Ni Kan And Maggie

The main characters from “Two Kinds” and “Everyday Use” are similar but also different in many ways. Both main characters want to make their mothers happy and are selfless. Ni kan and Maggie are both compared to other people and because they can’t reach certain expectations which causes people to look down on them. Their expectations that their mothers set are both extremely different. Ni kan and Maggie’s relationships with their mother are not alike, Maggie is closer to her mother than Ni kan. Throughout this essay I will go more into detail about the girls similarities and differences. Ni kan and Maggie are both selfless but in different ways. Ni kan wants to meet her mother’s expectations to make her happy and she tries very hard in the …show more content…
Maggie’s mother unintentionally compared Maggie to Dee. She said, “Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure”. Maggie’s mother doesn’t mean to compare her daughters to say that one is better than the other but to say they aren’t the same people. Ni kan’s mother constantly compared her to other kids she saw on tv. By Ni kan’s mother comparing her to other kids, she feels that her mother is putting her down. I don’t think that her mother intends to make her feel this way, she just wants to push her daughter to be the best she can …show more content…
Maggie had always been close with her mother but the passing of Ni kan’s mother eventually made her closer with her mother too. This is important because if Ni kan’s mother hadn’t died, Ni kan never would have played the piano again or realize that the two songs were two halves to the same song. The two halves represent the two halves of Ni kan’s life. The first being a pleading child trying to be herself not someone else and the second half being perfectly content with how her life played out. “Pleading Child” was short and slow because that part of her life was short but it seemed to take forever and “Perfectly Content” is longer and fast because that part of her life is longer and goes by quickly. After reading both short stories, I thought they were similar until I started looking for differences. Once finding both similarities and differences, I realized that these stories were both about a daughter’s relationship with their mother. The daughter’s relationships were different and the daughters were both different kinds of people. One thing I learned from this essay is that, your mom may seem to be hard on you when you’re young but once you grow up you understand that she just wanted you the be the best “you” that you could