29 pages • 58 minutes read
Amy TanA Pair of Tickets
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Setting
Canning and June May travel from the periphery of the country to the center, back to the periphery, from which they will presumably depart for their return to the United States. The geographical setting symbolizes the characters’ journey into the center of their familial history and their identities. In the center of the country, Guangzhou, June May learns the full story about the separation of her mother from her twin daughters. She requests her father explain that history in Chinese, a language that she has thus far resisted hearing or using. And in Shanghai, June May meets her long-lost sisters and reconciles her Chinese identity, something that will go with her when she returns to the United States.
Concrete realities about the setting also serve to challenge June May’s misconceptions of China and help her begin to embrace her Chinese identity: The wealth and capitalistic features of a communist country challenge her preconceived notions about China. Her experience with the crowdedness of public transport at the train station in Guangzhou finds June May at first resisting the pushing, streaming crowd, but then she embraces the cultural ways: “I am in China, I remind myself. And somehow the crowds don’t bother me. It feels right. I start pushing too” (296). The physical realities of the geographical setting help move June May along in her internal journey toward acceptance of her identity.
Point of View
The point of view in “A Pair of Tickets” is first-person close. The reader has access to the internal dialogue of one character, June May, the narrator and protagonist. Tan uses this point of view to reveal June May’s character and internal conflicts, such as her guilt and grief around her mother’s death and her struggle to identify with her Chinese heritage.
The reader learns a great deal about June May through her thoughts. One thought that helps establish and reflect the core theme about Embracing Multicultural Identity arises in the opening paragraphs as June May remembers her mother saying, “Cannot be helped […] Someday you will see […] It’s in your blood, waiting to be let go” (293). The “it” here is, of course, June May’s Chinese identity. Throughout the narrative, June May pauses to reflect on her mother’s wisdom, which she ignored when she was a teenager. June May observes how she feels herself becoming Chinese throughout the journey. These reflections support both character evolution and thematic development.
Aptronym
Aptronym is a term that describes character names that reflect some element of the character. Tan uses aptronym throughout the story, giving all major characters names that help define them. Suyuan’s name means “Long-Cherished Wish” when written one way in Chinese characters, and “Long-Held Grudge” when written another. This naming reveals that Suyuan had a wish that she was never able to see come true—finding her daughters—and that she is the kind of character who held a grudge.
The names that Tan gives to Suyuan’s lost twin girls are Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa, “Spring Rain” and “Spring Flower” respectively. As Canning explains to June May, these names reflect the time of year when the babies were born and their birth order, with spring rain coming before spring flowers. Jing-mei, according to Canning, is also a very special and poetic name meaning “pure younger sister.” Not only does June May’s Chinese name connect her to her half sisters, but it also reveals something about the way Suyuan thought about her third daughter.
Flashback
Tan uses the literary device of flashback multiple times in “A Pair of Tickets.” This is an especially important literary technique given that one of the main characters, Suyuan, is deceased, and her death is the occasion for the action in the story. The story’s theme about The Complexity of Grief is reflected in the journey June May undertakes with her father, which helps them both process their grief over Suyuan’s death. June May does so by getting to know Suyuan better through the Chinese landscape and the family stories she hears about her mother during the trip. Canning tells June May and his Aiyi the full story of how Suyuan became separated from her babies in what functions as a flashback in the story.
Another important flashback is the story of how Suyuan returned to her family home and determined that everyone was dead. Suyuan had given a doll of hers to her niece, and the niece brought that doll everywhere with her. When Suyuan returned to her bombed-out home after the Japanese attack in 1944, she found the doll, disfigured and dismembered, lying in the rubble of the home. She says, “Do you see? If she was in the house with that doll, her parents were there, and so everybody was there, waiting together, because that’s how our family was” (297). This memory related through flashback reveals some of Suyuan’s grief to June May and helps June May access important information about the family she never knew: They stuck together in hard times, and her mother lost them all at once.
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