In the excerpt “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, the story is set in Chinatown in the United States. Amy Tan explores the effect and mostly conflict that the American Idealism had on immigrants Jing-mei and her mother.
Many immigrants like Jing-mei’s mother believe America to be the “Land of opportunity” and Tan reinforces this ideology when she states “America was where all my mother’s hopes lay.” No mother wants her child to go through hardships in life especially of the kind that Jing-mei’s mom had undergone, “She had come here after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls.” and despite all this she still had the burden of settling into a new culture.
She becomes driven by her heartache and memories of her years in China and the apparent success her friend, Auntie Lindo and her daughter Waverly Jong are experiencing after the migration to America so she uses this to push the American Idealism upon her daughter Jing-mei. With this she sets out to make her daughter a prodigy by exploring ideas from “amazing children she had read in Ripley’s
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My mother and father would adore me.” However this creates great tension between mother and daughter as Jing-mei is privileged to have always known the safety of the American culture and so with the constant disappointment on her mother’s face after every raised hope and failed expectation she undauntedly begins to resent her own identity because she doesn’t understand her mother’s dream for her/their future. Who is Jing-mei? Chinese? American? A combination of the two? Prodigy? Dunce? Nothing? She begins to reject her mother in order to find herself, "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. She was the stupid