Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” shows the difference between American and Chinese Society. The story is based on a main character called Jing Mei. The story identifies the struggle that Jing has in balancing her mother’s expectation with Jing’s personal wants. Jing Mei explains what she thinks about her mother’s values and expectations. One can tell by reading the story, that Jing is a young character and how she does not realize about her mother’s good intentions for always wanting the best for her.
“A Broken Tradition” The short story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan is about contrasting ideals as the title suggests. A mother and daughter, Jing-mei, disagree consistently as they are divided by old traditions and new age cultures. Jing-mei’s mother has an ideal goal set for her daughter and what her daughter should achieve. Jing-mei resents her mother’s ideals about old traditions and new opportunities. This causes Jing-mei to do less than her best throughout her life as she grows into a Chinese woman of America.
A challenge is an obstacle that prevents an individual from reaching their goal. If overcome, it can lead to success and personal growth. Women in the 1940s and 50s had many challenges such as society’s expectations, persecution and the need for self belief. Mona Lisa Smile, directed by Mike Newell, tells the story of young Californian teacher Katherine Watson who transfer to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Katherine battles to teach a groups of girls and encourage them to be independent and think for themselves.
Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” brings forth this epic battle between a mother who wants perfection for her daughter and the coming of age daughter who is struggling to find herself. This is a story that is shared by many mothers and daughters as the daughter struggles to find herself amongst the pressures of conformity pressed upon her by the mother who only wants the best for her and the society who tells her that she needs to make her own choices. In this story, however, there is an extra factor that plays a part in Tan’s story. This factor takes the normal mother daughter struggle and makes it a little unique. The difference is a cultural divide between a mother born and raised in China and her American born daughter.
Obedient daughter," the mother seems inflexible, stubborn and even a bit abusive. However, the reader do not know what circumstances she was brought up under or any of the problems she has had to endure in order to even have made it to the United States. In the story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, readers are shown the struggles of a young girl Jing-Mei. Her struggle is that of a young girl growing up
Jing Mei’s mother forces her to try different things that the mother wants her to do to become a prodigy. Tan uses the elements of, character and plot to reinforce the theme of living through your child. Jing Mei wanted to be herself and her mother, who thinks differently, demanded her to become a prodigy. There were many reasons why Jing Mei’s mother wanted so much from her. She had worked really hard and taken lots of time trying to make Jing Mei a prodigy because Jing Mei was her last hope of becoming a “somebody” or famous.
The daughters disagree and believe divorce is ok. The Mothers belief stems from old Chinese culture while the daughters belief stems from American culture where divorces are very common. Another chinese belief the mothers believe that every women should be married. That conflicts with the american belief that a woman is not required to get married, this creates conflict among the daughters. The daughters of the members of the joy luck club grow up struggling to balance
Mrs Linde has had to work hard and was not afforded love and children which she longed to have. She took care of her mother and brother as her own but still desired more. Once her circumstances had changed she set out to acquire that which she had lost. When Mrs Linde is introduced in Act I, we can immediately see she is a woman who has been through a harder time and worked hard to have a meekly accommodating life. She is more insightful of her surrounding than Nora Helmer.
She believes that her mother’s constant criticism bespeaks a lack of affection, when in fact her mother’s severity and high expectations are expressions of love and faith in her daughter. All of the other mother-daughter pairs experience the same misunderstanding, which in some ways may be seen to stem from cultural differences. What Tan portrays as the traditional Chinese values of filial obedience, criticism-enveloped expressions of love, and the concealment of excessive emotions all clash with the daughters’ “American” ideas about autonomy, free and open speech,
In most cases this is true, for when they grow up they eventually figure out that they can reflect (retrace) their problems to that of their parents, and later understand what they had to go through. In the story The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Jing-mei is (acts like) an ignorant girl to her mother. Whatever tactic her mother tries on her to make her a better person she rejects. Jing-mei is constantly trying to hide her Chinese heritage and even changes her name to “June” to conform to American ways. But as she moves on in life, she begins to regret her past actions and finds out that her mother’s difficulties and problems, are (now) put on her shoulders and (now) for her to solve.