This paper will endeavor to compare as well as contrast two pieces by two writers from very different cultures – Chinese and Negro. The focus will be on Jing-Mei’s mother in Two Kinds by Amy Tan and Mama Younger in A Raisin In The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry.
A background of Amy Tan’s life follows:
“Amy Tan was born in America (Oakland, California) in 1952 to Chinese immigrant parents. The clash of values and sensibilities between first and second-generation people of Chinese heritage who have immigrated to America has been one of her constant preoccupations.”
Ms. Tan was born to parents who wanted her to be a doctor, a most demanding but prestigious career. Her talents, however, lay in other fields. Her teenage high school life which she deemed “tumultuous” was spent in Switzerland, after which she went back to America. She enrolled in college at Linfield College in Melville, Oregon, and later graduated from San Jose, California.
In the 1980’s she entered the business world as a business consultant as well as a business writer. She debuted as a fiction writer in 1985 when her first story, “Endgame” was published. Since then, Ms. Tan has met with great success, winning her, considerable fame and financial gain. Two Kinds, the story to be analyzed in this paper is the last story in the second of four sections of her successful first book, The Joy Luck Club. This novel has been made into a play shown all over the world and translated into several languages.
The following is about our other author, Lorraine Hansberry. She was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, USA. The youngest child of well-to-do parents, Carl and Nannie Perry Hansberry. The couple was independent and politically active Republicans who, at Lorraine’s birth wrote “Black” instead of “Negro’ in the Hospital which the couple Records, a testament to the Afrocentric ideology which the couple bequeathed to their brood.
Hansberry’s father was a successful businessman, having established one of the first black savings banks in Chicago. Politically active at all times, he challenged a Supreme Court decision against integration, winning the right to buy a residence in an exclusive Chicago neighborhood that formerly excluded colored people. Hansberry remembers her mother’s standing guard with a loaded gun to protect her family from the violence incurred by racism.
Hansberry enrolled at the University of Wisconsin but did not graduate there. Her growing interest in the arts led her to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, Roosevelt College, and the New School of Social Research in New York. She also studied art in Guadalajara, Mexico. Later she became a staff member of Paul Robson’s Freedom Magazine, Jean Carey bond says of her: “Her brief sojourn was, in one of its dimensions, a study in pure style. Born into material comfort yet baptized in social responsibility, intensely individual in her attitudes and behavior, yet sensitive to the will and aspirations of a whole people, a lover of life, yet stalked by death – she deliberately fashioned out of these elements an articulate existence of artistic and political commitment, seasoned with that missionary devotion which often intensifies the labors of the mortally ill.” (Cliffs Notes, n.d.).
Upon her death, Hansberry left behind an unfinished semi-autobiographical novel plus three plays, also unfinished.
Since its Broadway debut, A Raisin in the Sun has been translated into more than thirty languages, including the language of the eastern German Sorbische minority, and has been produced in China, Czechoslovakia, France, England, and the Soviet Union. Raisin addresses specific problems of the Youngers, a black family living in Southside, Chicago. However, it also reflects the very real problems of all. Its universal appeal defies some of the early critics’ views as being simply “a play about Negroes”.
A brief synopsis of the play runs thus: Raisin narrates how a lower-class black family struggles to gain middle-class acceptance. Mama Younger, the sixty-year-old matriarch awaits a $10,000 insurance check from the death of her husband, Big Walter. The play focuses on how the money should be spent.
Walter Lee Younger, the son, is desperate to become a better provider for his family, which is why he would like to invest the entire sum in a liquor store with two friends. Mama is strongly opposed to the idea of selling liquor for ethical reasons, and quarrels erupt over their disagreements.
Mama decides to set part of her insurance money as a down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, but her conflict with her son grows worse, and to pacify him, she gives the money instead to Walter who promptly invests it in the liquor business.
Walter’s business partner runs off with the cash. The Younger family, however, decides to continue with Mama’s scheme and they finally move to a new neighborhood.
One of the biggest selling points about Raisin was how much the Younger family was just like any other American family, not necessarily a Negro family. It was a stark demonstration of our conviction, our belief that deep inside, all Americans are pretty much alike. People are just people and all they need is a chance to integrate – to be like other people.
“This uncritical assumption, sentimentally held by the audience, powerfully fixed in the character of the powerful mother with whom everybody could identify, immediately and completely, made any other questions about the Youngers, and what living in the slums of Southside Chicago had done to them, not only irrelevant but impertinent but also disloyal… because everybody who walked into the theater saw in Lena Younger… his own great American Mama… And that was decisive.” (Nerniroff, 1994).
There is not a word in the play about Mama’s “acceptance” of her place in society. There is no mention that she is prepared to defy housing – pattern taboos, threats, bombs in her quest of her family’s survival over the soul and body-crushing conditions of the ghetto since this matriarch is proof herself that if one perseveres with faith, all will come out right in the long run. True to character, she thinks and speaks in the language of her generations, shares their dream of a better life, and takes her Christianity to heart.
Much that passed unnoticed in the play when it was first produced in 1959, speaks to issues that are now inescapable value systems of the black family; concepts of African-American beauty and identity; conflicts between classes and generations; conjugal relationships; the daughter’s feminism and in the scene between Beneatha and Asagai, the larger statements of the play and the continuing struggle it presages.
“If we are to survive in a world four-fifths of peoples of color – then I believe Raisin in the Sun will remain no less pertinent. For at the deepest level, it is not a specific situation but the human condition, human aspirations, and human relationships –the persistence of dreams, of the bonds and conflicts between men and women, parents and children; old ways and new and the endless struggle against human oppression…and for individual fulfillment, recognition, and liberation – that are at the heart of such plays.” (Nerniroff, 1994)
Going back to Amy Tan as a writer, Two Kinds, the last story in Ms. Tan’s greatly-commended first book, The Joy Luck Club was heretofore meant to be read as a collection of discrete narratives but later referred to as a novel since the stories are interrelated. A number of these stories were published in “Atlantic Monthly”. Two Kinds was published a month before the book was released.
Two Kinds concerns itself with the complex relationships between mothers and daughters – particularly the distance between mothers born in China prior to the communist revolution and their American-born daughters. The mothers have been separated from their native culture for a long time; while the daughters have to bear the burdens of their Chinese heritage together with the prevailing American expectations for success.
Jing-Mei, the narrator in the story, struggles against her ambitious mother’s plans of making her into a musical prodigy in competition with the daughter of one of her friends. After a period of more than two decades, Jing-Mei recalling the events that transpired still fails to understand the motivations of her mother.
“Two Kinds contains all the elements that won Tan the well-deserved praise she received from her first book. It shows off her keen ear for the fractured English of the older generation.. and her sharp eye for detail in recreating the domestic scenery of mothers and daughters, especially in her descriptions of food and clothing.” (Napierkowski, 1998)
Jing-Mei’s mother in Amy Tan’s Two Kinds and Mama Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun find themselves picking up the pieces of their respective lives after going through tragedy. Jing Mei’s mother arrives in America in 1949 after losing her family. Mama Younger has just been widowed and is awaiting the insurance money left her by her late husband, Big Walter.
Despite the reverses in their lives, both women show courage. Jing Mei’s mother once settled in the new country, never looks back. She believes that if you live in America, you can do or be anything you want. Not only can you open your own business, but you can buy a house and become rich.
“When Mama explains to Walter her act of buying a house at Clybourne Park, she says, ‘I just tried to find the nicest place for the best amount of money for my family.’ Her frustration comes as a result of her family’s inability to appreciate her efforts.” (Act 2, Scene 1)
Mama’s family consists of Walter Lee Younger, Mama’s only son, Beneatha’s brother, and Ruth’s husband. He is also a father to Travis Willard, ten or eleven years of age.
Jing-Mei’s mother’s first family back in China was made up of her first husband, their infant twin daughters, and her parents. In America, the mother had only one child – Jing-Mei; but she was quite a handful.
All mothers are alike in the sense that they want the best for their families. When Jing-Mei is nine years old, her mother tells her she can become a child prodigy. At first, she tries to transform Jing-Mei into a Chinese Shirley Temple but fails. At the start, Jing-Mei is just as excited about becoming a famous child prodigy. She thinks she will fill the role and her parents will be proud of her.
All efforts meet with disappointment until Jing-Mei finally decides she will never let her mother change her. The mother’s last attempt was to change Jing-Mei into a pianist. She bought a piano and managed to subject the girl to piano lessons. She even signed up Jing-Mei for a talent show. Then the daughter ended up a total failure.
When Jing-Mei is about to turn thirty, the mother offers her the piano as a birthday gift, the daughter says that she probably cannot play anymore; but the mother tells her that she picks things up quickly and still has a natural talent. After the piano is reconditioned and Jing-Mei plays on it, surprisingly, she plays her recital piece without difficulty. She plays the next piece and it easily comes back to her. She then realizes that both pieces are two halves of the same song. Her Mama was right, after all. Jing-Mei did have talent.
Mamas the world over are always right just as Mama Younger was right in pushing through with her plans of buying a house. This story of Lorraine Hansberry as well as that by Amy Tan are prime examples of how a family consisting of people with divergent ways of thinking can achieve success and lead satisfying lives if they really love one another.
References
Amy Tan’s Background. 2008. Web.
CliffsNotes (n.d.) Raisin in the Sun. Web.
Cooper, D. (1993) Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Explicator, Fall, Vol 52, Issue 1.
Kodat, C.G., “Confusion in a Dream Deferred: Context and Culture in teaching A Raisin in the Sun”, Studies in the Literary Imagination; Vol. 31 Issue 1.
Napierkowski, M.R. (ed) (1998) Short Stories for Students, Detroit: Gale.
Nerniroff, R. (1994) Introduction in Raisin in the Sun (by Hansberry, L.) New York: Signet.