Pleading Child Character Analysis

[America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is where people from all over the world come for a fresh start and a better opportunity than they had in their country.] Jing-mei’s mother decides to come to America from China to get away from all the things she had lost including her mother, father, home, husband and twin baby girls. When she came to San Francisco in 1949, she knew that things were going to get better. She decided that her daughter, Jing-mei, is going to be a prodigy. The American idea is that you can do whatever you to do, and Suyuan takes that to heart by preparing her daughter to become a Chinese Shirley Temple. The first time she really decided to go forth with her daughter being a prodigy was when she saw …show more content…
Jing-mei’s mother and Chang sign her up for a recital that she does awfully and her mother insists that they continue the lessons and in turn Jing-mei said “then I wish I weren’t your daughter, I wish you weren’t my mother”. The piano lessons stop and on the narrator's 13th birthday her mother gives her the piano as a peace offering. In the end, Jing-mei realized that “Pleading Child”, which represents her childhood, and “Perfectly Contented”, which represents her adulthood, are two halves of the same song. The story “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan focuses on two main things, the American Dream and tension between mothers and daughters. Reading as if you where the narrator gives us the chance to see the stress and struggle of Jing-mei as she try’s to live up to her mother’s …show more content…
Jing-mei never realizes what her mother was trying to give her by making her try and become a prodigy. It wasn’t until her mother passed away that she saw that her mother was trying to give her a life with opportunity and freedom that she never had. In the end, she finds out that the two songs that she played at the recital related to what her mother was trying to give her. The “Pleading Child” and “Perfectly Contented” songs make up two halves of her life that include her childhood that is slower, and her adulthood that is faster. She now knows that the “Pleading Child”, can finally be “Perfectly Contented” and know that her mother was only trying to give her daughter the life she deserved. [The ability to look through Jing-mei’s eyes gave us the sense that, yes she was having a hard time with her mother but in the end she realized what her mother was trying to