Example Of Thesis On Nationality And Anxiety In “A Pair Of Tickets”

One of the most intriguing elements of Amy Tan’s “A Pair of Tickets” (from The Joy Luck Club) is the story’s exploration of the tension between globalization and cultural identity. Jing-mei wants to “feel Chinese,” but is often frustrated by the Americanization of her native-born Chinese family, who insist on having hamburgers and taking Polaroids. The thesis of this paper will be that, through Jing-mei’s exploration of the story she is told about her mother, and how she was forced to abandon her half-sisters in the wake of the Japanese invasion, she begins to cultivate a greater understanding of what it means to be Chinese in the wake of a globalized dilution of this authenticity. This paper, therefore, will seek to explore these themes of cultural identity, generational identity and the anxiety of the ‘true Chinese experience’ through close textual analysis supported by other research of this story and Amy Tan’s life and work.
In my paper, I plan to examine the different ways in which Jing-mei navigates her own sense of cultural identity through the events of the story, using biographical context from the author’s life and secondary literary criticism of the story itself. First, I will explore the ways in which Jing-mei’s struggle to “feel Chinese” is interrupted and disrupted by the new globalized China, and how this can cause tension in individuals searching for a cultural identity. Secondly, I will explore how the story about her mother helps her to reconcile that Chinese identity with her Americanized present through an exploration of Tan’s own history and a close textual analysis of the story.

Works Cited

Tan, Amy. “A Pair of Tickets.” In The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Mays, Kelly J.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co Inc., 2014.
This is the story that serves as the primary source for the paper; a close textual analysis will form the bulk of the paper, supported by secondary research.
Wood, Michelle Gaffner. "Negotiating the Geography of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy
Tan's The Joy Luck Club." The Midwest Quarterly 54.1 (2012): 82.
Of particular interest is the relationship between mothers and daughters in the story, which is a running theme of Tan’s work – this article will place this relationship in “Pair of Tickets” in the context of the themes of the rest of the novel The Joy Luck Club, from which this story is taken.