Name ______
Queen Mother of the Western Skies
A Pair of Tickets (Jing-mei Woo)
Directions: Complete the summary using the words in the Word Bank.
Jing-mei and her father are their way to meet her ______. The
closer she gets, the more she realizes that she is ______. She realizes
that her mother, Suyuan, was right when she told Jing-mei: “Once you are
______Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese …. It is in
your blood…” (pg. 267) Her father, Canning, is ______and happy
to be returning home.
Jing-mei’s half-sisters are from Suyuan’s ______marriage.
They were babies when she was forced to ______them along the road
between Kweilin and Chungking. It was during the ______. Suyuan had
searched for them for ______and then, three months after she had
______a letter arrived at the house saying that they had been found.
Canning opened the letter and cried when he read about their lives and how much
they revered their ______, Suyuan. Canning did not have the heart to
______back and tell them that their mother was dead. He asked Auntie
Lindo to do that.
Instead she took the ______to her friends at the Joy Luck
Club. So it was that Lindo, Ying-ying and An-mei came up with a ______
to honor their friend Suyuan. They planned to send Jing-mei to ______
to meet her sisters and tell them about their mother.
In Guangzhou, China her father, Canning, is re-united with his great-aunt,
Aiyi. They hold hands, talk and ______. Finally Aiyi introduces them
to rest of her ______. They all pile into a taxi and arrive at the
______. Jing-mei had envisioned a traditional Chinese
______but instead, the family wants traditional American food –
hamburgers and French fries – from room service! The entire family spends the
______at the hotel.
Late that night Canning and Aiyi are talking about Suyuan and her
______babies. Canning reveals that the Japanese invaded Kweilin
but this information had been kept ______from all of China. Suyuan
needed to escape from the city or she and her babies would be ______
since she was the wife of a Chinese officer. Suyuan walked for several
______trying to find a main road so that she could catch a ride to
Chungking. She had sewn ______and jewelry into her dress to pay
for rides.
By the third day she had not gotten a ride, she was ______
with dysentery and she ached from carrying the babies. Finally, she could not walk
any farther. She sat the ______under a tree and she placed the money
and jewelry under their clothes. She also left behind family ______and
a note telling the names of the babies, asking that they be cared for and offering a
reward if they were returned to her family. Since she could not bear to
______her children die, she walked away. Suyuan ______
from the dysentery and exhaustion.
She ______to find herself on a truck surrounded by kind
foreigners. She had been ______- but not her babies. When she
arrived in Chungking Suyuan learned that her ______had been
killed. She had nothing. Suyuan spent a long time in the ______
recovering from her ordeal. That is where she met Canning.
In the meantime a peasant woman and her husband found the babies and
______them as their own. Since they could not ______,
they did not know what the note said. It wasn’t until the girls were eight years old
that the peasants tried to find their ______family. By then it was too late.
A factory stood on the spot where the Li family ______had once stood.
Suyuan and Canning had moved to ______and Canning believed that
Suyuan had finally let go of her missing babies.
But every year Suyuan ______wrote to old friends and
schoolmates asking them to look for her babies. She had even wanted to
______to China to look for them. After Suyuan died an old schoolmate
happened to see twin girls in a ______. They were Suyuan’s babies and
she wrote to tell her the ______news!
Jing-mei asks Canning what their ______are. One is Spring
Rain and the other is Spring Flower. Jing-mei asks what her name means. He tells her:
best ______or pure essence.
The next day Canning and Jing-mei board the ______for
Shanghi. The plane lands and Jing-mei sees ______faces -- her
sisters. They run to each other, hug and cry. Canning takes a picture and they can
see their ______, Suyuan. She is in their ______and their
mouths. Jing-mei finally sees what part of her is Chinese – her ______.