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Analysis Of A Pair Of Tickets By Amy Tan

Decent Essays

“A Pair of Tickets” is a short essay in which Amy Tan, the author, portrays how a photograph can be used as a time capsule. June May, Tan’s main character, experiences the new view of herself rather than the blindness she had to her culture before her mother’s death. Before her mother, Suyuan, dies she predicted that one day, something would trigger the connection to her heritage little did she know it would come with devastating news. Through her worldly travels to China to find her long-lost sisters and tell them about their mothers passing she also finds the heritage and piece of identity that has been absent from her life. The plot structure and pacing create the stories main theme: people are often unable or unwilling to see themselves as they really.
Although this short essay is based on a true incident in Tan’s life it does contain pieces of fairytales and modernism. The story is revealed by Tan through first person narrative. The narrator, June May, is speaking about the events that she is experiencing. It begins with the memory of when she was in high school and how she was explaining to her mother that she did not feel Chinese (paragraphs 1-4). The narrator only knows of the situations she has been told about and experienced. Tan explains exactly how the reader is feeling along with giving the reader hints through June Mays’s actions and words.
During her thirty-six years of life June May has felt lost in her identity. When she learns of her mother’s death, she realized “I’ve never really known what it means to be Chinese” (paragraph 5). Now there was no longer anyone who believed “Someday you will see… it’s in your blood, waiting to be let go” (paragraph 4). June May acknowledges the transformation she will go through during her journey to China. This suggests that the reader is open to change; she believes that this is her way to honor her mother by reuniting her with her twin daughters. June May wants to tell them about their mother’s death but she then realizes that the scene she has dreamed of so many times is not going to go as she once wanted (paragraph 18). Then, in a surprising twist, everything she thought she knew about the meeting would be revealed to her as wrong. The meeting was a long

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