In 1940s, China was a very poor country that was destroyed by war. First, in Jing Mei’s memory, China is a slow-motion film in which her mother came to her house to find her relatives in hopelessness after a bomb fell on her house. China was in ruin, all was in ruin and underneath her mother’s feet were “four stories of burnt bricks and wood, all the life of our house” (P.124). All Jing Mei can feel was the sufferings of her mother when she found each pieces of her house in turn. “There was a bed used to sleep in, really just a mental frame twisted up at one corner”, “a book” which “every page had turned black”, “a teacup which was unbroken but filled with ashes”, “my doll, with her hands and legs broken, her hair burned off” (P.124). It looks like whenever Jing Mei thinks about China, her heart feels a stinging pain from her mother‘s pain and an unclear definition of family in her mind. Jing Mei just knows that China is where her grandparents, her uncles, and their wives and children lived and all killed in the war. Through her mother‘s telling about her doll that she gave to her youngest niece, “If she was in her house with that doll, her parents were there, and so everybody was there, waiting together, because that’s how our family was” (P.124), in Jing Mei’s head is just a vague imagination of a traditional Chinese family that all members in the family were always gathered together happily. Moreover, through her father’s telling, “The roads were filled with people, everybody running and begging for rides from passing trucks. The trucks rushed by, afraid to stop” (P.130), everything in China was a chaotic pile when everybody just wanted to leave at any cost.
On the other hand, in 1980s, when her father and she comes to China to find her twin sisters, China wears quite different clothes which are more beautiful and modern. It sometimes brings some familiar feelings to Jing Mei and her father but it sometimes gives her alien, surprising feelings. The first scenes, the familiar setting, come to Jing Mei’s eyes are “a sectioned field of yellow, green, and brown, a narrow canal flanking the tracks, low rising hills, and three people in blue jackets riding an ox-driven cart” (P.121) when she is on the train with her father. Those scenes not only slowly awake her memory that she “had almost forgotten” (P.121) but also make her father younger and excited like “a young boy, so innocent and happy” (P.120-P-121).
And when she first sets foot on Chinese soil, she feels so strange about the names of cities such as is Chongquing, and Guilin (P.121) and about the landscape which “has become gray, filled with low flat cement buildings, old factories, and then tracks and more tracks filled with trains like our passing by in the opposite direction” (P.123). No more trucks and wagons, there are just taxies, buses, and cars. No more immigrants in hurry to run away, there are just “a stream of people rushing, shoving, pushing us along, until we find ourselves in one of a dozen lines waiting to go through customs” (P.123). Those are alien setting that makes her feel strange because her hometown is so different from what she remembered. This setting of modern China also makes her confused as if like she were in US now, “I feel as if I were getting on the number 30 Stockton bus in San Francisco” (P.123). Then, Jing Mei gets more surprising things on the way to Garden Hotel. China seems to be a mix between the Orient and the Occident. China looks like “a major American city, with high rises and construction going on everywhere”, with “scores of little shops, dark inside, lined with counters and shelves” (P.126). The modern characters of China are also expressed by Garden Hotel that has elevator, bellboys. Moreover, “the rugs, drapes, bed-spreads, color television, refrigerator stocked with Heineken beer, Coke Classic, and Seven-Up” (P.127) also makes Jing Mei cannot believe in her eyes. And even “hamburgers, French fries, and apple pie a la mode” (P.127) can be found there. But China still keeps its specific traditional characters with “little children wearing pink and yellow, red and peach” (P.123) and these character occurs clearly when Aiyi, “an old women in a yellow knit beret is holding up a pink plastic bag filled with trinkets” (P.124), comes to the air port with her crowded family.
Through those alien and familiar settings, the story says that although the changes of the country from traditional to modern, from old to new value, the relationship among family members cannot be changed. And this issue of the story can be expressed clearly by the symbolic setting, China. It does not simply mean a country, it is the valuable bridge to connect the relationship between Jing Mei and her twin sisters. It is where the permanent family love begins.
Finally, like John Denver used to sing “Country Roads take me home to the place I belong”, everybody in this world will find his or her origin one day because it is the value of family love and love never fails. And the short story “A Pairs of Tickets” is a very emotional and successful to story that tells us the true value of family. To me, learning about family value is something people do not always understand, like Jing Mei used to distrust her past and the past of her families. But when she understands her family ‘s past, she can connect her rest family. Now she can meet her sisters, she can feel peaceful because she has fulfilled her dreams and the dreams of her mother. Cherishing the family love we have is an essential thing we can do and have to do.
