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. Jing Mei’s mother also expected her to be a prodigy because she emigrated from China; she thought America was the land of opportunity and “you could be anything you wanted to be in America [and] you could become instantly famous.”(199) Jing Mei’s mother didn’t know what she wanted her to do, so she experimented. This is the Inciting Force. It is the first sign of conflict. First she tried dancing and singing, “At first my mother thought I could become a Chinese Shirley Temple” (200).
“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.
Katie Tava July 25, 2012 “The Struggle to Be an All-American” Part 1: Summary In “The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl,” Elizabeth Wong writes about her transformation from being a Chinese girl in to an American girl, as she moved to the U.S. Wong went to a Chinese school at the same time she attended American school because Wong’s mother wanted her and her brother to maintain the Chinese language as part of their heritage. Wong became embarrassed by her Chinese culture while studying in America. She said Chinese was, “ quick, it was loud, it was unbeautiful…. Chinese sounded pedestrian” (98). The desire to become American had become her dream.
I choose Jing-mei to be my character to write on even though she did not develop much personally, but the effect that the Joy Luck Club had on her were significant and it also has to do with her attitude throughout the story. To begin with, Jing-mei (a.k.a June) did not really know her mother. It’s only after her mother died that she began to understand what her mother went through; courtesy of her dad and “aunties” at the Joy Luck Club. It’s not clear in the story if June heard her mom story about the swan, but her mom Suyuan Woo came to America with the hopes of having a daughter in America “whose value will not be judged based on her husband, and who will not have to ignore herself and "swallow sorrow. "” Her mom hoped to tell her the story in English and also give her the feather from her long lost swan.
I know my mother probably told her I was going back to school to finish my degree.” (Tan 27) As the chapter is coming to an end and the night is at its peak, Jing-Mei starts to get up to leave but when the women stop her and tell June that her mother had left behind two infant twin daughters in China, she was shocked. “My sisters, I repeat to myself, saying these two words together for first time” (Tan
Novelist Amy Tan (Libi Pedder / Camera Press / Retna) Tan proves her point about parents’ influence on people’s life when she states “I think my mother’s English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well”. By talking about how her mother’s English lacked a certain wholeness and clarity, she explains why her thoughts about her mother tongue were different when she was a child; “I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say.” People in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants didn’t take her mother seriously, didn’t give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they didn’t hear her. Here Tan emphasizes the importance of mother tongue in somebody’s life. She believes that people may not be treated respectfully because of their poor speaking of any language. She never reflects on her mother’s difficulties as something that could’ve motivated her to become a writer.
Amy Tan struggled as a Chinese-American in California, where she grew up, because of the racial discrimination that was ever present. The fact that her parents were both immigrants made the racial discrimination of the Chinese in the 1950’s all the worse and further provoked her to write the story, “Two Kinds”. “Two Kinds” is a short story centered on a complex mother-daughter relationship, whose complexities take root in many important ideas concerning Chinese heritage and the expection of American excellence. With any mother daughter relationship, fighting will break out when expectations cannot be met. Many mothers want their daughters to strive to do the best they can under any circumstance.
The Joy Luck Club presents stories about four Chinese-immigrant women and their daughters. Each of the women views the world differently and they try to share their visions with their daughters, hoping that their relationships with their daughters is just as strong as what they had with their own mothers. One of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, forms a club in China called the Joy Luck Club in order to distract her friends from their problems during the Japanese invasion during World War II. She moves to San Francisco in 1947 after losing all of her family during the war, including her twin daughters. She has a daughter named Jing-mei and starts another Joy Luck Club with three other women.
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.
Velez2 Jennifer Velez Comp107 Miss Atzeni 3/22/2012 The Struggle to Be an All-American Girl By Elizabeth Wong In Elizabeth Wong’s writing on how she struggled to be an “All-American” girl, she expresses the strict religion and culture brought on by her single-parent raising mother, when all she only wanted was to fit in with American culture. While Elizabeth and her brother wanted to play childhood games, such as ghost hunt, with their friends their mother was stern on the importance of learning the language of their heritage. She would walk them seven long blocks to Chinese school, no matter how often they pleaded with her to not attend. Elizabeth wasn’t fond of the smell of the school or that the learning was restricted. She felt that American school would be a better fit for her.