Mother Vs. Daughter

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Mother vs. Daughter In Amy Tan's “Two Kinds” two characters, a mother and a daughter, reveal many negative traits. The mother is a Chinese-American woman who has lost her twin baby girls and her first husband back in China. Jing-Mei is daughter with the mother's second husband in America where the mother thinks she has found a new beginning. Jing-Mei's mother believes that in America, “You can be the best anything”(194). In “Two Kinds” the mother's ambitions for her daughter are outrageous, the daughter's efforts to thwart her mother's goals for her were uncanny, and the negative traits in the both of them are therefore revealed. Jing-Mei's mother believes that her daughter can be a child prodigy because America is the golden land of opportunity and her plan is to teach her daughter to imitate children on different television shows. Her mother first approaches her when she is only nine years old telling her, “Of course you can be prodigy, too”(194). That is when Jing-Mei's mother begins trying to change her daughter into something she is not. First she wants Jing-Mei to be a Chinese Shirley Temple. She decides if her daughter is going to achieve this, she needs to look the part, so she decides to make her hair curly. When the lady at the beauty school screws it up, they have to cut off the curls, and her mother said, “You look like Negro Chinese” (194) as if it were Jing-Mei's fault. The instructor of the Beauty School fixes her hair but she now looks like a girl with Peter Pan hair. Only a mother with atrocious dreams for her daughter will blame a little girl for the beautician messing up the daughter's hair, as if the daughter has any control over the situation. After the Shirley Temple does not work out as well as planned, her mother decides for her to memorize all the capitals; when Jing-Mei cannot do that her mother wants her to multiply numbers in her
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