A Journey to Find Who You Are By Cindy Lin

Many people assume that it is really easy to meet people from more than 70 different countries when one studies at Brigham Young University-Hawaii. There is a big possibility to meet multiracial students whose family tree can track to diverse races. When it comes to the time filling “identity information,” they may be confused because they are not sure which box they should put the check in. Some of them would think that choosing the race from one of their parents means they are denying the other parent. Others like Indo-Fijians or Japanese Americans who may be also confused because the country they were born is not the same place where their ancestors are from. At the time, it’s an opportunity to explore who they really are. I choose Amy Tan’s work A Pair of Tickets from The Joy Luck Club and the search for cultural identity as Jing-mei Woo visits her half-sisters abandoned by their mom , Suyuan, when the Japanese attacked China. The visit gives Jing-mei a chance to question herself about her identity. I am going to examine how Jing-mei gets to know her Chinese mom more through an opportunity of cultural identity exploration. In the rest of the paper I am going to analyze how and why Amy Tan writes stories about the Chinese American experience and mother-daughter relationships.

In the story, Jing-mei started inquiring what her race is on the way to visit her half-sisters in China after her mom, Suyuan, passed away. Before Suyuan’s death, Jing-mei keeps denying that she has any Chinese below her skin by thinking she was about as Chinese as her American classmates were. Jing-mei despises her mom as an outmoded and senseless woman, just like how she thinks about those who grow up in Chinese culture. She does not like the way her mom lived, “all those things my mother did to embarrass me-haggling with store owners, pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes.” (Mays 272) However, she starts feeling bad after they got the letter from her twin half-sisters. According to Jing-mei’s words, she’s worried that the other sisters will think she is responsible, that Suyuan died because she didn't appreciate her. The same situation happens to Yem Siu Fong, an American-born Chinese girl who is conducting an intergenerational study of Chinese-American women in the United States. In her journal, Fong describes how she was embarrassed by her Chinese mom who spoke broken English when she was five, especially when she was to talk to the shop owners in English while her mom loudly told her in Chinese what to say. She acknowledges that her denial of Chinese blood ties hurt her mom, just like Jing-mei felt herself was disappointing for Suyuan (Fong 123). People who are born and raised in different country from their parents’ home country have times questioning themselves about their own identities. There are times that they refuse to accept the fact that they are related to the culture that they don’t familiar with, although it’s a big part of their parents’ lives. Sometimes they will feel sorry about their denial later. Tan and Fong both felt regretful in their own adulthood.

As the story goes on, Jing-mei reviews her photo on her passport and doubts if the officer of custom would think she was “the American woman” in the picture—with fancy American modern makeup, because she didn’t put on makeup at that moment and her face “looked like” Chinese without makeup. However, she claims that she couldn’t feel like a Chinese because of her body height. “Even without makeup, I could never pass for true Chinese. I stand five-foot-six, and my head pokes above the crowd so that I am eye level only with other tourists.” (Mays 275) She spoke little Mandarin and no Cantonese, and she could not join the conversation between her dad and other families. Fong has a similar experience again. To fit her classmates, she speaks without an accent, shows her preference of American fast food, and wishes she could have blue eyes and blonde hair. After a visit to China, her zero Chinese skills brought her to think that she couldn’t be Chinese. When a little boy asks if she is Chinese, she has no words to say. Fong thinks he wouldn’t understand if she said no because of her Chinese face (Fong 123). There are people who like or dislike their appearance because of the similarities to their ancestors. Some of them avoid looking like their forefather by changing actions or outfit. Jing-mei uses makeup to make her looks like American while Fong changes her way to speak. These are the signs of their opposition to their nature.

Suyuan wanted Jing-mei to have a Ph. D., so she pressured her daughter a lot. She named her Jing-mei: " 'Jing' like excellent jing. Not just good, it's something pure, essential, the best quality. Jing is good leftover stuff when you take impurities out of something like gold, or rice, or salt. So what is left just pure essence. And 'Mei,' this is common mei, as in meimei, 'younger sister.' " (Mays 280) The name represents Suyuan’s expectation to her loved youngest daughter, to be the essence of her half-sisters. This is what most of the Chinese parents do to name their children. After the Chinese immigrated to America, they lived with a part of their original culture and tried to learn the American lifestyle. People in the first-generation immigrants needed to learn a brand new language that originated from a different language system. Chinese immigrant housewives back in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t have many opportunity to learn and speak English, because of the concept that all Chinese agreed with—the duty of a wife is to help the husband and teach the children at home. Usually, they tried to raise their children in the traditional Chinese way and to pass on Chinese culture to them, like being strict about being successful at school or work (Wang 92). That’s why Suyuan tried so hard to push her daughter on school work. She didn’t want Jing-mei to feel the same helplessness as she have felt.

When Jing-mei was in the shower, she feels alone instead of relax. “Standing in the shower, I realize this is the first time I've been by myself in what seems like days. But instead of feeling relieved, I feel forlorn. I think about what my mother said, about activating my genes and becoming Chinese. And I wonder what she meant.” (Mays 279) She calls back to the time before Suyuan’s death, recalls the meaningless questions she asked herself. Comparing them to the questions now she has, Jing-mei realizes she never tried to understand her mom and the Chinese culture. At this point, she truly wants to know the meaning of the sentence that her mom used to say all the time: “Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese.” (Mays 272) The second-generation immigrants are surrounded by American as they grow up, which helps them fitting in the environment faster than their parents. They speak fluent English, dress like their American classmates, and use to be “American” besides at home. Struggling between their desire of individual freedom and their sense of ancestral responsibility, people in the second-generation feel being trapped. They can feel that their parents try to transfer the Chinese culture to them but they want to escape from it (Wang 92). Accordingly, Jing-mei realizes that she tried to deny her Chinese blood since she was young.

The conflicts with Daisy Tan, Amy Tan’s mother, and the stories of Daisy’s experience has provided Tan the resources of scheming her works. Grew up in an old esteemed family in Shanghai, Daisy Tan witnessed her mother's tragic life. After her scholar husband's death, Jing-mei (whose name is used as the narrator A Pair of Tickets), Daisy's mother, was raped and taken as a low-ranked concubine by a wealthy businessman. She brought Daisy with her to live in the wealthy family in Shanghai and admonished her daughter with her suffering before she committed suicide. Daisy grew up with sorrowing the loss of her mother and got married early. But she did not live a happy life afterward; instead, Daisy was abused by her violent husband who later took away her right of visiting her three daughters, and further frame up her to prison for two years after their divorce. During the Sino-Japanese War, she met John Tan and immigrated to States with him (Hsieh). Amy Tan compares the character Suyuan to her own mother and writes Jing-mei’s point of view in her own experience. What Suyuan has been through is alike Daisy’s early life. The time Jing-mei denies her Chinese blood tie, Tan feels the same way. The background of Suyuan’s story is almost the same as Daisy’s journey before she moved to the United States.

Why does Amy Tan writes stories alike her or her family’s life? She claims that shortly after she started writing fiction, Daisy suffered what she was told was a heart attack. In those moments when Tan thought she might have died, she promised that if Daisy lived she would go to China with her, meet her half-sisters from Daisy’s first marriage. Tan also beg her mom to tell her the stories she had avoided hearing all her life. This why she started with a story about a daughter who has just lost her mother, and who later travels for the first time to China and meets her half-sisters who were abandoned (Penguin Group). These are all similar to the sense in the character Jing-mei’s life. Jing-mei used to ignore all the opportunities to learn more about the Chinese culture, so did Tan. Tan was regretting about how she had refused to understand her mom more, so was Jing-mei. They both felt frustrated when they knew they missed the chance to honor their mom. She uses her novels to show her love and care of Daisy.

It might seems a little late for Jing-mei to start having desire to know her mother more when she is 36 years old, but it is never been late to have a beginning. As she starts learning about her cultural identity, she starts knowing her mom more and more. From denying her Chinese blood ties, thinking about if she looks like an Chinese or not, to reflecting how her mom’s and her growing background influenced their relationship, Jing-mei feels she is becoming like her Chinese mom gradually. A Pair of Ticket shows how Jing-mei’s and Amy Tan’s feeling about the first generation immigrants, the moms. They didn’t want to be part of the Chinese culture when they were young, just like most of the children in the second-generation. But their desire of exploration of their mom and the culture they’ve carried grows as they experience dramatic changes like Suyuan’s death or the diagnosis on heart attack of Daisy. By an experience of cultural identity exploration, they gradually feel release and happy about seeing deeper to their mom’s lives.

Works Cited

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Hsieh, Julia. “Amy Tan”  http://english.fju.edu.tw/lctd/asp/authors/00026/introduction.htm. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.

Mays, Kelly J. The Norton Introduction to Literature. New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2013., 2013. EBSCOhost, byuh.idm.oclc.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat04455a&AN=BYU.824119614&site=eds-live. Accessed 8 Apr. 2018.

“The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan” Penguin Group (USA) https://web.archive.org/web/20100724064451/http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/joy_luck_club.html. Accessed 8 Apr. 2018.

Wang, Qun. “‘Double Consciousness,’ Sociological Imagination, and the Asian American Experience.” Race, Gender & Class, vol. 4, no. 3, 1997, pp. 92–93. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41674839. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.

Xu, Ben. “Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.” MELUS, vol. 19, no. 1, 1994, pp. 3–18. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/467784. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.