A Pair of Tickets, Mana Borden

Individual Identities

“I ka ʻōlelo no ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo no ka make. In language there is life, in language there is death.” This is an ʻŌlelo Noʻeau I learned in classes teaching about Hawaiian culture. Being raised in Hawaii and being part Hawaiian, I have learned a lot about the traditions, values, and culture of the Hawaiian people. This ʻōlelo noʻeau is one that Hawaiians have stressed in the revitalization of Hawaiian culture. It relates to the importance of speech and stories. The Hawaiian people lived in an oral society and therefore did not have a written language until the arrival of foreigners, specifically the missionaries. However, many events led to the “banning” of Hawaiian language and Hawaiian arts. This ban led to the loss of language, loss of traditions, and almost the extinction of Hawaiian culture. The Hawaiian renaissance was able to preserve the culture and especially the language. Without the stories and language of the Hawaiian people, there would be no existing history, and Hawaiians as a people would not be able to know their identity and importance as a Hawaiian.

The roller coaster of knowledge in the Hawaiian community related to the traditional Hawaiian culture greatly affected its members. Many if not most Hawaiians are now only part Hawaiian. Many are not aware of their heritage and culture as they leave Hawaii due to the high expenses and identify as merely American. The Hawaiian renaissance was also able to spark this idea of identity.

            If you ask me, I purely identify as Hawaiian, even though I only consist of ⅓ Hawaiian blood. While attending BYU-Hawaii and taking a Hawaiian Studies class the question was posed, “What makes someone Hawaiian?” This is a question that seems to not have a real, solid answer. Some people identify themselves as Hawaiian based on blood, or on their knowledge of the culture, or even on the fact that they might live in Hawaii. Even though all of these reasons can explain that someone is “Hawaiian,” I believe that identifying as Hawaiian, or as anything for that matter, requires more than just the title. It requires an understanding of all the different factors, experiences, and ideas in oneʻs life.

Ben Xu stated this in a journal named “Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club,” “The process of understanding ordinarily begins with the displacement of the thing unknown toward something that is known, apprehended, and familiar. The process of understanding thus begins with an experiential shift” (Xu, 6).  In other words, when there is something unknown, understanding comes when connections are made to an idea that is known. Xu’s quote can easily be related to the understanding of identifying as a Hawaiian and it is also directly related to the story, The Joy Luck Club, and specifically the topic of “identity”. This whole story is talking about culture in relation to discovering who the characters are and who they are trying to be. The ethnic background of the Chinese mothers in the book are affecting the modern Americanization of their daughters and vice versa. The mothers were born and raised in China, with their own memories and experiences that shaped their strong influence. The daughters were born in America and have an American-Chinese mixture when it comes to their personalities, goals, and lives.

Memories, experiences, and the steady rolling of time in life are the things that shape a person, their values, their standards, and their happiness. The story portrays the concept of identity and how knowing comes from changing ideas that are misunderstood or misinterpretted into ideas that are understood. The chapter within the book named “A Pair of Tickets” explores a specific daughter who, at the end of the story, comes to this realization of who she is and how much of her life has been the result, creation, and caregiving of her own mother, who tried to instill in her daughter that sense of identity. There is also the clash throughout the entire story where the mothers are trying to show their perspective of life with their unversed daughters. Within the story, The Joy Luck Club and in the specific chapter named “A Pair of Tickets” the author, Amy Tan, explores the inner conflict of identity discovery and how mothers,  experiences, historical stories, and ethnic culture, all displayed throughout the entire book, was able to shape and teach Jing-mei of who she truly was.

The mothers in the story are essential. A mother is someone who cares for the needs of the children. Mothers literally carry their children in them for months until they are born, giving them all the nutrients and support that they need while in the mother’s body. After birth mothers are the still the children’s main source of nutrients and strength. As the children grow up, mothers are one of the main sources of learning aside from the father. This story directs readers through the lives of four mothers, Suyuan Woo, An-mei Hsu, Lindo Jong, and Ying-ying St. Clair, as well as their four daughters, Jing-mei Woo, Rose Hsu Jordan, Waverly Jong, and Lena St. Clair. Each mother and daughter pair have an interesting relationship due to their different backgrounds. The mothers are all very strong in their Chinese heritage being born and raised in China, however, when the mothers raise their daughters in America, there is a different story.

China and the United States are two very different places. Contextualizing the story of The Joy Luck Club, Susan Radner explains that the United States was seen by the Chinese mothers of the story as a place of hope and rest, a place where they could still uphold tradition, however, Radner believed the United States was not the best place to continue traditions as they could be reconstructed and suppressed (Radner 3). With the Chinese mothers and their optimism, they attempted at raising their American daughters to identify as Chinese. Jing-mei states of her mother, “there was no doubt in her mind, whether I agreed or not: Once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese” (Tan 166). This shows the determination of Jing-mei’s mother in trying to convince her that she is Chinese. This also faintly portrays Jing-meiʻs unfamiliarity and inconvenience when she speaks about not having a choice of being Chinese. This type of doubt Iʻll define as “American thinking.”

The American thinking is to reach the top. There is a conflict in not knowing whether fitting in or standing out is the better choice. Morals can be confused due to various experiences, cultures, and traditions. With work, sometimes some people can just flow through life and not truly work while others put all of their energy into achieving their goals. The American way of thinking is dependent on the person and their exposure to the cultures around them. America is a melting pot. There are so many various cultures, morals, standards and traditions that it is easy to see where someone might be confused and not know who they are. That person is allowed to choose for themselves what morals and standards they will hold. This is what the daughters in the story are dealing with. The mothers were only surrounded by their culture and were fully invested by the time they arrived in America. The daughters have a choice. This seems to cause cultural misunderstanding between the mothers and daughters in the story.

Within the story Suyuan Woo, the mother of Jing-mei Woo, states, “I couldn't teach her about the Chinese character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best.” (289) Of course Suyuan is able to say Chinese thinking is better because she was immersed in it during her childhood. See has understanding due to her own background. Ben Xu explains, “Not only does Suyuan's early experience of extreme situations result in a defensive contraction of self, but also it transforms her relationship with her daughter into one of survival: a fear that she will lose her connection with her daughter, and that her experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and desires will have no future successors. The daughter may look like the mother, or even identify with her; and yet, the two are still worlds apart from each other” (7). Suyuan wants her daughter to recognize her Chinese heritage, but her daughter cannot and this creates a disconnected bridge between the two that they can clearly see but cannot seem to mend.

Also in the article written by Ben Xu, he states, “The need to ethnicize their experience and to establish an identity is more real and more perplexing to the daughters than to the mothers, who, after all, are intimate with and secure in their Chinese cultural identity in an experiential sense, in a way their American-born daughters can never be” (15). This quote taken from the article is explaining the difference between the mothers and daughters. The mothers were raised in China surrounded by their heritage and culture. The mother’s experiences and sacrifices were key in helping them to know who they were, what they could do with their lives, what their strengths are, and what goals they had a desire to reach. The daughters on the other hand were born in America. They are American Chinese. The daughters were physically raised in a different time and a different way.

Michelle Wood suggests that the physical landscape the mothers and daughters are familiar with have affected their personal ideologies of themselves and others. Wood states, “the tensions within the mother-daughter relationships in the United States rise from the inability of the mothers and daughters to share cultural myths of strength and identity because they do not share the geographical landscape from which those cultural stories originate” (“Negotiating the Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s the of Luck Club,” 2). Basically, there is a missing connection visually, mentally, and emotionally. Wood continues to explain that the landscape the mothers were raised in are a part of their memory and memory can easily impact the present and affect ideas of the future.

The mothers have stories that speak of the mountain ranges, ponds, and nature in China. These stories are passed on to their daughters, however, the daughters physically and mentally cannot comprehend the imagery of China because they haven’t been there. The stories that the mothers tell come off as small myths, only to be truly understood by those who know the initial scene and can relate to it. In the last chapter of The Joy Luck Club, “A Pair of Tickets”, Jing-mei Woo, the daughter of Suyuan Woo, travels to China for the first time with her father. Jing-mei has moments during this trip that finally allow her to understand some of her mother’s stories. She thinks, “The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I think, My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese.” (166)  This realization forms masses of understanding in Jing-mei’s former experiences with her mother. Jing-mei can see the mountains her mother saw. She sees the cities her mother had seen. She meets the family her mother knew. Jing-mei’s perspective widens to allow pathways in her mind from the way her mother had sought to raise her and the life her mother lived. This recognition of the past allowed Jing-mei to begin to find her ethnic self, her connection to being Chinese. This recognition is confirmed in the saying, “The self is not a given, but a creation; there is no transcendent self, ethnic or whatever else. Ethnic awareness is not a mysteriously inherited quality; it is a measurable facet of our existence, whose conditions and correlates are the only context in which we can understand how we reconstitute feelings and inner knowledge of our own ethnic being” (Xu 16). In other words, experience and ultimate understanding of those experiences with ethnic culture create the ethnic being in a person.

This ethnic being that is created is what Jing-mei was finally able to comprehend. She was able to see her mom in a new light. She had that “aha” moment. One connection Jing-mei found was with the literal Joy Luck Club. The Joy Luck Club was the group of Chinese mothers who gathered around playing on a mah jong table and telling their stories from their past. Xu states, “Just as the mah jong table is a linkage between the past and present for the club aunties, Jing-Mei Woo, taking her mother’s seat at the table, becomes the frame narrator linking the two generations of American-Chinese, who are separated by age and cultural gaps and yet bound together by family ties and a continuity of ethnic heritage.” (14). Jing-mei is able to finally grasp the power of the personal stories that were shared by those in the Joy Luck Club, especially as she hears more stories of her mother (Singer 333).

In her own experience throughout the story and in the last chapter “A Pair of Tickets,” Jing-mei discovers herself officially as she meets the long lost twins of her mother, her own missing sisters. She states, “I look at their faces again and I see no traces of my mother in them. Yet they still look familiar. And now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in our blood. After all these years, it can finally be let go” (180). In explaining this moment, Wood says, “The geographical places they share with their mother create a bond with a mother they have never known and inform the foundational stories of loss and hope they share” (8). Through these special bonds and in that special moment, Jing-mei convenes the ideals of her life, the teachings of her mother, and the truth of her culture to find her true self, her individual identity.

Works Cited

Radner, Susan G. “The Radical Teacher.” The Radical Teacher, no. 41, 1992, pp. 41–42. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20709728.

Singer, Marc. “Moving Forward to Reach the Past:    The Dialogics of Time in Amy Tan's ‘The Joy Luck Club.’” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 31, no. 3, 2001, pp. 324–352. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30224569.

Tan, Amy. “The Joy Luck Club.” New York: Putnam’s, 1989. Print

Wood, Michelle Gaffner. “Negotiating the Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s the of Luck Club.” The Midwest Quarterly 54.1 (2012): 82,96,10. ProQuest. Web.