A Literary Analysis Of Two Kinds By Amy Tan

One In the Same

In Amy Tan’s short story “Two Kinds”, Tan writes about a mother who is from China and now she lives in America in the 1950’s with her daughter, Jing-mei. The mother sees America as a country of hope and new beginnings and a wants a better life for the family. The mother has high expectations for the daughter and pushes her relentlessly. The daughter struggles with the mother’s hopes and dreams. Those are the mother’s hopes and dreams and not the daughter’s. As young children we want to make our own path and do things against the grain not realizing that the words of our parents hold wisdom that we are to ignorant to understand.

The mother wants Jing-mei to become a child prodigy. She wants Jing-mei to become the next superstar

of the time. The mother puts Jin-mei through a child prodigy boot camp. She makes Jing-mei watch “Shirley Temple” movies and tells Jing-mei to look and study the young child actress. The mother even went to the extent of attempting to make Jing-mei look like Shirley Temple. It didn’t work out as planned. “Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz(472).”
Of course as a child, Jing has high hopes, and of course, the excitement of the child. It is the child pleasing the parent. She tries anything the mother wants her to be; it is some sort of indoctrination to become the next “big anything.” “In all my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I soon become perfect. (472)” As children we do not want to disappoint our parents. We want to please them, to get approval, to get the love from a parent by doing “good things”.
Jing also had the patience of a child. She wanted the prodigy to pop out in an instant. She struggled with the “child prodigy” side of her. She felt as if the prodigy didn’t come out, the prodigy would go away. The pressure from a parent can become overwhelming for a child. Jing had many struggles. The struggle with pleasing her mother, the struggle of the prodigy not wanting to come out, the struggle of just being an ordinary girl. She had confrontations with herself. Confrontations that a child should not have at that age. A child should not have to look in the mirror and question why they are not doing good enough to please their parent. As a child facing this situation, she began to rebel.
When her mother made her learn how to play the piano, she began to rebel in her own way.

She would pretend to play the piano hitting the wrong notes on purpose. Her mother being so proud of her “talent”, her mother decided to put her in the neighborhood talent show. That is when Jing's rebellion came out for her mother’s world to hear. Jing did horribly at the talent show, but she had no one else to blame, but herself. Her mother’s disappointment was showing and her world came apart. The time and effort her mother put in to her child and all for what? Of course the mother would not give up so easily, her mother was still hanging to some hope. Her mother would once again, attempt to make her practice. But not this time. This time Jing had enough of it. Jing would once again rebel against her mother and argue with her and this time with much harsher words. The words that a child knows how to dig deep and hurt their parent. Jing told her mother that she wished she was dead like the children her mother had before her. Out of frustration, anger, and hate those harsh words were spoken. Those words are the type of words we speak and we want to take back, but Jing didn’t take them back. Her mother asked no more from Jing to become a prodigy. No more lessons. No more dreams. No more next “big

anything.”
The years went by and on Jing’s thirtieth birthday, Jing’s mother gave her the piano. This was an apology. An apology from a hard woman who had a hard life in China. The mother apologized as best as she could and Jing accepted it. Jings found a song that had two parts. At first she thought it was two different songs, but later discovered that they were the same. Just like Jing.

As children we try to explore our ways we think are best to make our own lives better the way we want to live. As children we have an illusion that we can do it all on our own and the older we get the older the more we think we don’t need help. As children we think we know it all; as adults we know we don’t know anything. All we know is that we don’t know.