Two Kinds By Amy Tan Literary Analysis

"Two Kinds" by Amy Tan The story "Two Kinds," by Amy Tan is just one of the stories about the relationship between mothers and daughters in the book, The Joy Luck Club. We start this story with a mother, a Chinese immigrant to the United States, telling her American born daughter, Jing-mei, at a very young age that she can become anything she wants to become in America; more specifically, a prodigy of some sort. We witness the mother's search for what kind of prodigy she will turn her daughter into and at the same time we see the sorts of tests she puts her daughter through in her quest to make something of her. Jing-mei quickly grows tired and annoyed with her mother's judgmental pursuits to turn her into something she is not. Regardless, her mother persists and finally decides that her daughter will become a famous pianist. Jing-mei is immediately put into lessons and the family purchases a used piano. All of this comes to an
becoming a woman on her own. This conflict is key in understanding the central idea because it shows the inherent and unavoidable differences that come up between a mother and daughter with essentially two completely different heritages. Because of her mother's extreme and tragic past, she is ultra-sensitive about making sure her daughter not only has a better life, but also somehow wants her to understand how good she has it. The problem is that Jing-mei has never come close to the experiences her mother had and cannot see her mother's desires for her to achieve certain things in the same light that her mother does. Instead, she interprets the pressure to achieve as her mother finding her inadequate. The resolution comes first at the recital when she also experiences the humiliation of not knowing how to play the song and later with age and experience and a found understanding of her mother's