Amy Tan And Jing Mei Woo: Two Kinds

“Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” Salvatore Quasimodo, (Flavorwire.com). Many can resonate with this quote because poetry can even be appealing to a new reader; it allows them experience life in ways they’ve never before. In other words poetry really allows someone to maintain an experience so someone else can later access it as their own: it’s basically a way of sharing once inner thoughts, experiences and memories with others. In this essay I will be comparing the poetry of Li-Young Lee. The two specific poems I will compare are “The Gift” and “I ask my mother to sing”. Although both poems are based

Furthermore, Amy Tan writes a wonderful short story about the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters, yet one can be enriching. The theme of “Two

The only one that kind of threw me off was the visual story. I found it difficult to annotate because I did not no where to write or when. I almost felt lost because it was so unorganized. With the other two pieces I was very comfortable. They were easy to annotate and got to the point. I felt that the strategies for marking a book that we have practiced came into play and were easy to execute. The piece that made the most impact on me was “And that's why I’ll never leave twitter” because it felt that the author was very down to earth. I liked her comical and honest writing style. She held my interest because I felt like she was not lecturing me but more like having a conversation with me. My favorite part was said it only takes her 2 weeks sometimes to come up with one perfect page (Lawson). When she said that I could connect right away with her. She is not just any arrogant author!

The main rhetoric appeal used by Tan is pathos, the appeal to emotion. Language becomes an obstacle for Tan because her mother speaks limited English. Amy must be an interpreter for her mother in instances where her mother cannot communicate effectively. ?And sure enough, the following week there we were in

Every individual in this world faces some type of problem through out their lives, and everyone overcomes them in different ways. People sometimes release their stress and problems through writing what they feel, and by writing they feel they go somewhere else. Amy Tan, a Chinese American, struggled with her true identity which influence her works which mainly focus on identity, the Chinese American dream, and family struggles. Amy Tan had a childhood full of ups and downs, and they are all part of her stories and poems. She overcame many obstacles in her life and learned many lessons that are all reflected in her works. Many of Tan’s works are about personal experiences she had and about her family.

In her short story "Two Kinds," Amy Tan utilizes the daughter's point of view to share a mother's attempts to control her daughter's hopes and dreams, providing a further understanding of how their relationship sours. The daughter has grown into a young woman and is telling the story of her coming of age in a family that had emigrated from China. In particular, she tells that her mother's attempted parental guidance was dominated by foolish hopes and dreams. This double perspective allows both the naivety of a young girl trying to identify herself and the hindsight and judgment of a mature woman.

The mother, truly wants what is best for her daughter, but refuses to acknowledge that her daughter does not want to be a prodigy or play the piano. Her daughter only wants to live her own life and does not understand the success her mother is trying to push on her. Every mother and daughter relationship is different, but the most classic type is the “mother knows best trope.” Of course, if the story was presented in China, rather than America, the daughter may have fallen into her mother’s life path, “"Only two kinds of daughters," she shouted in Chinese. "Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!" (Tan pg #). However, since her daughter was born in America, she was given an opportunity to be who she wanted to be, because of America’s new dream of independence and

Each story makes use of a very unique tone and form of narration yet these same qualities can be compared to some extent across these essays. The authors utilize different forms of writing to convey their intended focus to the audience. I found each story relative to one another in that they all seemed to touch of the subject of the roles of different genders in our contemporary society maybe even across different cultures.

In “Two Kinds” the protagonist Jing-mei recounts how her relationship with her mother went from one of great communication to terrible over time. Becoming a prodigy, as her mother pushed her so hard to become, was exciting to her at first; “In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so”. However, this excitement began to turn

Jing Mei’s mother tries in multiple ways to help her daughter achieve greatness but it is made impossible due to Jing Mei’s stubborn and ungrateful ways. In Amy Tan’s story, “Two Kinds”, Jing Mei changes from unappreciative to appreciative when she realized that lack of appreciation leads to frustration and anger.

Emotions are expressed immediately at the beginning of the writing to have his readers grasp his feelings of the situation. Goldstein compares Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” a “depiction of Chinese-style extreme parenting” (Goldstein 272). He then continues to maintain the reader’s attention by explaining Chua’s parenting skills by addressing the fact how the children cannot have play dates, or even watch television. Goldstein inspires his readers by giving individual’s personal experiences that reflect how they became successful.

Tone is a literary device that is common in most works of writing. It is an attitude of a writer toward a subject or an audience. It is significant in that not only does it express the attitude of the author, but it also helps to quicken the pace of the plot. In the poem “Variations of the Word ‘“love”’,” Margaret Atwood wrote:

In the first place, mother-daughter relations between Chinese mothers and ABC daughters are not easy ones in Tan's novels. They are always problematic. Mothers want to bring up

The mother-daughter relationship is often scrutinized, publicized, and capitalized on. Whether from tell-all biographies, to humorous sit-coms, or private therapy sessions, this particular relationship dynamic gives some of the most emotion-activating memories. When female authors reflect and write about their relationships with their mothers, they have a tendency to taint their reflections with the opinions they have as an adult, reviewing the actions of their mother when they were young. These opinions set the tone of the story independently and in conjunction with the relationship itself and manifest in creative literary styles that weave an even more intricate story. Case in point, when reviewing the two literary works “I Stand Here

tone it would be hard to tell where the author is going or the attiyude they are trying to portray in