Two Kinds By Amy Tan Literary Analysis

In Amy Tan’s short story “Two Kinds,” we are shown how complicated relationships can be when one grows up in two different cultures in 19xy San Francisco, California. Jing Mei, the narrator, grows up in San Francisco, California, a place where people are free to do whatever they want. It is also a place that has “low context culture” which means that it is a society in which people are very loose and can enter into a group if they are an outsider. Her mother, however, is born in China, a country that has a “high context culture” which is the opposite of a “low context culture” and is harder for anyone to get into a group or place in society. As we can see in the story, Jing Mei and her mother do not have a good relationship because of these two very different cultures. Her mother continuously pesters her to become a prodigy, or as Jing Mei believes, someone who she is not. These arguments soon lead to the downfall of Jing Mei in the present and in the future. Although it seems that the story shows the clash of cultures between mother and daughter, a closer look into the story shows that it is Jing Mei’s mother’s ambitions and love for her daughter that bring Jing Mei’s downfall.

It is a very harsh world where one cannot easily move up in society. She decides to leave after she loses “everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters” in 1949 (Tan 1232). She then moves to America, where she “believed you could be anything you wanted to be” and a place “where all [her] hopes lay”(1232). Since she loses everything in China, she starts a new family in San Francisco and dreams of her daughter being a