11/24/2023 0 Comments Two kinds jing mei characteristics![]() Jing-mei realises that doing your best and making yourself proud is the key to a happy life: trying to win talent shows or outdo other people (or, worse, other people’s children through your own child) is only going to leave you trapped in a perpetual cycle of goal-chasing and ambition-pursuing.Īnd yet, Amy Tan has Jing-mei point out that the latter was dependent on the former: in order to be fully content as an adult, she had to plead and fight for her own independence while growing up. These are the ‘Two Kinds’ of person she has been: she had to struggle slowly through the years as a pleading child longing for independence and the right to choose what she pursued, but now she has reached adulthood, she is indeed perfectly contented, in a way that her mother never could be. Yet Tan’s title ‘Two Kinds’ does itself have two kinds of meaning: it can also refer to the final section of the story, in which Jing-mei discovers the other piece of music from the talent show, and realises – in a moment laden (perhaps too conveniently) with symbolism – that ‘Pleading Child’ is complemented by ‘Perfectly Contented’. Ironically, her mother has fled a totalitarian state only to set up a petty tyrannical regime in her own home (you can take the girl out of Communism, but …). The story’s title, ‘Two Kinds’, is ostensibly explained by the mother’s comment to her daughter that there are two kinds of daughter: obedient and free-thinking. Although Jing-mei doesn’t immediately take the piano off her parents, every time she sees it in their living room she feels proud. ![]() ![]() Even after all these years, her mother is convinced her daughter has a natural aptitude for music. When the narrator turns thirty, she is surprised when her mother offers to give her the piano as a birthday present. Jing-mei tells us that, in the years that followed, she continually disappointed her mother, because she doesn’t share her view that she could be anything she wanted to be, but instead could ‘only be me’. This stuns her mother, who stops trying to force her daughter to learn the piano. In response, Jing-mei says she wishes she wasn’t her mother’s daughter, or that she had died at birth like the children her mother had lost back in China. Her mother tells her that there are only ‘two kinds’ of daughters: those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind, and she insists on her daughter being the obedient kind. Two days later, however, the mother tries to force Jing-mei into resuming piano lessons.
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