Two Kinds

Expectations and hopes – these words contain lots of emotions and sensibility. It can bring enjoy-ment if you fulfil the expectation or it can lead to disappointment if you don’t. Every individual will not get through life without having some sort of expectation to something, and this as well include parents too. The short story ’Two Kinds’ written by Amy Tan is from 1989, and it delineates a mother’s attempt to push her daughter into achieving a prodigious lifestyle. The mother is an immi-grant from China, but her daughter is born in America. The cultural difference of their upbringing and childhood results in different values and ideals of how the individual person should become, and this is one of the main themes that constitute the short story.

The narrator of the story is a Chinese-American girl, and she has an arduous relationship with her mother. The mother is very strong-willed and determined on that her daughter should become a prodigy. As a result of the mother’s desired dream of her daughter’s terrific future, she takes her to beauty schools and presents tests to her, to see if the daughter possesses any extraordinary talent. Their long search of finding the right talent ends with that the narrator has to play the piano.
At first the narrator is pleased with the idea of herself becoming something great, which is also stat-ed in this phrase: “I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect. My mother and father would adore me” (p. 2, ll. 25-26). But later on in the progress, the daughter infers that she will not fulfil her mother’s wish after she witnesses the constant disappointment from her mother every time she fails. The narrator then decides to forge her own sense of identity and promises herself not to let her mother change her, which is seen in this excerpt: “I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I am not” (p. 3, ll. 48-49). From this point you will experience a reluctant behav-iour and attitude from the