`` Two Kinds By Amy Tan

They all want to reach a certain goal. In “Many Rivers to Cross”, she desires to get out of that negative life and be better than her mom and father. She does not want to struggle for money or continuously look for jobs. “I wanted to be strong”, she said, “I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived” (Jordan, 65). All her life she had felt dead and she just wanted to feel like she was alive. Life was hard for her and she knew it would always be hard, but she wanted to be able to live through it. In the short story “Two Kinds”, her desire is simply to be who she wants to be. Life has its way sometimes to make people feel obligated to be what people want them to be mainly because of what that other person has been through. It is not a terrible thing to do except when it stops a person from making their own decisions. Her mother is pushing her to be something she is not and what she wants is her mother to see through to her that what she wants is not making her happy. The character talked about how she felt like she was disappointing her mother and parents tend to do that. In one scene while she was looking at herself in the mirror, she said, “This girl and I were the same,” “I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won’ts,” “I won’t let her change me, I promised myself,” “I won’t be what I’m not” (Tan, 16-19). At that exact moment the reader can see that the author is trying to say that sometimes

Amy Tan had many personal experiences in her story. For example, when Amy Tan was living in Northern California, her mother had very high expectations on her. Her mother wanted her to be with the American society and be the best she could be. Amy Tan had to get a haircut very short to the way other famous children were acting in the United States. Amy’s mother was the one who encouraged this. With that, in the story “Two Kinds,” the young girl named Jing-mei live in a part of California and she had to get a very short haircut. Jing-mei’s mother wanted her daughter to look and act the same way Shirley Temple did. Within both of the girls lives, they each had to act like an already famous person exactly to please their mothers.

At the age of 20, while she is in college, we can see how her childhood environment had influenced her current state. She tells her friends she is above the genders and does not need human sexuality to give birth. This can be connected to her overprotective environment, particularly when sex and dating were concerned in high school. Her parents had high demands, so she decided to become a politician. There is nothing wrong with being ambitious, but her reasons included switching souls with a senior state senator which gave her access to his thoughts and memories. Her ambition does not stop at being a politician, she also wants to single-handedly save the world from nuclear destruction. This is a prefect example of visions of grandeur success that people often see in their episodes of mania. The reason can be traced back to the over-demanding environment she grew up in.

Mom tries to point out to her daughter that she knows that she’s not making any effort to be her best. She tried to use reverse psychology on her child but it didn’t work. The only thing that it did was make Ni’Kan more determined not to succeed in becoming a child prodigy.

In the short story, "Two Kinds" by Amy Tan, a Chinese mother and daughter are at odds with each other. The mother pushes her daughter to become a prodigy, while the daughter (like most children with immigrant parents) seeks to find herself in a world that demands her Americanization. This is the theme of the story, conflicting values. In a society that values individuality, the daughter sought to be an individual, while her mother demanded she do what was suggested. This is a conflict within itself. The daughter must deal with an internal and external conflict. Internally, she struggles to find herself. Externally, she struggles with the burden of failing to meet her mother’s expectations. Being a first-generation Asian American,

Have you ever wondered how powerful culture can be and how can it affect you?

The daughter is bored with her mother's dreams and lets her pride take over. She often questions her self-worth, and she decides that she respects herself as nothing more than the normal girl that she is and always will be. Her mother is trying to mold her into something that she can never be, she believes, and only by her futile attempts to rebel can she hold on to the respect that she has for herself. The daughter is motivated only to fail so that she may continue on her quest to be normal. Her only motivation for success derives from her own vanity; although she cannot admit it to herself or her mother, she wants the audience to see her as that something that she is not, that same something that her mother hopes she could be.

She allows herself to believe all she is told. She also allows herself to believe that being treated as she is is going to make her better, when in fact it is only making her worse. Her being sent up in a room, like a penitentiary will add loneliness to her illness. Her being told not to write or not to go and see family and friends, again, adds to her loneliness. She is separated from society. Therefore, she feels as though she is alone in society. She gives into the fact that the male-dominated society would rather her alone, than be with lots of women and cause chaos. She gives into everything the world wants instead of listening to her inner self. She ignores herself, causing her to act out in madness. When one does not listen to one's inner self, he or she is then turning away from his or her conscience. It's like the "devil and angel" episode that has been seen in numerous cartoons. If the person listens to the little devil, it will end up being the wrong decision. It the person listens to the little angel, it will be the right decision. The narrator listens to almost neither. She allows what is happening to happen and does nothing but sit back. This would cause anger inside anyone.

be again as she was as a child, free to wander, free to experiment, and

In the story Two Kinds by Amy Tan it tells the tale of conflict between a mother Suyuan and her daughter Jing-mei over piano lessons. Two Kinds deals with a clash between a mother’s belief of hard work and persistance and a daughter's belief that being a prodigy is unachievable. Amy Tan shows generational differences among immigrant families negotiating the mythology of the American Dream.

In the short story Two Kinds by Amy Tan, she writes about a child named Jing-mei and her experiences with her mother pushing her to become a prodigy, all while her mother deals with being a Chinese immigrant that just moved to the United States. The two countries obviously share very different cultures and this plays a part in the story as she pushes Jing-mei to live ‘The American Dream’. Her mother strongly believes that in America you can be whatever you want to be. This, to some, may not be true, however this idea is strongly pushed in the Chinese culture. This is shown when Jing-mei fails to do any prodigious task that her mother puts in front of her which leads to her mother being ultimately disappointed in Jing-mei. Her failures ends up causing a huge argument between Jing-mei and her mother. The argument could be called the climax of the story. This confrontation wouldn’t have happened if Jing-mei’s mother didn’t have the huge idea that The American Dream is a legitimate thing, and Jing-mei’s mother wouldn’t have that perception of America if the Chinese culture didn’t present the United States as such a place. Based on Chinese culture and perspectives, there are numerous fallacies concerning the American Dream, and these are displayed in Amy Tan’s short story “Two Kinds”.

people often too caution, but it is also evident that she wished to be free and to live her life despite her

“In 2009, 33 million people in the United States were second generation immigrants, representing 11% of the national population. The children of such immigrants in the U.S., also known as "second generation immigrants," experience a cultural conflict between that of their parents and that of mainstream U.S. society” (Wikipedia 1). Amy Tan the author of “Two Kinds”, and the young character in the story both are a second generation immigrants, who have struggled in their life with parents, about the culture they assimilating and their real culture.

Like many immigrants think, America is the land of opportunity. People from all over the world,

that she has an influence on her own future.  She begins to develop what she