicted the story of Suyuan as she left China and her two daughters by the roadside during the war, Tan also focused on June's discovery of the true Suyuan. A Pair of Tickets was a story that symbolized June's journey in finally knowing her mother, whom she had misunderstood and disagreed with through the years.

This paper discusses and argues that June had achieved a realization and understanding of her mother by visiting China for the first time. By going to her mother's native land, she was finally able to understand where her mother's beliefs and principles came from. Thus, June's realization was an act of redemption for the years she spent arguing and misunderstanding her mother, whom she have always believed did not understand her, being a second generation Chinese-American in the dominantly white American society.

As the short story began, Tan already prepared her readers on the changes that June would be witnessing as she and her father journeyed to China. As one of the many surprises that she would have in this journey, one of the remarkable changes that she witnessed was her father's "breaking out" as they approached China. June remarked, " ... now he looks like he's a young boy, so innocent and happy ... For the first time I can ever remember, my father has tears in his eyes ... " (307). For the first time in her life, June was seeing her father not as a parent but as an individual like her, an equal who also has feelings, a person who is also susceptible to sudden bursts of emotion triggered by both sad and happy memories of a previous life he had lived (in China).

In the same way that she discovered her father's 'human' character, June also discovered, albeit already too late, how her mother had once shown her vulnerable, desperate side, which happened when she was about to make the hardest decision in her life, and that was to leave her daughters in order to survive the war. This story made June realize that she was lucky that her mother did not leave her, and cherished her as her daughter despite her longing for her other daughters in China. Her guilt for treating her mother unfairly was mirrored in her confession, when she said, " They'll think I'm responsible, that she died because I didn't appreciate her."

This statement has a ring of truth in it: it was indeed possible that her mother was gradually dying inside due to emotional hurt because June never understood and never tried to understand her. Suyuan's frustration at her daughter stemmed from the fact that she cannot understand how June cannot be a good daughter when she was in fact the lucky one, the daughter who was enjoying the presence of her mother despite her self- centeredness.