Amy Tan's Pair of Tickets and Bonesetters Daughter

The Bonesetter’s Daughter and A Pair of Tickets by Amy Tan, are two stories that tell the story of a Chinese immigrant woman and the struggle between them and their American-born daughter. While A Pair of Tickets includes the father, both stories are focused on the relationship between a mother and daughter in which the mothers never actually tell their tales, but the basis of the stories are focused on the mother’s confessions of their lives in China. Beyond the theme, however, both stories show how the American born daughters come to build and accept their own identity through interactions with their mothers and hearing the stories of their life. Tan shows, in both stories, the ways communication between a mother and her daughter is important to the development of their ethnic identity. The daughters have to prevail against the barrier of intergenerational and intercultural communication to be able to understand who they are. The daughters confront language, literacy and translation obstacles, along with secrecy, lies, cover ups, silence and the absence of Chinese culture context in which to build their ethnic identity. They eventually overcome these difficulties with confessions from their mothers, to start to build their own new identities, with more acceptance of their ethnicity.

Tan bridges the cultural and generational gaps between the mothers and daughters through communications and story in both the novel and short story. Both the act and method of communication plays a pivotal rol in the daughters’ identity formation, but the context of immigrant parent/American born child relationship in particular, is fraught with complications. Even though all mother daughter relationships are complicated and crucial to the daughter’s developing sense of self, this connections is even more important when there is a cultural, linguistic and historical disconnect on top of the usual generational issues faced by mothers and daughters.

In both books, the