Journal

When I read the author’s name, Amy Tan, in the bookstore, I felt so familiar but I could not remember where I had heard about this name. After reading the short biography of her before the story Two Kinds, I finally recalled the title, the “Joy Luck Club.” I was surprised that the movie is based on Two Kinds. Therefore, I could hardly wait for reading it.
The narrator, in the first line of the first paragraph, directly points out the American dream in her mother’s mind, like most of people’s in the world. Besides, she quotes what her mother said to her in Pidgin English. We can determine that the narrator actually is influenced by her mother all the time. She could not banish her mother’s sayings from her thoughts; thus, she was almost controlled by her mother in the childhood. Not only manners and behaviors, but her own ideas were conducted as well. However, the thought she, of course, could do her best, she just did not want to be dominated by parents. The more her mother pushed her, the more she refused. Perhaps the narrator is a prodigy, and yet her mother always used the wrong way to demand her. We can perceive it from the narration in the story that her mother was so offensive, sudden, overbearing to make the narrator learn the good things. It is pathetic that even though these demands, without a doubt, were good for her, because of such rude way, her mother made them extremely unworthy; moreover, she made those good intentions become a serious malice between them. I think the problem is attributed to the narrator’s mother. First of all, it is quite obvious that her mother did not just want her to be what she should be innately; on the contrary, her mother wanted her to be what her mother had wanted to be when young but in vain. We always think what our parents look forward to is make their children become their own dreams which did never come true when they were young. So we usually feel we live in our parents’ dreams, or concretely, under their shadows. They never ask if we would like to be like this, and they just create, form, shape a blueprint of dream to demand us to accept it, follow it, fulfill it. It is interesting that perhaps our grandparents wanted them to make the dream come true and they refused it when young, but now they feel regretful so that they ask us to atone. Or perhaps our parents had wanted to do something which our grandparents didn’t allow, so that their dream could not come true. And now they demand us to help them to complete their dreams and refuse what we want to do. Both conditions are endless vicious circles from generation to generation. If people are always selfish to their parents and children, we will never find a good way to get along well with each other. There will be hostility and unforgiveness between parents and children. After our parents dying, some day we finally realize it is just a misunderstanding and we will hate ourselves, feel remorse, but it will be too late to compensate such poor relationship. We always complain that nobody understands us, including our own parents, but do we really understand ourselves? Or probably we just want to escape the pressure from them. We barely even know what we will do in the future, how it is important to learn some skills in our childhood. In fact, the most significant thing is that parents should know how to make their kids interested in learning skills. They have to use the clever method to communicate with kids to make them understand the meanings when training them instead of using the tough tone of voice or imposing them.
The narrator describes the relationship between her mother and her with first-person point of view, so that we can spy on the world in her mind. She uses the humorous tone to describe such relationship in the first half of story. We can see she is naughty, childish, determined and rebellious. The narrator takes everything as if she is reading fairy tales. But after she finds her mother gives up the hope when the conflict happens, she gets so startled and sensitive. The fact is that we keep escaping the pressure that we know it is worthy, and after shaking off the stress, we will suddenly feel empty, guilty and no one cares about us. We finally realize we are given up, feeling awful. I think the story is full of dualities, such as American culture and Chinese spirit, the mother and the daughter, the demonstration and rebellion, love and indifference, feelings and behaviors and so forth. Especially, when I read the part of the mirror scene, I believe the narrator wants to present the contrary between the surface and her mind. She perhaps doesn’t really want to rebel in her mind, but what she does is very extreme. She has a conflict, which is the dilemma between piety and resistance, in her mind. Nevertheless, after growing up, she finally realizes that the two sides of opposition can be in harmony as “Pleading Child” and “Perfectly Contented,” which are two halves of the same music she play when young and innocent.