Two Kinds’ is the last story in the second segment of Amy Tan’s highly popular debut book, The Joy Luck Club. The book is divided into four interconnected segments with each of them containing a group of stories which can stand alone themselves. While the author had intended the book to be a short-story collection, it is seen by critics as a novel due to the interrelated and cohesive narrative. Similar to other stories in the collection, ‘Two Kinds’ is a depiction of complexities in mother-daughter relationships in San Francisco’s China-town. The focus of the story is the often disruptive but inevitable “distance between mothers who were born in China before the communist revolution and thus have been cut off from their native culture for decades, and their American-born daughters who must negotiate the twin burdens of their Chinese ancestry and American expectations for success”. While the protagonist and narrator of the story Jing-mei persistently thwarts her mother’s aspirations to make her a musical prodigy, it was only decades later in life that she gains insight into her mother’s underlying motives. This essay will strive to support the view that ‘Two Kinds’ is a powerful expose on the problems of identity and community in twentieth century America. Author Amy Tan explores this sensitive and highly relevant aspect of this multicultural nation by employing sophisticated literary tools without compromising on the readability.
At the root of the story is the interpersonal dissonance that the phenomenon of mass immigration creates. In Two Kinds, Amy Tan builds up the romantic concept of cultural origins and lost ethnic essence in order to radically undermine and reconfigure the notion of an ethnic essence. The mother-daughter relationship is symbolized by the analogy of native-foreigner. For instance, “the narrative of separation and return— symbolized by Jing-Mei Woo’s return to China/mother—on the plot level is questioned by the rhetorical structure of the...