Amy Tan A Pair Of Tickets Summary

In this paper, the story chosen for the fiction analysis is “A Pair of Tickets” by Amy Tan, which is the final story in The Joy Luck Club. However, Jing-mei discusses about her trip to the China in order to meet her half-sister and to finish the story of her mother’s life. Jing-me in her teenage denied having Chinese nature, but her mother Suyuan had always insisted that someone once born Chinese, cannot help their inner instinct of being Chinese and when Jing-mei went to China for the first time, she felt that there was reality in her mother’s assertions and she realized that she has never been aware of what it is meant to be Chinese. In this story, Amy used internal conflicts and generalizations and in order to demonstrate how denial and

Jiang-mei till her middle age does not know how it is to be Chinese and never got along the ethnic identity of her mother and her cultural heritage. That is the reason why she adopted a nickname ‘June’ instead of Jiang-mei. Most of June’s arguments were a reflection of her antagonist attitude for Chinese heritage. The struggle of Jing-mei in this regard is evident in the line of Amy Tan that “The minute our train leaves Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with familiar old pain and I think, my mother was right, I am becoming Chinese" (Tan, 263). The main themes of “A Pair of Tickets” are the challenge of cultural translation and the problem of immigrant identity. The difficulty with translation happens when Jing-mei relates her mother’s story and the Joy Luck Club. After trying to explain the importance of club’s name, Mei realizes that this concept cannot be translated. Daughters think of their mothers as stupid due to their bad English, while their mothers are actually impatient with the daughters who do not understand the traditional and cultural tones of their language. The theme of identity difficulties comes into view when Jing-mei comes to realize that China also contains some American aspects. “If there were a self before language and culture that was identical to its intentions, it has been irretrievably lost” (Heung, 85). She realizes at the end that both cultures are now interwoven with each