Then she sees that there is no real resemblance at all. At first, she is startled that her half-sisters look so much like her mother. Through her meeting with her half-sisters, Jing-mei finds her heritage, her identity. I found something about myself that I never knew was there.' Her fictional creation, Jing-mei, shares the same reaction. 'There was something about this country that I belonged to. For the first time, Tan 'felt a sense of completeness, like having a mother and a father,' she said. She explained her reaction in a July 4, 1989, interview in the New York Times. The trip was a turning point in Tan's life. Tan wanted to find out more about her heritage while her mother was still alive. At the time, her mother suffered from a dangerous heart condition and had recently suffered an attack of angina. In 1987, Tan visited her half-sisters in China. This highly emotional ending to the novel is based on a true incident from Tan's life. Her father takes a picture of the three girls they look at the Polaroid photograph, and they see that together, they all look like their mother. She sees in them the part of her that is Chinese. Later, she sees no trace of her mother - yet the women still look familiar. At first, they look just like her mother. Jing-mei sees her sisters as she enters the terminal. After she died, a schoolmate saw the twins in a department store and tried to contact Suyuan in America. In 1949, they left for America, but Suyuan never abandoned hope. Meanwhile, Suyuan and Canning had returned to try to find the girls, but their attempts proved fruitless. They located the address of the children's home, but now it was a factory. When the girls were eight years old, their foster parents tried to find their parents. The abandoned babies were found by a kindly peasant couple, who raised the girls as their own. When she arrived in Chungking, she learned that her husband was dead. Soon she fainted and awoke in the back of a truck filled with sick people who were being tended by American missionaries. Then she put in family pictures and a note and left her daughters to see if she could find food. Having no other choice, she stuffed jewelry under the shirt of one baby, money under the shirt of the other. Despite her entreaties, no one would take the babies. She finally fell by the side of the road. She dropped her possessions one by one, continuing to trudge on until she was delirious with pain and fever. Her hands began to bleed from the weight of her heavy possessions and that of her daughters. Suyuan walked for three days, hoping to escape the Japanese invasion. He then tells her the story of how her mother, Suyuan, abandoned Jing-mei's half-sisters. Her name makes her the essence of her two sisters. Written one way, it means 'Long-Cherished Wish' written another way, it means 'Long-Held Grudge.' He further explains that Jing-mei's name means that she is, first, a pure essence, and second, that she is a younger sister. Late that night, Canning explains that his wife's name, 'Suyuan,' has two different meanings, depending on how it is written. Jing-mei is anxious to have her first real Chinese feast however, the native-born Chinese family decides that they want to eat American - hamburgers, French fries, and apple pie à la mode in the hotel room. They soon arrive at a magnificent hotel, much grander than Jing-mei had expected.

Jing-mei wins her young cousin Lili over with instant photographs from her Polaroid camera. The train pulls into the station, and the visitors are met by Canning's great-aunt. But after dreaming about the scene many times, she begs Auntie Lindo to write a letter to the sisters explaining that their mother is dead. Jing-mei agrees that she should be the one to tell her half-sisters about their mother's death. Together, the women answered the letter, signing Suyuan Woo's name to it. Instead, Auntie Lindo took the letter to the Joy Luck Club. Jing-mei's father asked Auntie Lindo to write back to the girls and tell them that their mother was dead. These were the two children whom she was forced to abandon on the side of the road in 1944. After her mother's death, a letter arrived from China from her mother's twin daughters from her first marriage. Like her father, Jing-mei is weeping for joy.

As the train enters Shenzhen, China, Jing-mei begins to 'feel Chinese.' Their first stop will be Guangzhou. Jing-mei is on a train to China, traveling with her seventy-two-year-old father, Canning Woo.

Tone in jing mei woo took kinds