“A Pair of Tickets” is the final story in Amy Tan’s 1989 novel, The Joy Luck Club. This guide refers to the edition of the story published in the Norton Introduction to Literature, 13th Shorter Edition (2019).

The book tells 16 interlocking stories about four Chinese immigrant mothers and their four US-born daughters. One of the mothers, Suyuan, left her twin daughters in China when she fled the country after World War II. After she arrived in the US, Suyuan had another daughter, June May, with her second husband, Canning Woo. Over the years, Suyuan sent letters back to China looking for her daughters, but she was unsuccessful. After she died, however, an old classmate of Suyuan’s located them.

When “A Pair of Tickets” opens, June May is traveling with her father to Guangzhou (Canton) to meet Canning’s aunt before continuing to Shanghai to meet June May’s twin half-sisters from her mother’s first marriage. June May has conflicted feelings in part because a family friend of the Woo’s, Auntie Lindo, wrote to the twins pretending to be their mother and saying that she would come to visit them. June May feels uncomfortable with this lie and implores Auntie Lindo to write a new letter explaining to the twins that their mother has died, but their half sister is coming to meet them.

When June May and Canning arrive in Guangzhou, they are met by Canning’s Aiyi (auntie), her oldest son and wife, one of Aiyi’s grandsons and his wife, along with their young daughter, Lili. This greeting is a surprise because Canning had written a letter to Aiyi saying that they would call her from the hotel once they arrived in Guangzhou. Aiyi decided to gather her family and meet June May and her nephew at the train station so they would have more time to visit together.

The family travels by taxi to the hotel that June May paid a travel agent to arrange. When they first pull up to the hotel, June May believes there has been a mistake: She indicated she wanted a mid-range hotel costing between $30 and $40, but the hotel is very grand. June May is embarrassed by the appearance of opulence and is prepared to haggle with the receptionist; however, she discovers that the cost of the room is indeed $34 per night. This is one of many surprises that June May encounters on her trip.

Once they check in, June May marvels at the well-stocked minibar, loaded with products like Coca-Cola and Johnny Walker scotch. She has been dreaming about her first authentic Chinese meal and is disappointed when Aiyi suggests that they stay in the hotel and order room-service burgers, fries, and apple pie with ice cream.

As they talk later in the evening, Canning explains the meaning of June May’s Chinese name, Jing-mei, as well as the names of her two sisters and her mother, Suyuan. Suyuan, meaning “Long-Cherished Wish,” named her twin baby girls Chwun Yu and Chwun Hwa, “Spring Rain” and “Spring Flower” respectively. Canning admires the poetry of this naming pair, since spring rain comes before spring flowers, and the names match the birth order. Jing-mei, Canning explains, is also a special and poetic name. It means something like “pure younger sister.”

He also reveals the full story of how Suyuan came to leave her girls behind. June May asks her father to tell her the story in Chinese. (She understands Mandarin, though she does not speak it fluently.) Canning recounts that Suyuan’s first husband was in the military, and he obtained information suggesting the Japanese military was about to attack. Suyuan fled with her baby daughters, packing some food and two suitcases of belongings. She also sewed money and jewels into the lining of her clothing, valuables which she reasoned she could trade for a ride to Chungking to meet her husband. She slung the two babies over her shoulders in scarves and headed out on the road.

Suyuan was not able to catch a ride, as people sped by fleeing the invasion. A short time into the journey, she developed symptoms of dysentery. Before long, she developed blisters on her hands from carrying the suitcases and had to abandon them. Eventually, she dropped the food, too. Thinking she was going to die, she tried to get passersby in a cart to take the babies to safety, but she was unsuccessful. Finally, she left the two babies on the side of the road. She left jewels and money with them, along with a note written on the backside of two photographs: one of her parents, and one of herself with her husband. She wrote: “Please care for these babies with the money and valuables provided. When it is safe to come, if you bring them to Shanghai, 9 Weichang Lu, the Li family will be glad to give you a generous reward. Li Suyuan and Wang Fuchi” (303). Then, in the delirium of illness, Suyuan walked down the road in search of help. She was eventually picked up and taken to a hospital to recover. By the time she became coherent enough to explain about her babies, it was too late. They could not be found.

Canning Woo then explains that a Muslim peasant woman named Mei Ching found the babies, and she and her husband Mei Han raised them in a cave. Unable to read the message on the back of the photographs, they raised the babies as their own for many years. Eventually, Mei Ching found someone who could read the writing on the photographs and went looking for the twins’ family in Kweilin. The house was long gone, destroyed by a bomb, and there now stood a factory on the land where Suyuan’s family had lived. Canning explains that Suyuan searched for the babies until she left China in 1947 and then wrote letters to a classmate asking for her to help look for them. This classmate spotted the twins out shopping one day.

The day after Canning recounts this story to June May, father and daughter take a plane to Shanghai to meet June May’s half sisters. June May is nervous about the encounter, fearing she will not be able to converse in her broken Chinese. When they arrive at the Shanghai airport, June May instantly recognizes one of her sisters, who looks so much like her mother. She thinks:

I know it’s not my mother, yet it is the same look she had when I was five and had disappeared all afternoon […] when I miraculously appeared, sleepy-eyed, crawling from underneath the bed, she wept and laughed, biting the back of her hand to make sure it was true” (305-06).

Her half sister is biting the back of her own hand at the sight of June May. The three women embrace and cry, “Mama, Mama” (306).