Two Kinds Jing-Mei Character

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Character Analysis of Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds”
Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” is a story about a Chinese American girl, Jing-mei, who struggles to find her own sense of identity when her Chinese immigrant mother dreams for her to be a prodigy. As an immigrant who suffered several tragic losses while coming from China, Jing-mei’s mother forms this idealized vision of America as the Land of opportunity, the first sentence in of the story introduces this, “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America” (Tan 222). According to Ira Mark Milne, Jing-mei’s mother’s hopes for her daughter’s future stemmed from her own tragic past, like Tan’s mother who was also forced to flee from China and leave her children and husband behind. However, …show more content…

Which she used as a way to train and mold her into this desired child prodigy, “We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films” (Tan 222). She starts by changing her hair and constantly testing her intellectual skills and many other skills. And Jing-mei begins to embrace the prodigy idea at first, as she picks and chooses the type of prodigy she wants to be. But after many failed tests and attempts to try to please her mother, she looks in the mirror one day and sees only her mother’s vision of her being a disappointment and a letdown. Furthermore, she realizes that her mother’s dream of her being a prodigy is interfering with her own dreams and plans for herself, so she in turn rebels against her mother to try to form her own sense of identity. Liz Brent explains further,
“The face Jing-mei first sees in the mirror is the face of who she is in her mother’s eyes. “Trying to scratch out the face in the mirror” symbolizes her attempt to erase or obliterate her mother’s image of her being a failure. Through this acknowledgement to herself that she is not the person her mother wants her to be, she begins to glimpse an image of her own definition of herself emerging from the

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