Jing Mei is tired of how her mother treats her and how she is trying to turn her into something that she’s not. She uses her stubbornness to take advantage of her piano instructor when she had learned why he had retired. Half the time she did not play and abused her piano lessons. At the contest Jing Mei’s performance was horrible. Her Maturity was when she had regretted saying the words she had said to her mother as a child “"Then I wish I weren't your daughter, I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last.” (Tan 5), “Then I wish I'd never been born!" I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them.” (Tan …show more content…
Amy uses symbolism to show the struggles between mothers and daughters. Jing Mei’s mother believed that living in America you can do anything you put your heart into and succeed. After losing her entire life in China she puts these expectations in her daughter. “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. "Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best anything.” (Tan