“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 Jing-Mei (June May) – Suyuan – Chwun Yu- Chwun 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?