Cultural Clash in Tan's "Two Kinds" and Lahiri's Stories

Introduction: Two Authors, Two Cultures

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 from their home nations while still accepting the dominant culture of the United States. This background would influence their writing, as is evident in the two stories examined here.

Beyond the question of cultural clash, both stories also explore the differing perceptions of society between generations and how those diverging worldviews can cause conflict. The older generation embodies the old culture and its traditions, whereas the younger generation is symbolic of Western influence on that older culture. It is therefore no surprise that the protagonists clash as much with their parent culture as they do with that of the United States.

Lahiri's Narrator and the Journey to America

In "The Third and Final Continent," Jhumpa Lahiri explores the cultural clash that occurs when an Indian man immigrates to the United States. The narrator has traveled from his homeland to London and then makes a final journey to the United States. Set in the mid-1960s, the reader's first impression is of a man in transit. Even in his London flat, the details of his daily life remain rooted in his Indian heritage — he specifically mentions eating egg curry and playing Mukesh. His cultural identity is as much a part of him as his employment.

The narrator is also about to enter an arranged marriage. He has never met his wife, and he seems to attach little importance to this event. He remarks simply: "In 1969, when I was thirty-six years old, my own marriage was arranged… I flew first to Calcutta, to attend my wedding, and a week later to Boston, to begin my new job." In American culture, arranged marriages might seem old-fashioned or even troubling. In Indian culture, however, this practice carries a very different meaning. The narrator elaborates:

"My wife's name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man. She was the daughter of a schoolteacher in Beleghata. I was told that she could cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore, but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face. She was twenty-seven, an age when her parents had begun to fear that she would never marry, and so they were willing to ship their only child halfway across the world in order to save her from spinsterhood."

His detached impression of his wife is equally foreign to American sensibilities. He offers no emotional response, noting only that her talents do not compensate for her lack of physical attractiveness to him. Most Americans associate weddings with celebration, romantic love, and considerable investment of time and money. Viewed through that cultural lens, the narrator's marriage appears destined for unhappiness — yet this misreads the cultural framework within which he operates.

Once in America, the narrator moves into a boarding house where his landlord is an extremely old woman named Mrs. Croft. Their interactions become another instance of clashing identities. Mrs. Croft demands that the narrator acknowledge the American flag on the moon as "Splendid" — nothing less will do. When he initially responds with a different word, she corrects him until he complies. Over time, the narrator learns simply to give her the answer she expects. In doing so, he is quietly indoctrinated into her cultural framework. Without fully realizing it, his identity has already begun to shift under the pressure of American culture.

Assimilation and the Loss of Bengali Identity

As the narrator and his wife Mala slowly assimilate into American culture, they also attempt to preserve some of their Bengali traditions. It is only when Mala arrives that the narrator speaks his native language and eats with his hands. Without the presence of another Indian person, he has largely set aside the customs of his heritage. Mala, who lacked the narrator's prior experience in London, retains her heritage longer — but she too assimilates. By the end of the story, "Mala no longer drapes the end of her sari over her head, or weeps at night for her parents." The couple have become American citizens, and their son has even less connection to his Bengali heritage than his parents.

"So we drive to Cambridge to visit him, or bring him home for a weekend, so that he can eat rice with us with his hands, and speak in Bengali, things we sometimes worry he will no longer do after we die." This is the moral of Lahiri's story. People immigrate to the United States from other countries, and the cultures of their homelands frequently clash with those of their new nation. The dominant culture often erodes the minority one, particularly as successive generations strive to become part of the American mainstream and avoid the alienation that comes with standing apart from it.

In "Two Kinds," the mother is so determined to discover some special talent in her daughter that she pushes the child too far. "After seeing my mother's disappointed face once again, something inside of me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations." Immigrants often came to the United States seeking the proverbial American Dream. If they themselves had to work hard for little reward, they at least hoped to secure a better life for their children. This mother invests everything in her daughter. Part of her obsession stems from the fact that one of her friends has a daughter who is a chess prodigy — making Jing-mei's ordinariness feel like a double failure.

The American Dream in Tan's 'Two Kinds'

The child begins to give up on herself and hopes her mother will do the same. She cannot see her mother's efforts as a means to self-improvement; instead, she feels like a pawn in her mother's rivalry with friends. When the mother sees a young Chinese girl playing piano on The Ed Sullivan Show, she decides her daughter will learn piano too. When the daughter objects, the mother insists she is doing it for the girl's own good: "Who ask you be genius? Only ask you be your best. For you sake." The mother assumes her daughter shares her own determination and resilience. The daughter does not, and resists her mother's authority. Adding to the irony, their instructor Mr. Chong is deaf, so Jing-mei never truly learns to play despite a year of lessons. Her spite for her mother's demands has led her into a kind of self-destruction.

The confrontation reaches its peak at a talent show where the daughter performs terribly and blames her humiliation entirely on her mother. Believing this will end the piano lessons, Jing-mei is surprised when her mother tells her it is time to practice again. She refuses:

"I didn't budge. 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" (Tan). Like most children, the daughter cannot see her own failures as her own and projects them onto her mother. Similarly, failing generations will almost always seek to blame current circumstances on those who came before.

Conclusion: When Cultures Collide

Being a child, Jing-mei does the only thing she can think of to stop her mother: she invokes the memory of the sisters her mother had to leave behind in China. The reminder of that trauma, and of the very reasons her mother came to the United States, forces the mother to retreat. To her own detriment, Jing-mei gets what she wants. As an adult, however, she reflects on the cost of that victory:

"And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable" (Tan).

What Jing-mei fails to understand, even in adulthood, is that it was not only the piano and the quest for talent that drove her mother. It was the desire that her daughter achieve everything the promise of the American Dream could possibly deliver.

In "Two Kinds," a mother and daughter are at odds over what the girl's life will become. This conflict mirrors that between the narrator of Lahiri's story and Mrs. Croft. The key difference is that where Lahiri's narrator yields to Mrs. Croft's cultural authority relatively quickly, Tan's narrator does not. Initially, the daughter shares her mother's excitement: "In the beginning, I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy part of me as different images, trying each one on for size" (Tan). But where Lahiri's story centers on the clash between India and the United States, Tan's story maps that same tension onto the relationship between a Chinese-born mother and her American-born daughter. The daughter does not share her mother's cultural perspective, and this difference adds a charged dimension to their bond.

Both stories ultimately grapple with the difficulty that arises when two different cultural worlds collide and cannot easily be reconciled. Whether it is a Bengali man quietly surrendering his traditions to the routines of American life, or a Chinese-American girl rejecting her mother's immigrant ambitions, the outcome is the same: the dominant culture exerts a powerful gravitational pull, and the minority culture — along with the dreams carried within it — slowly fades across the generations.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. "The Third and Final Continent." Interpreter of Maladies. Mariner, 1999.

Tan, Amy. "Two Kinds." The Joy Luck Club. Penguin, 1989.