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Amy Tan A Pair Of Tickets Summary

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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 …show more content…

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

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Tan expresses the life experiences of Chinese immigrants to the United States and attempts to depict the relationship of a mother and daughter through her significant piece of writing ‘The Joy Club’. Therefore, all these authors somehow portrayed their early struggles and their view point towards life from their literary

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Family in Chinese Culture As shown in Amy Tan's short stories A Pair of Tickets, Immortal Heart, and Two Kinds, one can see the importance of family in Chinese culture. In the piece A Pair of Tickets, it is shown how hard Jing-mei's mother Suyuan looks for the twin babies she is forced to leave behind. Her effort is shown when Jing-mei's father recalls the travels, saying, "We went to many different cities, back to Kweilin, to Changsha, as far south as Kunming. She was always looking out of one corner of her eye for twin babies, then little girls" (Tan, A Pair of . . . " 163, 164).

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Jing-mei and her father travel to her mother’s homeland to comprehend what her mother endured “She must not only hear her mother's words, and later, her father's, but also she must see the landscape that those words, or mini poems, interpret in order for her to discover her own individual place” (Wood 13). Once Jing-mei was with her sisters, her character grew or the better. In the end, Jing-mei finally understood and knew how Suyuan was in her

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Leonardo Da Vinci once stated, “The greatest deception men suffer from is their own opinions.” For eras on end, stereotypes and misconceptions have stood as obstacles preventing individuals from sharing experiences, perspectives, and ideas with one another. Amy Tan further exhibits an individual’s tendency to form preconceived opinions in her novel The Joy Luck Club. The pairing of Chinese mothers and daughters throughout Tan’s novel proposes that deception has a drastic effect on a woman’s life and the manner in which she is perceived. To begin, the strained relationship between Suyuan and Jing-Mei Woo signifies the misinterpretations that frequently occurred between mother-daughter pairs during the novel.

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The Rebellious Daughter: Analyzing the Theme of Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” The story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan explores the deep familial emotions between a mother and her daughter. Jing-Mei’s mother had left China to come to America after losing her family, and had been raising Jing-Mei in America with her second husband. Despite her mother’s grand hopes for Jing-Mei to become successful in America by becoming a child prodigy, Jing-Mei did not share the same opinions.

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The first part June doesn’t take where she is from and who she is, but as the story goes on she learns more about her mother and realizes who she is. Growing up in America, June was used to the western civilization. While June was in school she "..denied that I had any Chinese whatsoever below my skin.."(302). She didn’t think she was in fact Chinese. Identifying she doesn’t have any Chinese was in fact her saying that she doesn’t identify with this other side of her.

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As seen by the mothers’ and daughters’ behavior towards each other in The Joy Luck Club, it is difficult to preserve one’s culture when one is exposed to a new environment or country. With a difference of two distinct generations between them, the four main pairs often come across cultural collisions. Other than facing the age gap, these mothers and daughters also have to deal with a language and communication barrier. Already, at the beginning of the story, Jing-Mei Woo is able to understand how the mothers of the “Joy Luck Club” are displeased with their daughter’s rejection of their Chinese culture. She speaks to herself, admitting that “they are frightened.

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“I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I am not” (Tan, 1989) with this declaration she decided to change her mother’s view of her, and that of anyone else her mother. I think that this is the critical moment that she decided that she will be more of an American child then a Chinese one. Jing-Mei would passively defy her mother by answering her mother’s questions without enthusiasm. This slowly changed her mother’s perception of her, to a short tempered, lazy kid.

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Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club is an amazing representation of what Chinese immigrants and their families face. The broad spectrum of the mothers’ and daughters’ stories all connect back to a couple of constantly recurring patterns. These patterns are used to show that how the mothers and daughters were so differently raised affected their relationships with each other, for better and for worse. To begin with, the ever-present pattern of disconnect between the two groups of women is used to show how drastically differently they were raised.

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Mother knows best. And yet so many daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club feel slighted by what the matriarchal figures in their lives have in mind for them, or rather, what they believe their mothers have in mind for them. A perfect storm of expectation, true and false, about love, about success, about being Chinese. The souring of mother-daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club stem from unrealistic or ill conceived expectations that both parties hold for the other.

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On the other hand, being born into this country, Jing-mei is against wanting to live up to the expectations her mother sets on her. Two kinds reveal two different sides of the cultural spectrum, and their opposing view towards their values. Jing-mei 's mother felt like an outcast existing in a dominate population. Grasping the same idea, she held onto her hard time back in her home. Jing-mei is her last hope to prove that her homeland can be just as talented as Americans.

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Throughout the entire novel, the mothers and daughters face inner struggles, family conflict, and societal collision. The divergence of cultures produces tension and miscommunication, which effectively causes the collision of American morals, beliefs, and priorities with Chinese culture which

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Jing-Mei was immersed in American culture as she attended school every day, as opposed to her parents who were both born and raised in China. As a young adult who experienced two cultures, the barrier (including language and culture) between Jing-Mei and her parents contributed to “vigorous [denial] that [she] had any Chinese whatsoever below [her] skin” (Tan 147). Still, her mother was convinced that Jing-Mei would eventually come to “feel and think Chinese” (Tan 147). Although she disagreed with what her mother said, Jing-Mei knew deep inside that she was right, frequently realizing the tendencies she had that were so alike to her mother. She listed that “haggling with store owners, pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes” were some of the things that her mother did that the naive fifteen-year-old Jing-Mei identified with being Chinese.

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