Two Kinds
"America is where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come here in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her family home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls".
-Page 132
This quote lays out Suyuan's reasoning for the things she did in her life. Many people traveled to America, because it was the land of opportunity. They wanted to forget all of the oppression they faced in their past life and start new to be what ever they wanted to be. Unfortunately in this chapter we see that Suyuan put a little too much pressure on her daughter, June, to be the best she could be. At first June was excited to be a "prodigy" at something, but when she saw the disappointed look on her mother's face once again after she failed one of her other tests, she started to hate the idea of being a prodigy. She hated the disappointment and started to resent her mother for pushing her to try all these different things in hope that she would be the best. Like a normal teenager, June rebelled the more she was pushed. Suyuan told her, "There are only two kind of daughters, those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind!"(142). June was inobedient and when she failed her piano recital at the First Chinese Baptist Church's talent show, she blamed her mother for setting her up for something she could not do. In reality however, she failed only because she did not care enough to try.
It is almost a guareentee that if you do not try you are setting yourself up to fail. People at school always say that they know they are going to fail a test and if they do not put the effort into studying then we all know they are going to fail because they did not try. If you put in effort there is a good chance that you will succeed, but if not you are destined to fail. June set herself up to fail, because she thought her mom would be rewarded if she succeeded. This is yet another example of a strained mother-daughter relationship in this book. Yes, maybe at the surface Suyuan wanted June to be a prodigy because of selfishness because of her competition with Lindo, but I think it was really deeper than that. I feel that, as summed up from the first page of the chapter, Suyuan just had hope for the best life possible for her family.
There are several DENOTATIONS throughout all of the chapters. A denotation is the literal meaning of a word. An example of this is, "...'Ni kan' -You watch"(132).
I like the fact that you compared failure to school. Normally I would think something outside of school, but you used it for an almost everyday situation. People do set themselves up for failure when they do not believe they can do it.
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