FREE ESSAY ON TWO KIDS

TWO KIDS

Response: After reading the story, Two kinds, by Amy Tan, what impresses me most is the
way the mother educates her daughter. The mother wants the very best for her daughter
without understanding what her daughter needs. I hate the mother's educational method,
because it is impossible to bring out any genius in this way, rather it bottles up the
innate talent of a child. In addition, I am also in sympathy with the daughter.
Understanding: The story portrays a mother-daughter relationship confused with scattered
conflict. The two women have some opposing ideas and beliefs. And their lack of
communication is responsible for many of the problems they face in their relationship.
The mother was constantly pushing her daughter to try different things such as dance,
academics, and piano that she had no interest in. Because the daughter did not care about
any of these things, she did not really try her best, and therefore, would never
accomplish anything great. In this case, it also reveals one of the themes that we need
to make our own choice in life and find our own importance.
Close to the end of the story, the daughter states that "Last week I sent a tuner over to
my parent's apartment and had the piano reconditioned.(p488)", the piano could be
symbolic of the past mother-daughter relationship. The reconditioned piano is metaphor
for the change of the relationship from the way it was before to the way it is after her
mother's death. Just as the daughter feels that "Really, it was a very good piano"(p488),
she begins to appreciate and understand her mother.
Critique: The mother-daughters relationship in this story is one of the cases frequently
occurring in Chinese families. The reason why I stress the relationship again and again
is that I also come from a Chinese family, so I have a better understanding of such a
relationship. I am lucky that my parents never force me to do anything I am not willing
to, rather, they give me the right to choose my own life. Therefore, I can have such a
valuable opportunity to study abroad. In contrast, the children my age in China can only
journey on the road arranged by their parents. They only feel restrained by these goals,
so they are not motivated to fulfill the dream created by their parents. I strongly
believe that we build our own importance in life by deeply caring about something that we
choose and putting all of our effort into developing or accomplishing this.
The paragraph which begins with 'Only two kinds of daughters…..Obedient
daughter!'(page 487) is consistent with the title, which suggests there are two kinds of
daughters who are different because of their education. One kind is obedient daughter,
and the other kind is the daughter who follows own mind. These two kinds of daughters
also reflect the different educational methods between China and United States. In most
of the western countries, like America as well as Canada, Children are developed with
their own unique characteristic while in China, Children are developed uniformly in
China.. The children in China are all the hopes of their parents, because their parents
fail to reach their dreams for some history reasons and except to fulfil their dreams
through their children.