In Amy Tan's short story, "Two Kinds," from her
collection, The Joy Luck Club, there are moments of crisis
surrounding the conflict in the story between Jing-Mei (June) and her
mother.
The conflict is man vs. man, and it plays out in
the story between a Chinese mother who wants her Chinese-American daughter to achieve
some kind of success. Her mother only wants what is best for her daughter, but her
daughter can only see her own resentment, sure her mother is trying to make her
something she is not.
The first crisis of the conflict in
the story is, as you mention, the piano recital. Jing-Mei has not practiced enough, and
yet she somehow believes that her "prodigy" side will step in and magically smooth out
the areas of the song Jing-Mei does not know. This, of course, does not happen. Jing-Mei
and her mother are devastated and embarrassed by her poor
performance.
There is a second moment of crisis, and it
still involves the piano. After the fiasco at the recital, Jing-Mei is sure her mother
will stop pushing her and that lessons will cease. However, this is not the case. At
four o'clock, as Jing-Mei sits watching TV, her mother tells her it is time to practice.
Jing-Mei, aware of the power she has to say "no," screams at her mother, refusing to
comply. They have a terrible fight, and Jing-Mei looks for something to push her mother
over the edge: she says...
'Then I wish I wasn't your daughter. I wish you
weren't my mother...'
'Too late change this,' said my
mother shrilly...And that's when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones
we never talked about. 'Then I wish I'd never been born!' I shouted. 'I wish I were
dead! Like them.'
It was like I had said the magic
words...and her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed
out of the room,
stunned...
Jing-Mei's words
start out the way many angry adolescents react to authority and their inability to exert
enough power over their own lives. However, Jing-Mei is looking for a weapon, something
to push her mother over the brink, to make her really angry. So she mentions the twin
babies her mother had to leave behind in China, something that has haunted her mom all
her life. (See "A Pair of Tickets.")
This is the second
moment of crisis within their conflict: the conflict of mother and daughter, of her
mother's dreams vs. Jing-Mei's own wishes. Jing-Mei delivers an emotional sucker punch
that her mother is not expecting. However, instead of fighting back, Jing-Mei's mother
has been touched in such a terrible way, that she loses all her fight and simply backs
away. This incident hovers between them for many years.
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