"Two Kinds" by Amy Tan 'Two Kinds,' by Amy Tan is a story in which a Chinese mother believes that her
daughter can do anything in the United States as long as she puts her mind to it and decides to push her daughter, Jing-Mei, into being a prodigy. Unfortuantely, Jing-Mei and her mother do not share the same views on things. Jing-Mei wants to establish her own identity apart from her mother and feels that she can be successful through her own efforts and determination. Jing-Mei's desire to be an independent person leads to her stubbornness, hardness, and cruelty. At the beginning of the story, Jing-Meis mother attempts to dominate and control her daughters life. Jing-Meis mother presents her with many tests from stories of amazing children. The test include: knowing the capitals of states, multiplying numbers in her head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on her head without using her hands, predicting the daily temperatures in cities, and looking at a page from the Bible for three minutes to see what she remembers. After many failed tests in knowledge and skills, Jing-Mei quickly begins to lost interest in her mothers dream of being a prodigy and becomes stubborn. I wont let her change, I promised myself. I wont be what Im not? (213, paragraph 19). This clearly shows that Jing-Mei is trying to resist her mothers domination and control. She wants to be herself and make her own choices. Mr. Chong Mr. Chongalso known as Old Chongis Jing-mei's deaf and partially blind piano teacher. When she realizes that he can't hear the music, she stops trying to hit the right notes; when she sees that he can't read fast enough to follow the sheet music, she just keeps up the rhythm and he is pleased. At her disastrous recital he is the only one who cheers enthusiastically. Father The narrator's father makes only a token appearance in the story. He is not involved in the mother-daughter struggle over piano lessons. He does attend the recital; in fact, the narrator can't tell if he is horrified or silently amused at her performance.
American Dream Anthropologists and other scholars who study the immigrant experience in America have long noted that the American dream exerts a powerful influence on new arrivals in the country. These scholars have also pointed out the burden of these dreams usually falls more heavily upon the shoulders of American-born children of immigrants.
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Often immigrant parents are willing to sacrifice everything, including careers, family, and property, to pursue new lives in America. Realizing that they may not achieve the American dream of material success and social acceptance, they tend to transfer those ambitions to their children. The narrator's mother in "Two Kinds," for example, insists that "you could be anything you wanted to be in America." She ticks off the possibilities to her daughter: "You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government..... In "Two Kinds" the perspective moves back and forth between the adult and the child. In this way, Tan tells the story through the child's innocent view and the adult's experienced eyes. This allows readers to make judgments of their own, to add their own interpretations of the mother-daughter struggle. When Jing-mei's mother shouts at her daughter and demands her complete obedience toward the end of Tan's short story, "Two Kinds," she is defending her power over the only territory to which she can lay claim, the domestic sphere. Cut off from her native China by distance and political upheaval, yet distanced from surrounding American culture by language and other cultural barriers, the mother in the story makes a fortress of her home and uses it as a base of operations for deploying her matriarchal power over the life and destiny of her child. The central struggle in Amy Tan's story "Two Kinds" is a battle of wills between the narrator, a young Chinese American girl, and her mother, a Chinese immigrant. "Two Kinds" is a coming-ofage story, in which the narrator, Jing-mei, struggles to forge her own sense of identity in the face of her strong-willed mother's dream that she become a "prodigy." Jing-mei is caught between her Chinese mother's traditional ideas about how to raise a daughter, and her own development as a Chinese American girl straddling two cultures. "I wish I were dead," the protagonist and narrator of Amy Tan's "Two Kinds," the young Jing-mei, yells at her mother, watching her blow away in response like a leaf, "thin, brittle, lifeless." In this moment Jing-mei's empty battle for self has been won, though the victory is also a death, symbolized by her mother disappearance from the scene. The crisis between Jing-mei and her mother in Amy Tan's "Two Kinds" is grave.
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