2. Compare and contrast the self-image and thoughts of Connie in the following passages to the self-concept and thoughts of the narrator protagonist in Two Kinds as a young child: " ...she had a quick nervous...habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors, or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right" (Charters 977) and "Connie's mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over." (978). Can you find similar passages in Two Kinds? What do these similarities reveal to you? What idea can you arrive at from these parallels?
3. How can you connect this story to some aspect of the semester's theme of enslavement? Is the story about enslavement or liberation? If so, to what or from what? Explain please.
Feel free to blog on any aspect of the story that moves you or connects to the semester's work. I look forward to your thoughts. See 1549-1552 in the back of the text for an interesting essay by Tan that is quite illuminating!
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ReplyDeleteThe mother may have good intentions for her child but she shows it in an emotionally oppressive manner which sets off a defense mechanism in her daughter, “And right then, I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.”(1226) Her uneducated approach and limited understanding of success contributes towards her failure as a mother. Nowhere in the story is portrayed a light cozy moment between the mother and daughter; the daughter simply cannot “just be” in the mother’s presence because the mother constantly scrutinizes her by imposing tests, movies with a “message” or some such task in her endeavor to mould this lesser person into a prodigy of sorts. Jing-mei always falls short of the mother’s expectations. Even when her mother is not saying so much to her, the reader feels the ripples of her perpetual gnawing attitude in the atmosphere that surrounds her daughter, “In all of my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect.”(1222)
ReplyDeleteThe mother’s myriad ways of instilling in her child a sense of purpose or achievement, in her stubborn, irrational manner only compels the daughter to defy her. She may have had only good intentions for her child but how is the child to know that unless the parent communicates their intentions in a loving way that a kid would understand. The child only sees the angry, dissatisfied mother full of anticipation as if to say that her purpose on earth is to perform like the prodigy she wants her to be and astound everyone around her. The part where the mother feigns frustration to her friend over her child’s penchant for music proves her insecurity and craving for some sort of attention and recognition for which she’s clearly depending on her daughter to fulfill –“And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: “Our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It’s like you can’t stop this natural talent.”(1226)But then, in the mother’s defense, she wished for her daughter to try and be her best. It is hard to find fault with the daughter considering her age and inability to comprehend the bigger picture of what her mother may have been intending for her future. I guess there’s some truth to the saying that goes something like this- It’s not just what you do, it is how you do it that matters a great deal.
The similarity I find between mothers in these stories is their expectations from their children, or anticipation of some sort of recognition and acknowledgement. I found Dee mother the strongest and endearing of all the others. Despite her limiting environment, her strength of character and generosity of spirit is admirable. Her deep sense of contentment with who she is, is missing in Jing-mei’s mother who cannot just be because of her deep set insecurity and discontentment, whatever they may be.
2.
ReplyDelete"I had on a white dress layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV. And I started to play. It was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that at first I didn't worry how I would sound" (1227).
"And then I decided. I didn't have to do what my mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before and look what happened. She was the stupid one..."You want me to be someone that I'm not," I sobbed. "I'll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be."
"Only two kinds of daughters," she shouted in Chinese. "Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!"
"Then I wish I wasn't your daughter. I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted...
"Too late change this," said my mother shrilly.
..."Then I wish I'd never been born!" I shouted. "I wish I were dead like them!'" (1228).
-These show that there was more than just a cultural difference between Jing-mei [thanks Sunita! I couldn't remember her name and it was driving me nuts!] and her mother in regards to the differences in Chinese and American culture. There is a generational difference in culture. This idea of the mother not understanding the daughter is present in both stories. It not only shows the complicated nature of this relationship, but the need for understanding between the two, as well. It is natural for most young girl's to be preoccupied with looks, especially in younger generations. And in these relationships it is natural for a daughter to become resentful of the mother. Connie and Jing-mei resented there mother's nit picking and could not understand the reasoning behind it, leading to awful thoughts and words. Although, Jing-mei was more spiteful in her wishes, both were just as cruel in intentions. But both of these girls are children (even if they differ in age) and it is essentially the mother's obligation to motivate the child without picking on them.
The story has strong aspects of enslavement. The mother is enslaved to the idea of the American Dream; she wants her daughter to succeed in their new found America and believes the only way for her to do so is by assimilation. Actually, in the daughter’s relentless way of resisting her mother’s will for her to become famous, the daughter is revealed as having become the true American child who disrespects and talks back to parents. Thus they both are enslaved to the American culture that consumes. The commonality of most of the stories this semester is that the enslavement happens in the context of family systems that attempt to ignore the external pressures that facilitate their enslavement. None look out; their all blame within.
ReplyDeleteAnytime that unrealistic expectations are placed on someone is enslavement. In this case, the daughter is not free to grow and development into yourself. Surely, the mother may have good intentions in wanting the best for her daughter, but what these expectations do is actually stunt the daughter's growth because instead of following her own path to happiness, she is now a big disappointment to her mother and ultimately to herself. It will take her a long time to overcome the damage done by mother. This is a typical theme in Tan's books, except that Tan managed to escape some of the cultural expectations of her family and she writes her more personal novels with a tongue-in-cheek approach, able to look endearingly on her mother's unwillingness to break with "silly" traditions -- but there is still evidence of some pain there for Tan, that she didn't measure up in her mother's eyes, much like the girl in the story.
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Whether or not Jing-mei has a natural gift for the piano, her mother cannot force her to accept that playing music can be a liberating experience. Having known a number of people in my generation who have neglected musical (or otherwise creative) talent, I've struggled with questions about why anyone would choose to throw something like that away. Frequently it is not because music cannot move them, but rather because they have mistaken ideas about the relationship between work and liberation. Namely, there has always been a strain of adolescent rebel that believes that not-working in itself is a means of liberation and an escape from enslavement. However, in my humble and subjective opinion, liberation (whether personal, political, etc.) can only come about through hard work. The illusion of effortless genius comes only after significant time spent in dedication to that particular task. One must have some talent, of course, but this is not what Jing-mei lacks. Since she has not had the difficult experiences and the losses that her mother endured, she does not understand that one cannot have the rewards without work. Perhaps her mother fails to communicate this because she assumes that Jing-mei understands this implicitly and is simply choosing to ignore it. This lesson is one that bears repeating, however: over and over, tirelessly, and until it is worn out of the American youth's collective psyche.
ReplyDeleteI agree very strongly with the concept Pruss introduced in class (briefly) about one source of praise for Amy Tan. She makes the reader care about opposed characters, building a story in which it easy to empathize with both and hard to side with either one.
ReplyDeleteI cannot completely condemn this mother. She is wrong in the way she fails to show love to her daughter, but there are many understandable causes of this behavior. First, the reader is informed in a direct, factual tone that the mother had lost, quite simply, everything. “She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret” (1222). Even if she does not look back, it has to be difficult to show affection after losing so much. If she had invested love and care in the family she lost, she must now recognize the risk inherent to loving.
Furthermore, the mother’s early experiences have shown her how easy it is to lose all but one’s self. She has learned that material things can be taken away no matter what they mean to you (the family home) and that family, though a potential support system, can be lost, too. She is left with nothing but her own person, with the skills, knowledge, and will that she has when she leaves China. Now that she is looking forward and living her second chance, she takes that experience with her and seeks to “improve” her daughter. She wants her daughter to have some sort of innate skill, which would make sense from a loving mother who has learned that skills and knowledge are all that anyone can count on keeping when the world falls apart. She wants her daughter to be disciplined and determined; if the mother had not been, it is unlikely she would have recovered as well as she did from such devastating loss.
I cannot condemn the daughter, but I cannot praise or admire her, either. She gives up on herself out of spite for her mother’s control. “So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. . . I was so determined not to try” (1225). The misery and difficulty of growing up that she experienced was in part her own act of resentment. She had the chance to really enjoy music, which the reader sees when she responds to the beauty of the music during her performance. “And I started to play. It was so beautiful “ (1227). If she had practiced, she would not have “hit the first wrong note . . .[and then] another and another” (1227). Her performance could have been beautiful, and she had the capacity to enjoy it. Just as her mother made a mistake but for understandable reasons, the daughter does the same. This mother stifles her daughter as a result of her cultural background and personal experience; the daughter throws away a potentially beautiful talent as a result of her response to a stifling mother.
I love it when the title of a story begs an interesting question. Amy Tan's title asks us: "Two Kinds" of WHAT? We learn from the mother that there are two kinds of daughters, "Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!" (1228). But there are also two different songs that the narrator plays, "Perfectly Contented" and "Pleading Child." We learn in the last sentence that these two songs are really two halves of a single song. Playing them together will form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, the narrator grows up under the (frequently conflicting) influences of individualistic American society and the more high-context culture of China. The narrator is two things in one, just like this guy:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06TBhGrzyN4
The mother in the Kincaid story versus the mother in the Tan story is almost a lofty comparison. Perhaps it's because Kincaid's story is based solely in dialogue, but the mother in the Tan story seems more human and much more understandable. She may be misguided in her attempts, and there may be alienation between the mother and the daughter, but it is foolish to always expect a friendship between a mother and a daughter. This story seems to offer more closure within the mother-daughter relationship, but this might be because the story is written for a period of time, as opposed to compressed events. We also see the maturity of the daughter in this story, which we did not get to experience with the other familial relationships within our reading this semester.
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