How does the narrator's view of her father change by seeing him in a different setting in Amy Tan's "A Pair of Tickets?"

In Amy Tan's short story, "A Pair of Tickets," from her
collection The Joy Luck Club, the narrator sees her father in a
much different light when they travel together to
China.

Jing-Mei is the narrator, and in memory of her dead
mother, she and her father, Canning Woo, travel to China, where he and his wife were
born. Her father, at the time, is seventy-two years old, and has been away for China for
many years.

The first new impressions Jing-Mei has come
from watching her dad as they travel through the countryside in the
train.

I don't
 know whether it's the prospect of seeing his aunt or if it's because he's back in
China, but now he looks like he's a young boy, so innocent and happy I want to button
his sweater and pat his
head.

Rather than feeling
like the child in the relationship herself, Jing-Mei senses the child still living in
her father, and she wants to straighten his clothes and pat his
head as a mother might do, for a child she loves.

Another
way Jing-Mei sees her father in a new light also occurs during the train
ride.

For the
first time I can ever remember, my father has tears in his eyes, and all he is seeing
out the train window is a sectioned field of yellow, green, and brown, a narrow canal
flanking the tracks, low rising hills, and three people in blue jackets riding an
ox-driven cart on this early October
morning.

This section of the
story shoes the depth of emotion stirring within her father, and Jing-Mei notes that she
has never seen him cry before in her entire life.

When her
father is reunited with his aunt, Aiyi, once again Jing-Mei sees the child that still
lives within him.

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...But my father is staring down at this tiny
sparrow of a woman, squinting into her eyes. And then his eyes widen, his face opens up
and he smiles like a pleased little boy.

'Aiyi!
Aiyi!'—Auntie! Auntie!—he says softly.

'Syau
Yen!' coos my great-aunt. I think it's funny she has just called my father "Little Wild
Goose."

As Jing-Mei watches
her father return to the land of his birth, and family members he has been
long-separated from, or has never met, she sees him in a setting that may be new to her,
but not to him. And seeing him placed so differently in this alien world, and watching
the years roll off of him, Jing-Mei is able to see her father in a new light, reacting
as he did when he was a child living in
China.