Chinese Roots: Discovering Identity in “A Pair of Tickets”
Our Roots are pathways to understanding ourselves, our real selves, the person
beneath all the day to day superficiality. Our roots connect us to the past to bring us into
the future. For Jing-mei, or “June May,” the protagonist of Amy Tan’s short story, “A
Pair of Tickets,” it is thirty-six years before she finally discovers her roots. At thirty-six,
Jing-mei is a Chinese-American woman who has yet to really feel what it is to be
Chinese. To her, Chinese is “haggling with store owners, pecking [one’s] mouth with a
toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not
good color combinations for winter clothes”—all the idiosyncrasies that made her
embarrassed of her mother as a teenager in San Francisco (par.4). That’s all she has ever
known of her cultural origin—the stereotypes—and also all she has ever known of her
mother. But as Tan unravels Jing-mei’s story, we, along with Jing-mei herself, begin to
see that “becoming” Chinese is not about “transforming like a werewolf” into a “cluster
of tell-tale behaviors,” (par. 4) but rather about discovering who Jing-mei is, and who her
mother was, how the past connects to the present. Through the use of dialogue,
stereotypes, symbols, and irony, Tan composes the story of a woman discovering the
significance of her heritage on her own life for the first time.