In "A Pair of Tickets," a chapter in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, what does the final "it" refer to in these sentences: "It is my family. It is...

At the very end of Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck
Club, one of the characters, Jing-Mei Woo, is finally able to meet her two
long-lost twin sisters, who had had to be abandoned by their mother in China during a
long-ago war. The mother, who had always hoped that her lost daughters would be found
and would be able to meet Jing-Mei (who had been born and raised in America), has in the
meantime died. Jing-Mei, however, is able to come to China with her father and meet the
twins, who very much resemble both their mother and Jing-Mei
herself.

When Jing-Mei first sees the twins and realizes
how much they resemble her mother, she remarks (as the narrator of the
story),

And
now I also see what part of me is Chinese. It is so obvious. It is my family. It is in
our blood. After all these years, it can finally let
go.

These comments echo the
very beginning of the chapter, where Jing-Mei had discussed her reluctance, as a
thoroughly Americanized high school student, even to think of herself as Chinese despite
her mother’s insistence that being Chinese was part of her fundamental identity. Her
mother at that time had told Jing-Mei that once a person is Chinese, the person cannot
help but feel Chinese emotions and think Chinese
thoughts:

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“Someday you will see. . . . It is in your blood,
waiting to be let
go."

Presumably, then, the
statement that “it can finally be let go” suggests that now that Jin-Mei has met her
sisters, she can experience (and is experiencing) a sense of being Chinese – of being
part of a broader Chinese family. She can “let go” (that is, give free rein to) thoughts
and feelings she had once resisted.  But she can also “let go” (that is abandon) any
sense of conflict between her Chinese identity and her American identity. By seeing,
feeling, and understanding her connection to her sisters, Jing-Mei now feels more fully
connected to her mother as well, and she also feels more at peace with herself. She has
achieved various kinds of integration on various kinds of levels. If the phrase “let go”
suggests a kind of freedom, then, for one of the first times in her life, Jing-Mei feels
fully free to be the kind of person her mother had always insisted she was. By echoing
her mother’s words, Jing-Mei implies a recognition of her mother’s wisdom and a sense of
even greater closeness to her mother than she had already felt.