The Reading Report of The Joy Luck Club

The Joy luck Club is written by Amy Tan. It was once published on periodicals and Atlantic Monthly. Moreover, the Atlantic Monthly got the serial rights and published it in February in 1989. The author intended this book to be read as a loose collection of interrelated stories. However, most readers read it as a novel. Two kinds is the last story of the second of four sections in the book, it impresses me the most.

Like the other stories in The Joy Luck Club, two kinds tells the story between mother and daughters. The mother was born in China before the communist revolution. Therefore she was cut off the culture for many decades. She even lost her twin daughters in China.

In this story, the narrator, Jing-mei, resists her overbearing mother's desire to make her into a musical prodigy in order to compete with one of her friend's daughters. The narrator recalls these events after a period of more than twenty years and still struggles to understand her mother's motivations.

This story happened in San Francisco. It is a story of an immigration family from China to America. The mother thought they can reach any dreams in this nation. She forced her daughter to learn playing the piano, although her daughter was not interested in it at all. This experience expresses the conflict between mother and daughter. It is also a kind of generation gap. The mother hoped her daughter to be successful, even outstanding. The daughter couldn’t understand her. She desired for freedom instead of doing the things she was unwilling to.

Amy Tan tells the story from the point of view of an adult looking back on her own childhood experiences. This gives the story a rich double perspective, allowing both the hindsight and judgment of a mature woman, and also, for much of the story, the freshness and innocence of a young person trying to discover her own identity.

The way in which Amy Tan orchestrates these shifting points of view is one of the pleasures of reading the story.

This story recalls my own experience with my mother. She always forces me or advice me intensively do something she wants to achieve. Even up to now, I have grown up, I can’t understand her in most cases. I think it is because she always uses the methods I can’t accept to force me to do what she wants to. Therefore I think a suitable way for communication is a main aspect to build up a good relationship between parents and children.

The key to Amy Tan’s success is describing the relationship between mothers and daughters in detail. In her novels, Chinese mothers living in America now are the main characters; they often feel confused and perplexed. They are looked down upon by the native Americans, even their daughters. This is mainly due to their values and education gap. Although there are all kinds of conflicts between Chinese mothers and Americanized daughters, mothers still show deep love to their daughters. By means of story-telling and self-identity reconstruction, mothers break silence and reconcile with their daughters. Amy Tan depicts the complicated relationship between mothers and

daughters, from conflicts to understanding each other, at last they reconcile. The conflicts and solutions between the two generations are also described by Amy Tan. The mothers and daughters were born in different times and with different cultural backgrounds, thus her novels have the common social significance, which acts as a mirror, guiding our teachers to deal with the teacher-student relationship in vocational education. Teachers in vocational schools are like mothers in Amy Tan’s novels, while the students are like the daughters in her novels. Because of the various contradictions between them, teaching is impeded seriously. Therefore, starting from this thesis, the author would like to, from the perspective of a teacher in a secondary vocational school, analyse Amy Tan’s mother-daughter relationship, learn some experience from her books and then apply them to the current vocational education.

 

第二篇：Two Kinds by Amy Tan

I believed my daughter could be anything she wanted to be in America if she put all her heart in. She could open a restaurant. She could work for the government and get good retirement. She could buy a house with almost no money down. She could become rich. She could become instantly famous. America was where all my hopes lay. I had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: my mother and father, my first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But I never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.

Firstly, we had watched Sirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. I told me daughter that she could be a Chinese Shirley Temple. So I came up an idea to take her to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put her in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. To my disappointment, she had emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz, although the instructor of the beauty training school had to tell me that it is very popular nowadays. To my surprise, my daughter liked the haircut. She told me that it made her actually look forward to her future fame.

How l like my daughter! How I hope she could become successful. I hope I can give everything to her. It is my wish that she could put all her heart in what she did. Every night we sit at the Formica topped kitchen table and I present her new tests, taking my examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley’s Believe. I kept lots of magazine in our bathroom. I got these magazines from people whose houses I cleaned. Since I cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. I had looked through them all for searching for stories about remarkable children. The first night I brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even the most of the Europe countries. I asked my daughter several questions, but she knew nothing which made me very angry. I turned to disappointed face. I guessed something inside my daughter began to die. I totally knew that she hated the tests , the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to the bed that night, I knew she looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink and after a moment, she began to cry. Such a sad. In the deepest of my heart, I did not want to change her. I also knew she did not want to be changed by me. Day after day, it seems that she became very boring when we were learning. To be honest , I also got very tired ,but I never lost my confidence. I promise myself that I should try my best to make my daughter to become a useful person. I promise myself that never give up hope on her. She just a child and she needed my advise. I think she should take a rest, so we did not have any tests in two months. She may recover the state she used to be in two months. One day I was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on the TV. The TV set was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time I got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan would be talking. Finally, I stood by the set with my hand on the sound dial. I called my daughter over to with hurried hand gestures. The show 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. In this situation, I came up an idea that I could have my daughter to learn how to play piano, but there is a difficulty. I should work hard to buy a piano for my daughter. I talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr. Chong was a retired piano teacher , and I had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for my daughter to practice on every day, two hours a day. A month later, I came cross an advertisement that there was a competition would be hold in the hall. If my daughter took part in the competition, I would be pound of her. I asked her to join it. From her facial expression, I knew she was not glad at taking part in it. But she was unable to against me. She should follow me. Mr. Chong let her practice again and again. After she

back from Mr. Cong’s house, it seems that she was very tired and my heart was painful, but I have no idea. It is her duty to make good preparation for the competition. In the hall, everything was ready, finally, it was my daughter’s turn to play. To my disappointment, she could not play it as normal. Some terrible ideas occurred in my mind: she was nerve or she played it terrible on purpose. After the competition, we had an argument; I told her that if she acknowledges she was my daughter, she must have to follow my words. If she did not acknowledge that, she could do whatever she wanted to do. She told me clearly that she do not want to be my daughter. My heart was totally broken. Since that, I never ask her to do anything, she could do whatever she wanted to do and I did not complain. And we did not have any words to talk. She may think that I never forgive her.

…….

In my child’s thirty birthdays, I bought her a piano. It means that I forgive her forever since she is nothing but my daughter.