“Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, a chapter within The Joy Luck Club, explores the strained relationship between Jing-mei “June” Woo and her Chinese immigrant mother, Suyuan, who pushes her daughter to become a child prodigy to achieve the American Dream. June resists these expectations, resulting in conflict, cultural gaps, and a disastrous piano recital.
Two Kinds
Amy Tan
My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant.
You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no
money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.
"Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best anything.”
America was where all my mother's hopes lay.
We didn't immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese
Shirley Temple. We'd watch Shirley's old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother
would poke my arm and say, "Ni kan. You watch."
“Ni kan," my mother said, as Shirley's eyes flooded with tears. "You already know how. Don't need
talent for crying!"
In the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy part of
me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by
the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ
child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity.
In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father
would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If
you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned.
Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica topped kitchen table. She would
present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley's Believe
It or Not or Good Housekeeping, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom.
The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states
and even the most of the European countries. The little boy could also pronounce the names of the
foreign cities correctly. "What's the capital of Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the story. All I
knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in
Chinatown. "Nairobi!" I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that
might be one way to pronounce Helsinki before showing me the answer.
The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards,
trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles,
New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then
report everything I could remember. "Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance and...that's
all I remember, Ma," I said.
And after seeing, once again, my mother's disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated
the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror
above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back - and understood that it would always be
this ordinary face - I began to cry. I made high - pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out
the face in the mirror.
And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me - a face I had never seen before. I looked at
my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful.
She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts - or. rather, thoughts filled with lots of
won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not.
So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I
pretended to be bored. And I was. I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on
me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted only one bellow, maybe two at most. At last she
was beginning to give up hope.
Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother
was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time
my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan
would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up - the TV broke into
loud piano music. She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing
quality, which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones.
"Ni kan," my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. "Look here."
I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese
girl, about nine years old. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudly modest, like a
proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy. In spite of these warning signs, I wasn't
worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn't afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and
piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother badmouthed the little girl on
TV.
Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for
piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our
apartment building. Mr.Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning
services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until
six.
When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I whined, and then kicked my foot
a little when I couldn't stand it anymore.
"Why don't you like me the way I am?" I cried. "I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I
could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!"
My mother slapped me. "So ungrateful," I heard her mutter in Chinese, "If she had as much talent as she
has temper, she'd be famous now."
Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the
silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the hair on the
top of his head, and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired. But he must have been
younger than I thought, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married.
I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done
something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person's, like an old peach I once found in the
back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up.
I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. "Like Beethoven!" he
shouted to me: “We're both listening only in our head!" And he would start to conduct his frantic silent
sonatas.
Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their
purpose: "Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!"
And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old
unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the
music was really something quite grand.
I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that
sounded like a rat running up and down on top of giraffe cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and
say, “Very good! But now you must learn to keep time!"
So that's how I discovered that Old Chong's eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was
playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and
pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I
would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios. He had me curve my hand around an
apple and keep that shape when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger
dance up and down, staccato, like an obedient little soldier.
He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with
mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn't practiced enough, I never corrected
myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie.
Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother
and her friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with
stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lind’s daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the
wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters,
squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she
was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as "Chinatown's Littlest Chinese Chess
Champion."
"She bring home too many trophy." Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. "All day she play chess. All day I
have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings." She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who
pretended not to see her.
"You lucky you don't have this problem," Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother.
And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: "our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei
wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." And right then I was
determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.
