A Pair of Tickets: Finding Identity Amy Tan’s, A Pair of Tickets, focuses on a girl who goes to China in search for her two long-lost sisters. The story follows Jing-Mei in her venture of going to her homeland for the first time, while feeling no connection to the Chinese culture. In this short story, Tan uses setting to illustrate the protagonist, Jing-Mei’s journey to self-discovery. Through going throughout her whole life not feeling Chinese, this journey served as an important growing factor to becoming a proud Chinese woman. Although Jing-Mei’s mother, Suyuan, always told her that she was Chinese growing up, she never believed her mother. Jing-Mei mentioned her mother saying “‘cannot be helped’ when I was fifteen and had vigorously denied that I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin.” (Tan, pg.132) Jing-Mei felt herself more as a Caucasian because she grew up in San Francisco with little to no traditional Chinese behaviors around her. Even all of her…show more content… Leaving her twin babies in China was incredibly hard for Suyuan, she regretted it every day, but she could not be selfish; she had to think of the girls’ future before herself. Jing-Mei felt guilty because “all these years, while they waited to be found I had lived with my mother and then had lost her.” (Tan, pg.134) The twin sisters felt abandoned and were still living day to day, looking forward to finally meeting their mother. Jing-Mei even had second thoughts of going to China after thinking “‘it’s cruel to have them believe she’s coming on the plane, when they see it’s just me, they’ll hate me.’” (Tan, pg.135) She felt like the twins would despise her because Jing-Mei had the chance to grow up with her mother but the twin girls did not. Although Jing-Mei expected for both of her sisters to hate her, all three of them formed a beautiful bond by the end of this short