Mother-Daughter Relationships In Amy Tan's Two Kinds

Mother/ daughter relationships can sometimes be rough. Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds,” shows many examples of a really rough one. “Two Kinds” shows how Jing-mei and her mother’s relationship was good, with the usual mother/ daughter arguments, up until she got older and could see what was going on. You could tell that what Jing-mei was feeling was hurt as this went on. Throughout the story, Jing-mei expresses her anger in many different forms. In the beginning of the passage, Jing-mei goes into detail about her side of her and her mothers relationship. She says that her mother believed that in America, you could be anything that you wanted. However, although she believed this, she didn’t let Jing-mei live that way. Her mother never let her be herself, be “anything she wanted”. Instead, she always made all of JIng-mei’s decisions. She kind of controlled who she wanted her daughter to be. “‘You could be the best of anything,’” (Tan paragraph 2) is what Jing-mei was told by her mother at a very young age. She believed that this was her mother trying to tell her not to hold back who she is, until she was proven wrong. Her mother then contradicted herself by forcing Jing-mei to be like other people. She was put in a beauty training school, and

She had no control over her life anymore because her mother just kept taking more and more away from her. She wanted to be her own person, especially after she was told that she could be her own person. She no longer wanted her mother to do everything for her. She wanted to have control over herself, and she just got angrier and angrier at her mother. “I hated the test, the raised hopes, and failed expectations,” (Tan paragraph 14) Jing-mei exclaimed. She didn’t want to live the way her mom wanted her