“A PAIR OF
TICKETS”
BY AMY TAN
Amy Tan - biography
• Born in Oakland, CA in 1952 only daughter of Chinese immigrants.
• After the death of her father and brother in 1967, Daisy Tan,
Amy’s mother, moved her family to Switzerland and enrolled the
children in school there, but they returned to CA two years later.
• Parents wanted Tan to be a doctor and a concert pianist.
Begin premed but switched to English and linguistics.
Received both her BA & MA from San Jose State University.
• 1974 - Began working towards Ph.D in 1974 at UC Berkeley
• Married a tax attorney
• Worked as a language consultant, a reporter, a managing editor and freelance
technical writer before she turned to fiction writing.
• In 1987, she visited China for the first time—“As soon as my feet touched China, I
became Chinese”—and returned to write her first book, The Joy Luck Club (1989).
• Tan has since published four more novels—The Kitchen God’s Wife(1991), The Hundred
Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2000) and Saving Fish from
Drowning (2006)—and has co-authored two children’s books. Her first book of
nonfiction, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003), explores lucky accidents,
choice, and memory.
• Tan is also the lead singer for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band made up of
fellow writers, including Stephen King and Dave Barry; they make appearances at
benefits that support literacy programs for children.
The Joy Luck Club – book and film
Even though "A Pair of Tickets" has a great deal of unity and
coherence when presented as a short story, it is also the final chapter
of Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989). The novel, set mainly in San
Francisco, focuses on four Chinese immigrant women and their
daughters, with the narrative point of view shifting as each character
tells her story. The action hinges on the characters’ efforts to forge
bicultural identities and on the conflicts and tensions caused by their
different relationships to both Chinese and American culture.
Thinking about this story, please consider how it might have
functioned as the final chapter in a novel about the cultural and
generational differences between daughters and mothers.
• The Joy Luck Club trailer
• The Joy Luck Club, final scene
Setting
the time and place of the
action in a story, poem or
play, often affecting the
work’s meaning and tone
• The individuals in the stories are embedded in the specific context, and the
more we know of the setting, and of the relationship of the characters to
the setting, the more likely we are to understand the characters and the
story.
• Think of the importance of the setting in “The Cask of Amontillado” (i.e.
historical setting, Italian renaissance).
• How would the story have been different if it had taken place in Poe’s hometown
of Baltimore in his own lifetime?
• How does setting play a part in “A Pair of Tickets”? What is its
importance? How does the setting help establish the mood and
tone of the text?
Some Themes in “A Pair of Tickets”
How do each of these function in the story?
• Expectations
• Images
• Loss and Gain
• Appearance and reality
• Fairy tale aspect
• Partly autobiographical story?
• Language - Names – importance of / Double meaning
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Jing-Mei (June May) –
Suyuan –
Chwun YuChwun Haw –
• Alienation
Discussion Questions
• Why does Jing-Mei (June May) decide to go to China?
• What is she searching for or hoping to learn?
• Jing-mei’s memories of her mother seem troubled by guilt and by a
sense of having failed to understand her. What kinds of conflicts or
problems did she seem to have with her mother? How does her
journey to China resolve some of those tensions, even after her
mother’s death?
• What does Jing-mei know about her twin half-sisters before her
trip? What new information does she learn from her father?
• The Joy Luck Club is a group of four Chinese mothers, each with at
least one daughter, who are close friends in San Francisco. This tale
is the culmination of all the stories of Chinese mothers and their
Chinese American daughters. How do you think this chapter
functions as the final chapter in a novel about the cultural and
generational differences between daughters and mothers?
Discussion Questions, continued
• Early in the story, Jing-mei insists, “I could never pass for true
Chinese.” What does she mean by this claim? What does the
phrase “true Chinese” seem to mean to her? Do her ideas about
what is and is not Chinese change over the course of the story?
• What differences does Jing-mei remark on between China and
America? Do you think she is invested in seeing China as an exotic
place? A familiar place? Both?