Part 4, Jing-Mei Woo, "A Pair of Tickets" Summary

Jing-Mei feels different when her train enters Shenzhen, China, as if she is a werewolf and becoming Chinese. She realizes she has never known what it means to be Chinese. She is thirty-six years old and is traveling with her seventy-two year old father, Canning Woo. Her mother is dead and she is going to China to fulfill her mother's dreams. First, they will visit Guangzhou, where her father's aunt lives. She looks at her father, who appears young and happy and is crying. After Guangzhou, they will fly to Shanghai, where she will meet her two half-sisters, the babies her mother abandoned on a road as she was fleeing Kweilin in 1944. The girls had written to her mother. They called her Mama and said they always revered her...