Amy Tan, "A Pair of Tickets"

In your blog entry, after you list the full title and year of the story, write a paragraph about the setting.  Try to explain the time and place as if you were explaining them to someone who had not ready the story.  Then, go online and find images of that time and place that you could us to illustrate the story.  Include at least five images with your blog entry.  For each image, explain how and why it fits with the story.  

The story, “A Pair of Tickets”, written by Amy Tan, is about Tan’s trip to China to discover her self identity.  The setting plays an important role in this story for this story because she realize that a large portion of her family history is in China. Through the story, while Tan is travelling through China to her final destination, she was reflecting how her mother’s past influence Tan’s present life.  The story starts out when Tan is entering the Shezhen, China boarder and how she feels her cultural identity is changing.  She grew up in San Francisco and she knew that her identity as an American, but her mother told her that once she goes to China, she will understand that she is Chinese American. Her mother told her that "once you are born Chinese, you cannot help but feel and think Chinese" (120).  Tan realize her mother was correct because she was reflecting how much her family had to endure and leaving her life in China to go to America.  Her family has so much history in China that Tan even saw her father crying. She knew that her father was home again by "seeing out the train window is a sectioned field of yellow, green, and brown, a narrow canal flanking the tracks, low rising hills, and three people in blue jackets riding an ox-driven cart on this early October morning" (120).  

This is a picture of Shenzhen, China.  When Tan left the "Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, [she] feel different.  [She] can feel the skin on [her] forehead tingling, [her] blood rushing through a new course, [her] bones aching with old pains.  And [she] think, [her] mother was right, [she is] becoming Chinese" (120). I believe that once she saw or enter this city, she felt different because she realize that she did not accept her heritage.  She told herself at the age of fifteen that she was American.  So coming to China realize that she did not embrace her culture when she was growing up in America.  

I could imagine Tan's father watching the scenery passing while they were in the train while heading to Cuangzhou.  This scenery made her seventy two year old father to have "tears in his eyes, and all he is seeing out the train window is a sectioned field of yellow, green and brown..." (120).  The reason why he started to have tears in his eyes because he realize that he is home. He had finally came back to be reunited with his family instead of the family being divided into two. 

When Tan and her family was staying at the hotel, her father told her a story  about when her mother  and the twins tried to escape the Japanese when they invaded.  This picture reminded me of that scene because this mother like Tan's mother is traveling for some reason. I imagined Tan's mother was carrying a lot of their belongings because the family was trying to escape from the Japanese.   But Tan's mother had to make the ultimate decision to leave her twins because her mother became "delirious with pain and fever. Finally, there was not one more step left her body.  She didn't have the strength to carry those babies any father.  She slumped to the ground.  She knew she would die of her sickness, or perhaps from thirst, from starvation, or from the Japanese" (131). 

There was a time when Tan's mother and Tan were talking about how a bomb fell on their house and how "they are all dead, [her] grandparents, [her] uncles, and their wives and children, all killed in the war, when a bomb fell on [their] house.  So many generation in one instant" (124).  Tan learned that her family always waiting "together, because that's how [their] family was" (124).  She learned that her family is very important because families do thing together and never leave anyone to catch up.  

By the end of the story, Tan finally met her half sisters.  She knew that this was her mother dream of her entire family were united as one, instead of her life being divided into two; one in America and another life in China. "The gray-green surface changes to the bright colors of our three images, sharpening and deepening all at once.  And although we don't speak, I know we all see it: Together we look like our mother.  her same eyes, her same mouth, open in surprise to see, at lat, her long-cherished wish" (135).