Two Kinds By Amy Tan Literary Analysis

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In Amy Tan’s short story “Two Kinds”, Tan writes about a mother who is from China and now she lives in America in the 1950’s with her daughter, Jing-mei. The mother sees America as a country of hope and new beginnings and a wants a better life for the family. The mother has high expectations for the daughter and pushes her relentlessly. The daughter struggles with the mother’s hopes and dreams. Those are the mother’s hopes and dreams and not the daughter’s. As young children we want to make our own path and do things against the grain not realizing that the words of our parents hold wisdom that we are too ignorant to understand. The mother wants Jing-mei to become a child prodigy. She wants Jing-mei to become the next superstar of the time. The mother puts Jin-mei through a child prodigy boot camp. She makes Jing-mei watch “Shirley Temple” movies and tells Jing-mei to look and study the young child actress. The mother even went to the extent of attempting to make Jing-mei look like Shirley Temple. It didn’t work out as planned. “Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz”(472).
Of course as a …show more content…
This was an apology. An apology from a hard woman who had a hard life in China. The mother apologized as best as she could and Jing accepted it. Jings found a song that had two parts. “After I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song. (480)” At first she thought it was two different songs, but later discovered that they were the same. Just like Jing.
As children we try to explore our ways we think are best to make our own lives better the way we want to live. As children we have an illusion that we can do it all on our own and the older we get the older the more we think we don’t need help. As children, we think we know it all; as adults, we know we don’t know anything. All we know is that we don’t
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