Elements of Identity, by Aleah Peck

Elements of Identity

Identity is something that everyone struggles with - regardless of whether or not they are aware of it. In the last chapter of Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the idea of identity is highly important. The chapter is called, “A Pair of Tickets” and under deep examination we see that even the name connects to identity. We know that there are two tickets which suggests that wherever the character is going, she is not going by herself; and throughout the chapter we come to understand that identity is not found alone. The mother-daughter relationship is one that depends heavily on both women, and together they are able to form their individual identities. Tan’s chapter, “A Pair of Tickets,” dives into the concept of accepting one’s heritage in order to be guided along the path of discovering and understanding one’s individual identity.  

The mothers and daughters featured in Tan’s novel all have fractured relationships. They struggle with each other because neither can fully express themselves nor can they feel fully accepted by the other. This is hard on both of women because as family they feel deeply connected and dependent on each other for reassurance. The mother Suyuan in “A Pair of Tickets” passes away and leaves behind her daughter Jing Mei who goes to China to find the twin daughters that Suyuan left behind decades earlier, and long the way, to find her identity. Jing Mei has what seems to be a very nervous inner-dialogue throughout the chapter as she prepares to meet her half-sisters. She doesn’t know them, she doesn’t know what they expect her to be, and she doesn’t want to disappoint them. The twins live in China, the country her parents are from, and the country that Jing Mei has never been able to fully understand or relate to personally. She senses a void in her life due to that lack of connection. Jing Mei feels that she needs to be like her mother for her sisters and that she needs to be like her sisters for her mother, but when the moment comes that Jing Mei is finally reunited with her sisters, she realizes that what they need is each other just the way they are.

Knowing where one’s family is from has a profound influence on their identity depending on whether or not they choose to accept or reject their heritage. Tan’s use of setting to represent geographic difference in mother versus daughter upbringings cannot be ignored. Scholar Michelle Wood dives deeper into this physical separation and its affect on the emotional separation between the women. Wood believes that each mother has ties to the place where she was brought up and that because the locations differ from that of their daughters, there is a gap between them that cannot be filled. Although they want their daughters to assume identities rooted in Chinese tradition, they must come to terms with the fact that their daughters will never be ‘truly Chinese’ because they were raised in America. While I agree that the difference in childhood landscape plays a role in the lack of mother-daughter connection, by the end of the chapter, Jing Mei has returned to her China, showing that she wants to understand and connect with her heritage. Not only does China help Jing Mei connect with her mother, but it also connects her with her two sisters whom her mother left behind. Being together in the place where their mother is from, conveys a feeling of completion. Despite their different cultural and geographic backgrounds, the three girls are all daughters of Suyuan and they can see that in their surroundings and, most importantly, in each other.

China and America are not only representative of physical separations, but of cultural separations as well. Marc Singer highlights this idea of a cultural barrier by labeling America as present and factual and China as past and mythical according to the views of the daughters. Singer writes, “… the daughters’ maturation in the present day leads to a confrontation and acknowledgment of the distant, mythologized Chinese past that is represented by and transmitted through their mothers,” (330). Before traveling there herself, Jing Mei knows of China only what she has been told by her parents in stories growing up. She has no context or tangible evidence to support what she has heard, thus giving her mother less credibility and authority. Whereas, in America, where Jing Mei has grown up, she can relate to the stories told by her friends because maybe she has been to the location where the story took place and she might even know the people that are being talked about. Once in China, Jing Mei is finally able to see the people and places that she had only heard about and she can now make her own conclusions about the country that has shaped her parents’ identities. However, when past and present converge for Jing Mei, she seems almost disappointed. The mini-bar in the hotel is modern and like all the ones she has seen before, her family wants to eat American food and not the traditional Chinese meal she was hoping for; it’s as though the stories she’d been told were now irrelevant, making China just another country assimilating with American customs. She must wonder what it means to be Chinese if China is trying to be American. No matter what, Jing Mei will never fully understand the China of her mother’s youth because of the time that has elapsed. This is where we see that China is also a symbol of the past. Even if Jing Mei had grown up in China, the generation gap would hinder their ability to connect on that level.

Character is arguably the most important aspect of Tan’s novel and final chapter. The names of the mother and her youngest daughter play a significant role in the development of character and identity. Suyuan’s name means “long cherished wish,” her metaphorical wish being that she will once again be with her daughters. Early on, Jing Mei interprets her wish differently, and instead is disappointed in herself for not being “the essence of the [twins],” (Tan 190). When in reality we learn that Suyuan’s wish is fulfilled by Jing Mei when she is reunited with her sisters. Next to her mother’s, Jing Mei’s name has the most significance in the story. Jing, meaning excellent, pure, or essential and Mei denoting the fact that she is a younger sister. Based on her name alone, we see that from the time of her birth, Suyuan had a deep love and consideration for all of her daughters; just by saying Jing Mei, Suyuan acknowledges the daughters she left in China and expresses gratitude for the ‘pure and essential’ daughter that she still has. Their names are very clearly symbolic of their character, Suyuan being the devoted mother, always holding onto her hopeful ‘wish,’ and Jing Mei, the youngest daughter who struggles to find herself in a family where she feels like she can’t live up to her mother’s high standards of ‘excellence.’ 

In addition to the concrete and literal translation of Jing Mei’s name, we see that the unsure and unknown aspects of her life play a role in her search for identity as well. Jing Mei only knows what it means to be Chinese within America. She cannot fully accept her Chinese heritage if she doesn’t understand the place where all of the traditions and customs originate. Going to China will give her the opportunity to develop an appreciation for her ancestry and then she can decide for herself if and how she identifies with Chinese culture. On the train in China, Jing Mei thinks to herself, “I feel different… my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I think, My mother was right. I am becoming Chinese,” she goes on to say that she hasn’t previously understood what it actually means to be Chinese (Tan 179). Coming to China and seeing the things her mother saw and going to the places where her mother went gives Jing Mei a new perspective on this idea of ‘being Chinese.’ She can begin to recognize her Chinese traits that maybe she couldn't explain before and also experience the culture firsthand that so heavily impacted her mother’s decisions and life path.

Individual experiences have a major impact on the identity of an individual. War has taken away Suyuan’s extended family, husband, and two daughters. Although they were not dead, Suyuan had no way of knowing this and had to live with only the hope that they were safe. These losses have a profound influence on the decisions that she makes from then on, such as moving to America. Jing Mei, however, has not lost all that she has due to the conditions of her country, but she has lost her mother. These losses, though different, have shaped Jing Mei and Suyuan, causing them to make choices that affect their paths to discovering their identities. The choice for Suyuan being to leave China, and for Jing Mei, to return to China. Her mother’s death leads Jing Mei to wonder what her mother would tell hell her in response to all the questions that will forever go unanswered, but being in China gives her a glimpse into her mother’s life and helps explain the way she was when she was alive. That is, China explains and reveals parts of her mother’s identity that Jing Mei wants to understand.

An important moment in “A Pair of Tickets,” takes place during a conversation that Jing Mei has with her father. He has just finished explaining the names of her and her mother, when Jing Mei asks him to tell her about why Suyuan left the twins in China. What I find most significant is that she asks her father to tell her the story in Chinese. The American daughters in The Joy Luck Club view their Chinese parents as unintelligent because of their broken English, so by asking her father to speak in his native language, she’s showing a desire to understand and a respect for her parents’ language and culture. Jing Mei may not be able to understand every word that her father speaks, but she knows that the story will be conveyed in its fullness if he can speak his first language. Jing Mei can better understand aspects that influence her identity if she tries to see her parents the way they were meant to be seen and not the way she simply grew up seeing them. Seeing them for who they are gives her a window into their life before she was born and what they valued most. Hearing the story about her mother leaving behind two daughters in China does not disgust or upset Jing Mei, but rather it gives her an idea of just how loving and dedicated her mother was to her family.

In Kristin Ann Girard’s dissertation on mother-daughter relationships in American Literature, she claims that Tan’s novel demonstrates the importance that mother-daughter relationships have on both of their identities. Girard states, “… daughters in the novel return to the ethnic mothers from whom they have distanced themselves through the process of separation and individualism,” (77). I agree with Girard, in that from the beginning Jing Mei wants to be independent of her mother and what she represents, but in the end she discovers that China is a piece of her identity that she treasures and that connects her to her late mother. It’s important to note the influence that the daughters have on their mothers identities as well. Although she has already passed by the last chapter, readers learn just how devoted and loving Suyuan was as a mother. She did not want to leave her twin daughters in China, but she made a sacrifice in order to save their lives and her own. Seeing how heroic she was in the lives of her first daughters, one can only imagine that she valued Jing Mei just as much and would have done the same for her. Suyuan’s identity was formed around being a mother and doing the best that she could. Whether or not Jing Mei could comprehend the love that her mother had for her is impossible to know, but we learn in the story that although they had rough patches, Jing Mei and her mother were very close, each positively influencing the identity of the other.

At the very end of the chapter when Jing Mei sees her sisters for the first time, all of her nerves subside and she thinks to herself as the polaroid photo develops, “And although we don’t speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother,” (Tan 195). It’s realized that rather than separating them, China has brought them together. She is the woman she is because of China, because of America, and because of her family. Jing Mei’s journey in China has allowed her to search for and accept the identity that she had previously been intent on writing off. Because of this acceptance, Jing Mei has a peace and relief than she’d not experienced before. Thus we see in the last chapter that understanding one’s self requires learning about personal connections to ancestry and deciding how and whether it will affect their identity.

Works Cited

Girard, Kristin Ann. "Mother /cultures and “new World” Daughters: Ethnic Identity Formation and the Mother -Daughter Relationship in Contemporary American Literature." Order No. 3246776 State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2006. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 21 Mar. 2018.

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.

Mays, Kelly J. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed., New York, London: Norton, 2014. Print.

Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Penguin Books, 2016.

Wood, Michelle Gaffner. "Negotiating the Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan's the Joy Luck Club." The Midwest Quarterly 54.1 (2012): 82,96,10. ProQuest. Web. 21 Mar. 2018.