Two Kinds, by Amy Tan

A detailed Summary of Two Kinds, by Amy Tan

TAN DEMONSTRATES THROUGH THE USE OF THE NARRATIVE POINT OF VIEW, JING-MEI'S PERSUASION NOT TO SUCCEED IN "TWO KINDS"

Throughout out the short story "Two Kinds", Amy Tan demonstrates through the use of the narrative point of view, Jing-Mei's persuasion not to succeed. The young protagonist in the short story came to the difficult realization that the person who her parents wanted her to be is not what she was, and she blamed everything that happened to her on her mother. This short story contains believable characters that go through hard times trying to make a prodigy out of a child who thought that she was trying hard to please her mother. In actual fact, she did everything in her capacity to make herself not become a child who her parents could look up to. Throughout the short story Jing-Mei demonstrations how she attempts to make her life more difficult by doing everything in her power not to succeed, even though she is aware how much her success would mean to her mother. To attest to this, she mocks the mental and physical training administrated by her mother to improve her distinctn!

ess, the futileness of the piano lessons by the deaf teacher, the incident in front of the church when her mother boasts of her piano exp

She stated that it was her mother's entire fault for not performing well at the recital. However, it was Jing-Mei who fooled around at her piano lessons, and it was she who decided not to do well to spite her mother. By performing so badly at the recital Jing-Mei hope to provoke her mother into a confrontation, which would allow her to put her mother in her place on all the issues built up inside of her over the years. She believed that her mother had hoped for something so large, that Jing-Mei believed that failure was inevitable. However, her mother's hopes were only for Jing-Mei to succeed and to do the best of her ability. Jing-Mei is the one who failed her mother, not her mother who failed her. The narrator is in first person, this character is Jing-Mei, and she projected all of her failure on her mother. This reiterates the fact that she never intended to succeed, but refused to be responsible for the failure.

Tan demonstrates Jing-Mei abstinence through the narrator's point of view. Regardless of the mother's attempts to strengthen Jing-Mei's physical and mental character by developing quizzes on the capitals, various bible readings and by learning how to accomplish fast multiplications, Jing-Mei only mocks her mother and does not attempt to learn. Never making an attempt to memorize them. She convinced herself to become bored with what she was doing, distracted herself easily hoping to illustrate to her mother that the exercises were futile. This allowed Jing-Mei the window of opportunity to not even bother to try. She believed that her mother 's goal was to make her into a child prodigy, like those she had seen on the Ed Sullivan Show. Jing-Mei believed that her persuasive mother only tried to make herself become a star for her mother's gratification and not for Jing-Mei's benefit at all. Jing-Mei thrived on making her life more difficult, when by having taken advantage of!

d blindness. Mr. Chong, the piano instructor tapped the beat on her sh

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Approximate Word count = 1337
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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