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Surname 1 Name Course Instructor Institution Critical Essay Critical analysis of literature is an important practice since it enables the reader or analysts to view critically the facts presented by the author. A clear confident refusal to accept the story at face values helps in generating a balanced presentation of the arguments provided within the piece of literature. On the other hand, it also illustrates the weaknesses and strengths as exhibited in the story or writing. To this end, scholars have developed and formulated several critical approaches to evaluation and literary analysis. Some of the popular critical approaches and schools of literary criticism include gender criticism, sociological criticism, and race, queer and historical criticism. In informing and propelling the read short story, this paper will highlight one of the foundational theoretical approaches and apply it to the analysis of the subject short story. The main aim of applying gender criticism is to dissect the author’s thoughts pertaining to their story and draw varied conclusions that are evidence supported. Two Kinds a short story written in the first person narrative by Amy Tan. The story is about a girl whose immigrant mother is obsessed with bringing out the best in her. To achieve this vision she has concerning her child she repeatedly takes her through a transformation that will set her on her journey to becoming known, respected and above all famous in the great America they now reside. Unfortunately, in her obsession to raise a genius/ prodigy or at least a child that gives their best effort she manages to push the girl to her limits. Once aware of her Surname 2 inadequacy to fully satisfy her mother and fulfill her expectation, the girl sinks into self-pity which later breeds rebellion. Despite this rebellion, the mother is still hell bent on charting the course for her child which leads her to sign up the girl for piano lessons from a retired piano teacher living in their block. In her rebellion, she sets out to prove to her mother that she is indeed incapable of making her proud. The socioeconomic background of the family is a natural driving force for the mother to push her child and herself to achieving big dreams. The writer begins the narration by exhibiting the positive character of the woman. It is pointed out that she is a Chinese immigrant trying to make it in America. However, her main focus is being able to raise her daughter in a way that brings out her prodigy because ‘in America, you can become anything you desire successfully’ (Tan, Amy). This mentality is fueled by the circumstances the family finds themselves in once settled in a new country. The mother gets a blue collar job where she goes around cleaning people’s houses in the city. The work by the author is better understood by the illustration regarding their social and economic background. For instance, when showing rebellion, the girl refuses to go to for her lessons and her first thought is that in the new country new rules apply. In essence, the disobedience she shows her mother could never have been tolerated in China, but she can easily get away with it in America. This particular example also shows the disparity in the social structure of two societies. The illustration is evidenced by her mother’s constant words. ‘There are two kinds of daughters, those who are obedient and those who follow their mind’ (Tan, Amy) Moreover, the fact that the mother is always carrying magazines and books from the houses where she works shows their inability to afford this luxury. Another instance, acknowledging their poor background is the clothes the girl wore to the recital. It is evident to see that the daughter’s education or hidden talent and her strong will are possibly the Surname 3 only priced possessions. The author would not have achieved the same level of empathy and understanding from the reader if the depicted socioeconomic scenario was not utilized. The story is made complete by use of the immigrant family looking for greatness in America, as many did during that period. The main characters are all Chinese which shows race and ethnicity used for delivering the story to the target audience. The use of Chinese immigrants helps the story achieve a certain outlook that would otherwise be lacking. The story gets an edge from utilizing this literary criticism. Conversely, some of the stereotypes of Chinese people have been emphasized by the writer. For example, the idea of Chinese parents always pushing their children to be the best has constantly been shown within the story which only fuels some of the stereotypes. Unfortunately, stereotypes only tell one side of the story, and it is easy to misconstrue the writer’s intentions in using a particular race/ethnic group. For some readers, the main question can be why she chose Chinese immigrants as opposed to other groups that found themselves in similar situations. Similar situations, in this case, being that they had to get low paying jobs all the while keeping a hopeful spirit that they would grow, flourish, achieve and succeed in America. On the other hand, the writer failed to portray a balanced approach to parenting. Throughout the narrative, the mother is seen pushing the child to be better with little mention of the father’s role in the daughter’s life. In gender criticism, the approaches examine the gender imbalances which means that some of the arguments tend to gravitate towards feminism. According to this approach, the idea is that some of the ideals accepted as the norm in the western world have been infiltrated in the literature which further reinforced them. Subconsciously some of the patriarchal set-ups have been viewed as normal when in real case the idea should be discarded. Following the narrative of the short story, the author mentions the Surname 4 role of the mother more than she mentions that of the father. In fact, the only instance the father is brought up in the daughter’s life is when he partners with the wife to buy their daughter a piano and when she passes away, and he is left with the now grown young woman. It is clear that the role of the child’s upbringing which encompasses discipline is left to the mother entirely. Parenting should involve both parents since they each have the power to influence the child differently. Additionally, the Aunt is also seen carrying out parenting solely. Women meet in church and discuss their children’s pitfalls, growth and achievements and no mention of men are done. Similarly, the men are only mentioned when the recital is ongoing and in a manner that does not even depict support in any way. Their role is passive and almost nonexistent since even their contribution to the families is not mentioned. This is not say that they do not contribute but the lack of elements pertaining their role and contribution in the short story go to show that the author might have subconsciously accepted some of the one-sided perceptions. To draw a clear comparison, the mother is mentioned to having a job, continually pushing the child to perform better in school and other extra curriculum activities such as piano lesson, she is the only one that scolds the child and pays for the piano lessons. Lastly, the story development shows the character getting an epiphany concerning their behavioral trends which occur after the mother’s death. The realization of the impact her actions had on the mother is only conscious of her after she has died. She goes back to her old home and plays the keys and accepts her fate while still mourning her mother in a queer way. It is in the end that the girl sees all the effort the mother had been putting to see her achieve greatness. The author succeeds in helping the reader reconciles their feelings on the girl to the events that take place in that fragment of the story. All through, the girl appears adamant, rebellious, disobedient Surname 5 and blind to the mother’s efforts to help her be the best she can be in America. The main point is that the girl like everybody else should strive to be them. In conclusion, the literary devices, and poetry used in the story help the story development and flow of ideas. Conversely, a critical review of the short story using the foundational theoretical approaches only goes to show the inadequacies of the story. For instance, the author’s accomplishes to show some of the perspectives on parenting and more so parenting in ethnic groups. A clear confident refusal to accept the story at face values helped in generating a balanced presentation of the arguments provided by the short story. The critical analysis also illustrates the mentioned weaknesses and strengths as exhibited by the author in the narrative. Surname 6 References Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York, Penguin Group US, 2007. Why analyze through a critical lens? How can we have more complex readings when we read with established frameworks? ESSAY WARS EPISODE III Critical Essay on a Short Story Background Being able to perform a “close reading,” or a literary analysis, is something that we have spent a significant amount of time studying this quarter. We have learned how to identify poetic and literary devices and considered how the usage of these devices can help support a text’s “thesis” and stylistically formulate its “argument.” Yet, how can we consider these arguments within larger contexts? How do “scholars” discuss literature? We are moving away from just close, personal readings toward situating our readings among other professional, academic conversations about literature. Prompt For this assignment, you will use one of the theoretical lenses to inform and propel your reading and analysis of one of the short stories we’ve read this quarter. Using the “Cultural Analysis” handout as a reference and framework, you will highlight one of the foundational theoretical approaches and apply it to your analysis of the short story, using the “literary lens” to inform and propel your reading. You may choose from four options, which represent some of the most current and major schools of literary criticism: socioeconomic, gender, race/ethnicity, queer. Minimum Requirements • Must be at least 4-6 full pages, 1” margins, double-spaced in MLA Format • Give readers a clear, specific thesis that states your position • Free of grammatical/mechanical errors • Has fully developed introduction and conclusion, both at least ½ a page • Be comprised of TEA/PIE paragraphs (topic-evidence-analysis/pointinformation-explanation) à should be ½ to ¾s a page • Topic sentences must frame the paragraph and connect back to the thesis A Successful Essay Will… • Discuss at least a few literary devices at work in the story as part of the overall analysis through the theoretical framework of your choosing • Ensure that the argument is logically sequenced and coherent • Look at the “big picture” à connect the lens you are reading through with real-life social issues and concerns • Smoothly integrate and analyze textual evidence (+parenthetical citations) A&P by john updike In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not. I ring it up again and the customer starts giving me hell. She's one of these cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows, and I know it made her day to trip me up. She'd been watching cash registers forty years and probably never seen a mistake before. By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag -- she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem -- by the time I get her on her way the girls had circled around the bread and were coming back, without a pushcart, back my way along the counters, in the aisle between the check-outs and the Special bins. They didn't even have shoes on. There was this chunky one, with the two-piece -- it was bright green and the seams on the bra were still sharp and her belly was still pretty pale so I guessed she just got it (the suit) -- there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose, this one, and a tall one, with black hair that hadn't quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long -- you know, the kind of girl other girls think is very "striking" and "attractive" but never quite makes it, as they very well know, which is why they like her so much -- and then the third one, that wasn't quite so tall. She was the queen. She kind of led them, the other two peeking around and making their shoulders round. She didn't look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima donna legs. She came down a little hard on her heels, as if she didn't walk in her bare feet that much, putting down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it. You never know for sure how girls' minds work (do you really think it's a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?) but you got the idea she had talked the other two into coming in here with her, and now she was showing them how to do it, walk slow and hold yourself straight. She had on a kind of dirty-pink - - beige maybe, I don't know -- bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty. She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out of those white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was. She must have felt in the corner of her eye me and over my shoulder Stokesie in the second slot watching, but she didn't tip. Not this queen. She kept her eyes moving across the racks, and stopped, and turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron, and buzzed to the other two, who kind of huddled against her for relief, and they all three of them went up the catand-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-rice-raisins-seasonings-spreads-spaghetti-soft drinkscrackers-and-cookies aisle. From the third slot I look straight up this aisle to the meat counter, and I watched them all the way. The fat one with the tan sort of fumbled with the cookies, but on second thought she put the packages back. The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle -- the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) -- were pretty hilarious. You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed. I bet you could set off dynamite in an A & P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering "Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!" or whatever it is they do mutter. But there was no doubt, this jiggled them. A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct. You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor. "Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint." "Darling," I said. "Hold me tight." Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April. "Is it done?" he asks, the responsible married man finding his voice. I forgot to say he thinks he's going to be manager some sunny day, maybe in 1990 when it's called the Great Alexandrov and Petrooshki Tea Company or something. What he meant was, our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street. And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less. As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again. It's not as if we're on the Cape; we're north of Boston and there's people in this town haven't seen the ocean for twenty years. The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it. Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself. The store's pretty empty, it being Thursday afternoon, so there was nothing much to do except lean on the register and wait for the girls to show up again. The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of. After a while they come around out of the far aisle, around the light bulbs, records at discount of the Caribbean Six or Tony Martin Sings or some such gunk you wonder they waste the wax on, sixpacks of candy bars, and plastic toys done up in cellophane that fall apart when a kid looks at them anyway. Around they come, Queenie still leading the way, and holding a little gray jar in her hand. Slots Three through Seven are unmanned and I could see her wondering between Stokes and me, but Stokesie with his usual luck draws an old party in baggy gray pants who stumbles up with four giant cans of pineapple juice (what do these bums do with all that pineapple juice' I've often asked myself) so the girls come to me. Queenie puts down the jar and I take it into my fingers icy cold. Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream: 49¢. Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. Really, I thought that was so cute. Then everybody's luck begins to run out. Lengel comes in from haggling with a truck full of cabbages on the lot and is about to scuttle into that door marked MANAGER behind which he hides all day when the girls touch his eye. Lengel's pretty dreary, teaches Sunday school and the rest, but he doesn't miss that much. He comes over and says, "Girls, this isn't the beach." Queenie blushes, though maybe it's just a brush of sunburn I was noticing for the first time, now that she was so close. "My mother asked me to pick up a jar of herring snacks." Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the people first, coming out so flat and dumb yet kind of tony, too, the way it ticked over "pick up" and "snacks." All of a sudden I slid right down her voice into her living room. Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with "They'll Do It Every Time" cartoons stencilled on. "That's all right," Lengel said. "But this isn't the beach." His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- as I say he doesn't miss much -but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare. Queenie's blush is no sunburn now, and the plump one in plaid, that I liked better from the back - a really sweet can -- pipes up, "We weren't doing any shopping. We just came in for the one thing." "That makes no difference," Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. "We want you decently dressed when you come in here." "We are decent," Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy. Fancy Herring Snacks flashed in her very blue eyes. "Girls, I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy." He turns his back. That's policy for you. Policy is what the kingpins want. What the others want is juvenile delinquency. All this while, the customers had been showing up with their carts but, you know, sheep, seeing a scene, they had all bunched up on Stokesie, who shook open a paper bag as gently as peeling a peach, not wanting to miss a word. I could feel in the silence everybody getting nervous, most of all Lengel, who asks me, "Sammy, have you rung up this purchase?" I thought and said "No" but it wasn't about that I was thinking. I go through the punches, 4, 9, GROC, TOT -- it's more complicated than you think, and after you do it often enough, it begins to make a little song, that you hear words to, in my case "Hello (bing) there, you (gung) hap-py pee-pul (splat)"-the splat being the drawer flying out. I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm, and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking. The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say "I quit" to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero. They keep right on going, into the electric eye; the door flies open and they flicker across the lot to their car, Queenie and Plaid and Big Tall Goony-Goony (not that as raw material she was so bad), leaving me with Lengel and a kink in his eyebrow. "Did you say something, Sammy?" "I said I quit." "I thought you did." "You didn't have to embarrass them." "It was they who were embarrassing us." I started to say something that came out "Fiddle-de-doo." It's a saying of my grand- mother's, and I know she would have been pleased. "I don't think you know what you're saying," Lengel said. "I know you don't," I said. "But I do." I pull the bow at the back of my apron and start shrugging it off my shoulders. A couple customers that had been heading for my slot begin to knock against each other, like scared pigs in a chute. Lengel sighs and begins to look very patient and old and gray. He's been a friend of my parents for years. "Sammy, you don't want to do this to your Mom and Dad," he tells me. It's true, I don't. But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it. I fold the apron, "Sammy" stitched in red on the pocket, and put it on the counter, and drop the bow tie on top of it. The bow tie is theirs, if you've ever wondered. "You'll feel this for the rest of your life," Lengel says, and I know that's true, too, but remembering how he made that pretty girl blush makes me so scrunchy inside I punch the No Sale tab and the machine whirs "pee-pul" and the drawer splats out. One advantage to this scene taking place in summer, I can follow this up with a clean exit, there's no fumbling around getting your coat and galoshes, I just saunter into the electric eye in my white shirt that my mother ironed the night before, and the door heaves itself open, and outside the sunshine is skating around on the asphalt. I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course. There wasn't anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn't get by the door of a powderblue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he'd just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter. Two Kinds Amy Tan My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. "Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky." America was where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways. We didn't immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple. We'd watch Shirley's old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother would poke my arm and say, "Ni kan. You watch." And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying "Oh, my goodness." “Ni kan," my mother said, as Shirley's eyes flooded with tears. "You already know how. Don't need talent for crying!" Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the 1|Page scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair. "You look like a Negro Chinese," she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose. The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days" the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy's, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame. In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air. In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned. “And then you'll always be nothing." Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica topped kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley's Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader's digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children. The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. "What's the capital of Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the story. All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown. "Nairobi!" I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that might be one way to pronounce Helsinki before showing me the answer. The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember. "Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance and...that's all I remember, Ma," I said. And after seeing, once again, my mother's disappointed face, 2|Page something inside me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back - and understood that it would always be this ordinary face - I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high - pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror. And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me - a face I had never seen before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts - or. rather, thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not. So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted only one bellow, maybe two at most. At last she was beginning to give up hope. Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up - the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down - silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial. The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of "Anitra's Tanz," by Grieg. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it. She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones. "Ni kan," my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. "Look here." Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr.Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six. I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a large carnation. In spite of these warning signs, I wasn't worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn't afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother badmouthed the little girl on TV. "Play note right, but doesn't sound good!" my mother complained "No singing sound." "What are you picking on her for?" I said carelessly. "She's pretty good. Maybe she's not the best, but she's trying hard." I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that. "Just like you," she said. "Not the best. Because you not trying." She gave a little huff as she let go of the sound dial and sat down on the sofa. 3|Page When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I whined, and then kicked my foot a little when I couldn't stand it anymore. "Why don't you like me the way I am?" I cried. "I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!" My mother slapped me. "Who ask you to be genius?" she shouted. "Only ask you be your best. For you sake. You think I want you to be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!" "So ungrateful," I heard her mutter in Chinese, "If she had as much talent as she has temper, she'd be famous now." Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the hair on the top of his head, and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired. But he must have been younger than I thought, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married. I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person's, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up. I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. "Like Beethoven!" he shouted to me: “We're both listening only in our head!" And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas. Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their purpose: "Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!" And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand. I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that sounded like a rat running up and down on top of giraffe cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say, “Very good! But now you must learn to keep time!" So that's how I discovered that Old Chong's eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and pushed down on my right shoulder for 4|Page every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios. He had me curve my hand around an apple and keep that shape when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger dance up and down, staccato, like an obedient little soldier. He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn't practiced enough, I never corrected myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie. So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns. Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother and her friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lind’s daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as "Chinatown's Littlest Chinese Chess Champion." "She bring home too many trophy." Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. "All day she play chess. All day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings." She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who pretended not to see her. "You lucky you don't have this problem," Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother. And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: "our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride. A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be held in the church hall. By then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room. For the talent show I was to play a piece called "Pleading Child," from Schumann's Scenes From Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile. My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there. 5|Page Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops in pink ballet tutus, and when they bowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, "Awww,” and then clap enthusiastically. When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I remember thinking, this is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother's blank face, my father's yawn, Auntie Lindo's stiff-lipped smile, Waverly's sulky expression. I had on a white dress, layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV. And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I wasn't worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn't stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes staying with me all the way. When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room was quiet, except for Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting "Bravo! Bravo! Well done!" By then I saw my mother's face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. "That was awful," and mother whispered "Well, she certainly tried." And now I realized how many people were in the audience the whole world, it seemed. I was aware of eyes burning into my back. I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest of the show. We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen-year-old boy with a fake moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly and got an honorable mention. And the eleven-year-old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee. After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my mother and father. "Lots of talented kids," Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. "That was somethin' else," my father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even remembered what I had done. Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. "You aren't a genius like me," she said matter-of-factly. And if I hadn't felt 6|Page so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach. But my mother's expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got home before shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery. I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV. "Four clock," she reminded me, as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV. "Turn off TV," she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn't budge. And then I decided, I didn't have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one. chest, but it also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last. She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. "Four clock," she said once again, louder. "Too late to change this," my mother said shrilly. "I'm not going to play anymore," I said nonchalantly. "Why should I? I'm not a genius." She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way. "No!" I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along. "No! I won't!" I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying. "You want me to be something that I'm not!" I sobbed. "I'll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!" "Only two kinds of daughters," she shouted in Chinese. "Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!" "Then I wish I weren't your daughter, I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my 7|Page And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that's when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. "Then I wish I'd never been born!" I shouted. "I wish I were dead! Like them." It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless. It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn't get straight As. I didn't become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me. And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped. The lid to the piano was closed shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams. So she surprised me. A few years ago she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed. "Are you sure?" I asked shyly. "I mean, won't you and Dad miss it?" "No, this your piano," she said firmly. "Always your piano. You only one can play." "Well, I probably can't play anymore," I said. "It's been years." "You pick up fast," my mother said, as if she knew this was certain. "You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to." "No, I couldn't." "You just not trying," my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if announcing a fact that could never be disproved. "Take it," she said. But I didn't at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, every time I saw it in my parents' living room, standing in front of the bay window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy that I had won back. Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent's apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been getting things in order for my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put in mothproof boxes. I found some old Chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk against 8|Page my skin, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them home with me. After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that I remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench were the same exercise notes with handwritten scales, the same secondhand music books with their covers held together with yellow tape. I opened up the Schumann book to the dark little piece I had played at the recital. It was on the left-hand page, "Pleading Child." It looked more difficult than I remembered. I played a few bars, surprised at how easily the notes came back to me. And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side. It was called "Perfectly Contented." I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with the same flowing rhythm and turned out to be quite easy. "Pleading Child" was shorter but slower; "Perfectly Contented" was longer but faster. And after I had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
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Explanation & Answer

i changed most part of the essay and made sure the point on social economic theoretical lens since your professor stated that was the strongest point, so i made sure i enhanced it. Go through the paper make any changes necessary then tell me,

Surname 1
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Course
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Institution
Critical Essay
Two Kinds a short story written in the first person narrative by Amy Tan. The story is
about a girl whose immigrant mother is obsessed with bringing out the best in her. To achieve
this vision she has concerning her child she repeatedly takes her through a transformation that
will set her on her journey to becoming known, respected and above all famous in the great
America they now reside. Unfortunately, in her obsession to raise a genius/ prodigy or at least a
child that gives their best effort she manages to push the girl to her limits. Once aware of her
inadequacy to fully satisfy her mother and fulfill her expectation, the girl sinks into self-pity
which later breeds rebellion. Despite this rebellion, the mother is still hell bent on charting the
course for her child which leads her to sign up the girl for piano lessons from a retired piano
teacher living in their block. In her rebellion, she sets out to prove to her mother that she is
indeed incapable of making her proud.
The socioeconomic aspects play a crucial role in the story. The story can actually be
viewed as presenting a moral aspect and at the same time the socioeconomic aspects in the
society at the time. In concise, socioeconomic aspects in the story, “Two Kinds”, are attached to
the lifestyle and social...


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