"APair Of Tickets" by Amy Tan
...s dead wife Suyuan, her escape with two twins daughters from Kweilin, from the imminent occupation by the Japanese; her long and difficult walk on the roads that filled with fleeing refuges. Canning describes how ill, hungry and tired Suyuan was, when she tried to hang on to her little twins. Suyuan decided to leave her little girls on the roadside, thinking that her daughters might stand a better chance to survive. Later, American missioners rescued sick, bleeding and unconscious Suyuan. Throughout the rest of her life, she had been unsuccessful in searching for her lost daughters in China. Suyuan died with an endless hope to find her twins. After a joyful day in Guangzhou with the grand auntie’s family, Jing-Mei and her father take a plane to Shanghai. They met Jing-Mei’s sisters at the airport. Jing-Mei recognizes her mother, Suyuan, in them; she feels something of her own in them. She embraces them and finally, has a feeling of a complete family. The central idea of “A Pair of Tickets” is the idea about Jing-Mei’s relationship with her mother, about the rediscovery of her mother’s past and her Chinese root. Also, it is about learning of our own heritage, and our family’s past. Sometimes in our life, we need to make a way to find ourselves. We need to provide answers to ourselves: who are we, where are we from, what is our culture, what is the best we can do to keep our parents’ past. The major dynamic character of this short story is an Americanized Chinese woman, Jing-Mei. She is a second-generation Chinese immigrant in the USA. She constantly ignores the culture of the home country of her parents. She doesn’t agree with her mother that the Chinese culture is in her own blood, and that it will let out some time in the future. The death of Suyuan and the news about finding her long lost half sisters shocked and depressed her – they bring pain and sor...