I never really listened to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else" (2). Naturally, her poor practice leads to a poor performance in front of her family and peers. Here however, her reactions betray her. Tan reveals that Jing-mei values her mother's acceptance of her above anything. When Jing-mei laments that her "mother's expression was what devastated [her]: a quiet, blank look that

Conformity and Two Kinds Amy Tan's Two Kinds is a story that, like some of her relationships in The Joy Luck Club, is concerned with the conflict and complexity within the relationship between mothers and daughters -- particularly those mothers who are first-generation immigrants, born in China before the Communist revolution and their American-born daughters who must choose which parts of traditional culture they will adhere to, and which they will

Really, the theme of this story is growing up and how quarrelsome mothers and daughters can be toward each other, but it goes deeper than that. This is a story of a young girl trying to find her own identity, and distance herself from her parents and their ideas. The young girl defies her mother because she feels the need to be herself, but she hurts herself in the process.

She never had the opportunity to grow at her own pace and this was something that her mother had to live with every day for the rest of her life. Parental control can also work against a parent/child relationship because even if a child is talented, rebellion will destroy opportunities and appreciation. Jing-Mei might have possessed what was needed to be a prodigy but she spent all of her energy

Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri Both Amy Tan's "Two Kinds" and Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Third and Final Continent" tell stories about the cultural clash between eastern cultures and the western world of the United States. This is not the only point of similarity between these two women or their writing styles. Besides the fact that they were second-generation immigrants, both women had mothers who wished them to hold onto their heritage

Tan's experience with the piano underscores the stark contrast between the way her mother believed fame and fortune work in America, and the way she believed they worked. She writes, "Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me. And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward at