ifferent meanings of heritage, one being everyday use and the other being showing things off. Dee mistakenly places heritage wholly in what she owns, not what she knows.In Amy Tans A Pair of Tickets the theme of Chinese-American life, focuses mainly on mother-daughter relationships, where the mother is an immigrant from China and the daughter is thoroughly Americanizedyellow on the outside and white underneath. Tan begins her story by describing a feeling that Jing-mei, the narrator, speaks of. She says, The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with a familiar old pain. And I think, my mother was right. I am becoming Chinese (Tan 120). Tan tells a story within itself giving readers a chance to get to know the character right off the bat and also allowing an understanding of heritage to be brought out. Jing-mei has come to China to trace her Chinese roots which her mother told her she possessed, and to meet her two twin half-sisters whom her mother had to abandon on her attempt to flee from the Japanese. Readers can see that Jing-mei has waited her whole life to connect with her heritage when she says, . . .I saw myself transforming like a werewolf, a mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, replicating into a syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all those things my mother did to embarrass me. . . . But today I realize Ive never really known what it means to be Chinese. I am thirty-six years old. My mother is dead and I am on a train, carrying with me her dreams of coming home. I am going to China (Tan 120). Although Jing-mei was not born in China like her mother, she now has a grasp on her life and on her mothers. By having the story take place on a train in China, helps the tracing of heritage become real for readers. Strong feelings of happiness and sorrow are felt when Jin...
