Two Kinds

“Two Kinds” by Amy Tan is a short story from the collection The Joy Luck Club, which was originally published in 1989. The full short story collection was adapted for film as the eponymous Joy Luck Club in 1993. Amy Tan and Ronald Bass adapted the screenplay. The series portrays first and second-generation Chinese immigrants living out the “American dream” in current day Chinatown, San Francisco. Through a series of 16 linked stories, four women and their four daughters are each given a voice.

“Two Kinds” begins with a brief passage in which it is made clear that the narrator, Jing-mei Woo, is telling this story from a distance; this is a memory from her childhood, and she is now in her mid-thirties. It is also a story about Jing-mei’s mother and their relationship. When Jing-mei is nine years old, her mother, Suyuan Woo, starts encouraging her to be a “prodigy.” While their first several attempts fail (i.e. becoming the first Chinese Shirley Temple), Suyuan is not ready to give up on her daughter. She and Jing-mei sit for hours going over hundreds of obscure facts, most of which the narrator cannot answer correctly.

While at first Jing-mei is excited about the prospect of becoming a prodigy, she grows tired of the process and begins to act out. She gains several months of freedom before her mother tricks her into flattering a nine-year-old prodigy they see on The Ed Sullivan Show, which quickly leads to regimented piano lessons from their neighbor, Mr. Chong, a middle-aged deaf man whom Jing-mei refers to as “Old Chong”. Due to Jing-Mei’s unwillingness to commit to her lessons and Mr. Chong’s inability to hear her, her progress is minimal, and she develops a laziness resulting in poor execution of the pieces she is learning. However, no one is around to tell her she is doing poorly.

After around a year’s worth of lessons, Suyuan and fellow Joy Luck Club mother, Lindo Jong, bicker over whose daughter is more advanced. Lindo’s daughter, Waverly, is “Chinatown’s Littlest Chinese Chess Champion,” and her mother complains that her daughter brings home too many trophies. Suyuan argues that they have trouble getting Jing-mei to stop practicing her piano. The women contrive to put on a children’s talent show in the church hall; Jing-mei is gifted a beautiful secondhand piano on which to practice, and her piece will be Schumann’s “Pleading Child.”

Jing-mei enters the show full of confidence, but she stumbles through the piece. In the end, only Mr. Chong praises her performance, and she is ashamed to see her parents’ disappointed faces—especially her mother’s. When her mother reveals her lessons will continue, Jing-mei refuses. She feels defeated and that she has done enough to prove she is not a genius, like Waverly. The tension between mother and daughter escalates into a fight. Jing-mei tells her mother she will never be the kind of daughter she wants. Her mother says there are two kinds of daughters, willful and obedient, but she will only raise an obedient daughter. In retaliation, Jing-mei counters that she wishes she were not her mother’s daughter and then adds that she wished she were dead like “them”—the two babies Suyuan lost in China before her move to America in 1949.

After their fight, Suyuan stops forcing her daughter to apply herself. Jing-mei believes she is ordinary and continues to disappoint her mother as the years go by. Unexpectedly, when she turns 30, her mother gifts her the piano. Jing-mei sees this as an act of forgiveness, and for the first time in years, her mother reiterates that she could have been a genius. Several months after her mother’s death, Jing-mei sends a tuner to her parents’ apartment; after, she sits down at the piano and attempts to play the “Pleading Child” piece from the talent show. While it looks difficult, she’s surprised by how easily it comes back to her. Then, she looks at the piece on the opposite page, “Perfectly Contented.” She finds it is also quite easy to play and continues to play the two back to back, realizing they are actually two parts to one longer, connected piece.