Compare And Contrast Catch The Moon And Jing-Mei

In the short stories "Catch the Moon" and "Two Kinds," the main characters Luis and Jing-mei are both alike and different. They are alike in the sense that they rebel against their parents for similar reasons, but their reasons for rebellion differ. In both stories, the main characters eventually accept that their parent had their best interests in mind, but at different times and for different reasons. Luis and Jing-mei both feel that their parents try to control their lives, and don't want to do what their parents want them to. In "Catch the Moon," Luis is troubled by his mother's passing. Instead of grieving peacefully, he forms a gang and causes trouble for his neighborhood. He is eventually sentenced to six months of free labor in his father's junkyard, which he agrees to. Luis is angry at his father because he does not want to work at the junkyard like his father wants him to. In "Two Kinds," Jing-mei's mother wants her to become a "prodigy" playing the piano, but Jing-mei feels that she is incapable of this.

Her mother eventually forgives her for what she said in their argument and offers to send her the piano as a birthday gift. After her mother's death, Jing-mei accepts the piano. While looking through her mother's things, Jing-mei finds sheet music of the song she practiced for a talent show when she was a child. She sits down at the piano and plays the song, realizing that it wasn't as difficult as she perceived it to be when she was young. She then realizes that the two sheets of music, titled "Pleading Child" and "Perfectly Contented," are two halves of the same song. This applies to Jing-mei's life because as a child she was the "pleading child," pleading with her mother to give up on her dream of Jing-mei becoming a prodigy. When Jing-mei accepts the piano, she comes to peace with her mother and becomes "perfectly