Amy Tan Culture

Parents tend to be our first influences in life; we grow up with them as our role models and would do anything they say. There is usually a time in a child’s life when they either decide they love what their parents chose for them, or hate it and do what they find best for themselves. In “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, we see this happen to our main character June and her mom. In this story, Amy Tan uses her own personal experiences, setting, and culture to illustrate that a parent’s culture and ideals in life may cause the relationship with their child to fail. In this story, we see the Asian influence of June’s mother on June, but this seems to come from a more realistic source; Amy Tan herself. Tan grew up steeped in her mother’s Asian

Since June and her mother had this linguistic barrier, they wouldn’t get their messages across fully. One idea Priya had on this is that since there were “divergent perceptions and absence of a common language of communication have rendered each incomprehensible to the other language. As a result, they fail to fathom each other's feelings and likes and dislikes” (71). Other things that show her mother’s disappointment is her mom’s lack of encouragement which leads June to believe she is not good enough. One thing she told her mom is “‘I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be’” (Tan 642). Not only does this show how upset June was, it shows what she thinks her mother wants. How could someone be what their mother wanted and be themselves at the same time? In “Contradiction and Culture” Hoyte states, “The daughter who tries to live up to these expectations is doomed to failure. How can one be ‘saucy’ and ‘proudly modest’ at the same time? How can one be simultaneously a Shirley Temple who is so representative of white American ideals and an ethnic minority child?” (Hoyte). All of these small contradictions and arguments lead to the destruction of their relationship. Even years later, “all that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unspeakable” (Tan