Two Kids Essay, Research Paper

Response: After reading the story, Two kinds, by Amy Tan, what impresses me most is the way the mother educates her daughter. The mother wants the very best for her daughter without understanding what her daughter needs. I hate the mother’s educational method, because it is impossible to bring out any genius in this way, rather it bottles up the innate talent of a child. In addition, I am also in sympathy with the daughter.

Understanding: The story portrays a mother-daughter relationship confused with scattered conflict. The two women have some opposing ideas and beliefs. And their lack of communication is responsible for many of the problems they face in their relationship. The mother was constantly pushing her daughter to try different things such as dance, academics, and piano that she had no interest in. Because the daughter did not care about any of these things, she did not really try her best, and therefore, would never accomplish anything great. In this case, it also reveals one of the themes that we need to make our own choice in life and find our own importance.

Close to the end of the story, the daughter states that “Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent’s apartment and had the piano reconditioned.(p488)”, the piano could be symbolic of the past mother-daughter relationship. The reconditioned piano is metaphor for the change of the relationship from the way it was before to the way it is after her mother’s death. Just as the daughter feels that “Really, it was a very good piano”(p488), she begins to appreciate and understand her mother.

Critique: The mother-daughters relationship in this story is one of the cases frequently occurring in Chinese families. The reason why I stress the relationship again and again is that I also come from a Chinese family, so I have a better understanding of such a relationship. I am lucky that my parents never force me to do anything I am not willing to, rather, they give me the right to choose my own life. Therefore, I can have such a valuable opportunity to study abroad. In contrast, the children my age in China can only journey on the road arranged by their parents. They only feel restrained by these goals, so they are not motivated to fulfill the dream created by their parents. I strongly believe that we build our own importance in life by deeply caring about something that we choose and putting all of our effort into developing or accomplishing this.

The paragraph which begins with ‘Only two kinds of daughters…..Obedient daughter!’(page 487) is consistent with the title, which suggests there are two kinds of daughters who are different because of their education. One kind is obedient daughter, and the other kind is the daughter who follows own mind. These two kinds of daughters also reflect the different educational methods between China and United States. In most of the western countries, like America as well as Canada, Children are developed with their own unique characteristic while in China, Children are developed uniformly in China.. The children in China are all the hopes of their parents, because their parents fail to reach their dreams for some history reasons and except to fulfil their dreams through their children.