Literature, A Pair of Tickets, and Identity

Prompt: For this journal, choose one of the required texts you read this week. Reflect on what you have learned about active and critical reading, the relationship between literature, culture, and identity, and your own experience with literature.

For this assignment, I read “A Pair of Tickets” by Amy Tan. I chose to write about this story because I had previously enjoyed her work. I read her book The Joy Luck Club in high school, and we later watched the film in my Creative Writing class. I’ve always enjoyed Amy’s work and her consistent exploration of identity.

This story reminded me of a few things. While I cannot relate to being a child of immigrants or having a secondary culture outside of the US, I definitely relate to her themes of identity. While many people are unaware, the disability community does in fact have a culture. The culture is rooted in social and political activism, our shared community history, and personal aesthetic and individual and community empowerment. The world’s view of disability is doom and gloom. The world’s view of disability is one of brokenness, hopelessness, and despair. People physically cannot comprehend why I do not want to walk, but would you want to spend all your energy every single day doing something that…