Amy Tan's, "A Pair of Tickets," is about a woman, Jing Mei, who at the beginning of the story, has never been introduced to her Chinese roots. She was born in California and never grew up around many Chinese people besides her family. As the story starts out, she is on a train going to meet her father's aunt who lives in Guangzhou. After a few days of visiting with her, they will depart to Shanghai to meet her long lost twin sisters. Now that her mother, Suyuan, is dead, she doesn't exactly know how this is going to go. She struggles with this idea throughout the entire story. Jing Mei doesn't know what to think about meeting them and how they will react when they finally do meet her. It will be up to her to tell the story of their mother's life, what all that happen, and why their mother made that decision. That puts a lot of pressure on Jing Mei. At the end of the story she finally meets them and realizes that they love and accept her as their sister, as someone they have known all their life. This story shows us that the feeling of family is the strongest bond there is, and that bond can bring people together in a time, when love is the only thing there is. .
The central character in this story is Jing Mei. Day after day, she struggles with this because she is dealing with feelings of resentment towards her mother, because her mother never told her that she had two older half sisters. Later in the story she finds our about a whole life her mother had in China that Jing Mei never knew about. This bothers her because now, being in China, she gets a feeling of family, that as an American she has never known. This and the fact that she was never told about her sisters by her mother, who is now deceased, makes Jing Mei feel as if she had never really known her mother. Jing Mei feels distance from her family because they were all raised in the traditional Chinese ways while she was raised in a much more American environment.