People face a significant number of problems in the course of their lives. Some of them break under the burden of these problems whereas other take them as something temporary, something they can learn from and something that makes them stronger. Moving to a foreign country is a challenge for everybody and especially for children who are on a very delicate stage of their personality development. Moving to such country as America is even more difficult as the variety of possibilities for the personal development is striking there. This country offers a lot of job opportunities and a great number of entertainments but this all involves high competitiveness and ability to be flexible. Everybody is trying to do his or her best and to prove to the others that their moving to this country was not a mistake. The problem of adjustment to the foreign environment is just a tiny part of what may seem to be difficult when moving to America. Most of young people encounter a much more difficult problem which is the fear not to meet the expectations of their parents, relatives or friends. People move to other countries in search of something better and aiming to change their lives. When something does not work out, it can be very disappointing for both the person who has failed to achieve the desirable results and for those who believed in this person’s success. Amy Tan’s short story “Two Kinds” describes the inability of a Chinese girl who lives in America to meet the expectations of her Chinese mother who immigrated to America a long time ago. It is full of conflicts and misunderstandings arising because of cultural and age differences as the mother still did not manage to fit in the American society and put up with the traditions this society observes.
Before discussing the story itself, it is worth mentioning that “Throughout the early part of her life, Amy Tan rejected her Chinese heritage and embraced what she regarded as typical American values and ideals” (Nanette Koelsch, Nancy Nelson, Lawrence E. Berliner 944). Most of her works are about relationships between a mother and a daughter, which is due to the fact that she herself had problems with her mother. Her works reveal all the problems people face when living in a foreign country, but at this, the inability to correspond to high standards the parents set in order to have children they want to remains the central problem. Amy Tan’s short story “Two Kinds” is about “an immigrant mother who pushed her daughter in very negative ways” (Arlette Ingram Willis, Georgia Earnest Garcia, Rosalinda B. Barrera, Violet J. Harris, 280) in order to make of her somebody she could be proud of. The story is not only about the parents and children’s relations and how complicated they may be. It also reveals some cultural aspects which should be paid attention to when living in a foreign country: “In Two Kinds, Amy Tan not only states her personal view of growing up but also gives a cultural view of “growing-up” experience’ (Edward P. J. Corbett, Sheryl L. Finkle 144). Nevertheless, it should be as well admitted that in her ‘Two Kinds” Amy Tan “considers issues relating to ethnicity to be secondary to her concern with “relationships and family” (Kathryn Hume, p. 181).
Generation gap is the problem of the centuries which has always been vital and very widely discussed mostly due to the fact that no proper solution to this problem has been offered so far. This generation gap becomes even wider when it comes to people who have to cope with one more difficult life stage – the immigration to another country and getting accustomed to the environment surrounding them and demands of the new society. These two problems mixing and intertwining with each other never bring anything positive that’s why certain misunderstandings between immigrants of different generations may arise, and they can be not so easy to cope with. The short story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan reflects the conflicts arising between a mother and a daughter because of the vastness of the generation gap between them and misunderstandings springing up on the same basis. Conflicts, as a rule, never arise out of nothing that’s why some reasons causing them should be necessarily discussed.
What should be mentioned above all is that the mother and the daughter had different purposes in their lives just like two other people coming from different generations. The desire of the mother was to have a talented daughter who she could boast in front of other people. Driven by the idea that ”you could be anything you wanted to be in America” (Amy Tan, p. 132) and all it takes is to put a little more effort, she was trying to disclose at least some sort of genius in her daughter. The absence of this talent, or as the narrator called herself “without a mention of my being a prodigy” (Amy Tan, p. 135), she explained by the fact that Jing-Mei was not trying hard enough: “Just like you”, she said. “Not the best. Because you not trying” (Amy Tan, p. 136). This is a common fault of most of the parents. Sometimes they expect too much from their children and children’s inability to meet these expectations disappoints and irritates them. What makes this whole situation even more complicated is that Jing-Mei was already a half-American. This concerned the state of her soul and the way of her living rather than her origin. The fact that she lived in an American society made her overtake its rules and take after American children for not to stand out and not to be different than the others. She was influenced by the ideas of the independent identity and uniqueness of personality. She would never agree to be somebody she does not want to as she was not a Chinese girl anymore, not the kind of a girl her mother got used to bring up: “I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’m not” (Amy Tan, p. 34). This desire to preserve her identity was one of the main causes of the conflicts between Jing-Mei and her mother.
What’s more, apart from the problem of parents and children the problem of observing the traditions of the native country arises. Jing-Mei, a Chinese girl was born in America, and this changed her personality and moved her away from her native country. Her mother had her own traditional ideas of how to bring up children, the ideas she got used to have in China: “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!” (Amy Tan, p. 142). Her mother was not the one who would indulge or pamper a child as it would be not in accordance with Chinese traditions of upbringing. Chinese people seem to pay not so much attention to their children because most of parents in their country tend to keep to the authoritarian style of parenting. This is why the fact that her daughter contradicted to her and dared to stand up to her made her furious: “She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying” (Amy Tan, p. 143). That very moment the mother could hardly be mad at Jing-Mei only because she refused to play the piano. What mattered to her most of all is that her daughter refused to obey her and dared to stand up to the rules she established in their house. A regular Chinese child would never dare to contradict to either of the parents, but that was not a kind of a child Jing-Mei was now. What she turned into was an “uneasy Americanized teenager at odds with the expectations of her traditional Chinese parents” (E. D. Huntley, p. 2). Jing-Mei and her mother were parts of different societies now this is why the conflict arising between them can be considered typical as this is what happens when two people of different generations and different societies live together.
And the final problem which served as a basic of the main conflict in “Two Kinds” was that Jing-Mei’s mother demanded and expected too much from her. As it was already mentioned above, the mother dreamt of having a gifted daughter who would become famous with time. It was not just a mere dreaming. She did everything to get the daughter she wanted to have and thought that it would be enough to simply select the sphere, the area in which her daughter could become popular, the so-called “right kind of prodigy” (Amy Tan, p. 132). She gathered materials about these different spheres and compiled a number of tests in order to check if her daughter was ready for the future she planned for her: “I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air” (Mary Tan, p. 133). But in none of these spheres Jing-Mei turned out to be talented enough. The mother continued trying to make a star of her, and this resulted in further, the biggest, disappointment when she made her daughter learn to play the piano. It seems that for being her daughter, one had to correspond to certain standards which Jing-Mei did not want to correspond to: “Then I wish I wasn’t your daughter, I wish you weren’t my mother” (Amy Tan, p. 142). Here Jing-Mei finally expressed what she wanted to for so long: “this awful side of me had surfaced, at last” (Amy Tan, p. 142). The tries of the mother to turn her daughter in what she considered to be perfect is the cause of most of their conflicts. This desire of hers was constantly making the already existing gap between them even wider.
It seems reasonable to point out what this partly cultural generation gap developed into in the relations between Jing-Mei and her mother. Authoritarian style of upbringing seems to be effective only in those countries where it is widely applied. But in case with Jing-Mei who was not a citizen of such a country anymore, it gave absolutely opposite results. Perhaps, if the cultural aspect was not involved in this situation, everything would work out in a different way. But what we have here is only a negative influence on Jing-Mei’s life in all possible spheres. Not only had she failed to become famous and talented but never had she managed to be in the first ranks at school, college and her life in general: “In the years that followed, I failed her many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college” (Amy Tan, p. 142). What Jing-Mei did all her life was trying not to be the best because her essence was against it, because by trying to make her perfect her mother engendered in her soul an aversion to everything related with this word. Perfect meant for Jing-Mei something, her mother would be proud of, something she once resented, something which should not be done because the sense of her life was to run counter to her mother’s principles and desires. Her whole life, she was running away from this perfection in order to prove to herself rather than to her mother that she would not turn into somebody who she was not. It seems that if Jing-Mei’s mother did not try to disclose a talent to something in her daughter, she would probably be a mother of a very gifted child. At the end of the story, it turns out that Jing-Mei did have a genius for music. If only her mother did not make her play the piano, she would probably become an excellent pianist.
In conclusion, a number of problems can complicate the relations between parents and their children. The short story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan provides good examples of how an already existing gap between a parent and a child gets even wider due to certain cultural and personal factors. When dealing with immigrants, the collision of different generations is very much the same problem as the collision of ordinary people of different generations. The only difference lies in the fact that cultural problems are added to already existing misunderstandings as children brought up, as in case with the “Two kinds”, in American environment but by Chinese parents, can turn out to be at a loss which rules they exactly have to follow, the ones imposed by their parents or those which are followed by other members of the new society. Immigrant parents belong to another generation this is why they tend to keep to the rules they got used to in their times and usually in their native country, forcing their children to be at one side with them. Another problem raised in the story is the parents’ expectations of what their children can become and their constant reminding about these expectations as well as trying to make their children what they do not want to be. When children start afraid of disappointing their parents all the time, their whole life can turn into one big disappointment. This is what happens to children who are not given a freedom of choice. The object the restriction of their liberty and end up achieving nothing, whereas their potential perfectly allows them to become the best in some spheres of life. The children who are forced to do something they do not want to usually have hidden talents which they are either afraid to show or not allowed to do this. The short story “Two Kinds” tells about the variety of problems, including racial and cultural ones, but concentrating on the family problems which, unlike the others, when remaining undecided, produce a negative effect on the life of children raised in the families with such problems. It is very important to realize that what one has and what one wants to have is, as a rule, not the same thing, and it is better to appease with this idea as when trying to fight with it, one may end up having nothing. A very vivid example of this is Jing-Mei’s mother who wanted to have a perfect talented daughter but almost lost her when striving to have everything and at once.
Works Cited
- Amy Tan. The Joy Luck Club. Penguin, 2006.
- Nanette Koelsch, Nancy Nelson, Lawrence E. Berliner, Prentice-Hall, inc. Prentice-Hall Literature. Prentice-Hall, 1994.
- Arlette Ingram Willis, Georgia Earnest Garcia, Rosalinda B. Barrera, Violet J. Harris. Multicultural Issues in Literacy Research and Practice. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.
- Edward P. J. Corbett, Sheryl L. Finkle. The Little English Handbook: Choices and Conventions. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
- E. D. Huntley. Amy Tan: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press, 1998.
- Kathryn Hume. “Amy Tan’. MELUS 30.4 (2005): 181.