Fictional Short Essay
A Pair of Tickets by AMY TAN is a story concerning a woman finding out her cultural identity. As June May was traveling from the USA to China, her journey is imaginary since we only get to know about it when she is already in the boundary. While she is traveling, she gets into a psychological conflict with herself about her culture. She gets different feelings as she crosses the border into China. She felt the skin of her forehead tingling, her blood rushing through a new course, and in her bones, she felt a familiar old pain. The imaginary feelings made her travel back in time to when her mother told her that if she was born a Chinese, she cannot help but feel and think it.
June May once told by her mother that someday she would see her Chinese identity and that it is in her blood. She saw herself transforming like a werewolf, and her DNA changed to reveal the Chinese behaviors. As she travels, she aims to reunite with her family, which she has never seen them although she is thirty-six years old, which makes it unreal. In her journey, she has an imagination of her twin sisters. They had remained babies in her mind for all the years since her mother told her about them. She also imagined that they were seated on the side of the road all the years they had been abandoned. The six-year-old girls were found, and June May had a picture in her mind on how the babies transformed to six-year-old girls and always seated close to one another using one fountain pen one after the other.
When the twin sisters wrote to their mother whom they did not know was dead, the authors’ aunts replied to them. In the reply, they promised the kids that they would reunite as a family, and this made the aunts to think of a way of bringing back their mother from death. This was to make her fulfill her dream of reuniting, but it was imaginary since they could not resurrect the dead. This made the author imagine how the kids would react happily to the reunion with their mother that they would act with so much excitement, but in the real sense, their mother was dead. This imagination also brought her a thought. She thought of how it would have been if her sisters were at the airport when she had arrived in Shanghai. She understands how it would have been complicated to tell them about their mother’s absence because of their excitement to meet her. She also admires in her imagination how she would have brought them gifts and how she would have become of great help for them to understand the situation.
When they arrived and met with their relatives, she realized how her people see her that she has grown. She then imagined the gift that her aunt would give her after she saw how grown she was. AS June May interacts with her relatives, she introduces herself as Jing-Mei, and she got laughed at because of her accent. This embarrassed her, and she made her imagine and think of the words she had learned from her friends in china town. The words, however, were inappropriate since they were only swearing words and short sentences, and therefore she realizes that she had no other option. When they started traveling, they took a taxi, and Aiyi started confronting Jing-Mei’s father that when they come, they should not call them to the airport. They should go to Aiyi’s home because she says that her son almost turned heaven and earth upside down, trying to come up with a way they would come to the airport. They later decided to take a bus from Taishan to Guangzhou to meet Jing-Mei and her father.
As they continue traveling, Jing-Mei held her breath because the driver was dodging between buses and trucks. This made Jing-Mei have a look at a distance and realized that Guangzhou and American cities were much alike and that China had a little western culture. Jing-Mei settled in a hotel, and she went for a shower when she had thought about her mother. She thought about what her mother meant when she told her about activating her genes and becoming Chinese. This takes her memories back to when her mother died, and she asked herself a lot of questions that could not be answered. This forced her into grieve, and it now seemed to her as if she wanted to sustain the grief to make sure that she had cared so much. That is different now as the questions she asks herself she seeks to get their answers about her mother. She attempted to know the names of the uncles who died in Shanghai and the dreams that her mother had about her twin daughters. This was all in her thoughts, and she cannot get the answers since her mother is dead.