Dr. Prinsky

Engl. 1102

Notes and Questions on Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds”

As indicated by the introduction in R&J, “Two Kinds” is drawn from Amy Tan’s novel of interlinked stories, The Joy Luck Club. The book consists of sixteen stories, with four stories in each of the four sections “Feathers from a Thousand Li Away,” “”The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates,” “American Translation,” and “The Mother of the Western Skies.” The tellers of the stories or tales are the following, with the exception of Suyuan Woo, who started the Joy Luck Club but has recently died:

The Composition of the Joy Luck Club

The function and name of the club are explained by Jing-mei at the opening of the book:

My father has asked me to be the fourth corner at the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago . . . . My mother started the San Francisco version of the Joy Luck Club in 1949, two years before I was born . . . . My mother . . . speaking Chinese [said] “I thought up Joy Luck on a summer night that was so hot even the moths fainted to the ground [in the midst of terrible conditions while living in China during World War II] . . . . My idea was to have a gathering of four women, one for each corner of my mah jong table. I knew which women I wanted to ask. They were all young like me, with wishful faces . . . . Each week one of us would host a party to raise money and to raise our spirits. The hostess had to serve special dyansyin foods to bring good fortune of all kinds . . . . We knew we had luxuries few people could afford. We were the lucky ones. After filling our stomachs, we would then fill a bowl with money and put it where everyone could see. Then we would sit down at the mah jong table . . . . After sixteen rounds, we would again feast, this time to celebrate our good fortune. And then we would talk into the night until the morning, saying stories about good times in the past and good times yet to come . . . . We decided to hold parties and pretend each week had become the new year. Each week we could forget past wrongs done to us. We weren’t allowed to think a bad thought. We feasted, we laughed, we played games, lost and won, we told the best stories. And each week, we could hope to be lucky. That hope was our only joy. And that’s how we came to call our parties Joy Luck.”

The story “Two Kinds” is the last story of the section “The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates.”

1. Vocabulary (an asterisk indicates a word used in an unusual sense)

prodigy (pars. 4, 9, 11, etc.), manger (par. 9), indignity (par. 9), sulk (par. 10), Formica (par. 12), Finland (par. 14), Nairobi (par. 15), Jehoshaphat (par. 17), willful (par. 19), listlessly (par. 20), bellows (par. 20), the bay (par. 20) [= San Francisco Bay, with San Francisco the understood setting of the story], entranced (par. 22), frenzied (par. 22), mesmerizing (par. 22), lilting (par. 22), sauciness (par. 24), cascaded (par. 24), Beethoven (par. 37), sonatas (par. 37), key . . . treble . . . bass . . . sharps . . . flats (par. 38), trills (par. 39), arpeggios (par. 41), staccato (par. 41), reverie (par. 42), preludes* (par. 43), discordant (par. 43), spinet (par. 49), [Robert] Schumann (par. 50), dawdled (par. 50), debut (par. 52), pranced (par. 52), tutus (par. 52), sulky (par. 53), stricken* (par. 55), devastated (par. 62), fiasco (par. 63), shrilly (par. 76), alakazam (par. 78), Stanford (par. 79), inevitable (par. 81), bay windows (par. 91)

2. (A) How do the following verbal motifs help to convey aspects of character or personality in the story: (a) “prodigy” and (b) Ni Kan? (B1) How is music not only a characterizational motif but also a thematic and symbolic motif in the story? (B2). What might be in the story the thematic or symbolic relevance of (a) Grieg’s Peer Gynt (esp. “Anitra’s Dance”), (b) Schumann’s Childhood: Scenes from Childhood [Kinderszenen] (esp. “Pleading Child” and “Perfectly Contented”), (c) Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, and (d) Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”?

3. (A) How are both the narrator’s mother and narrator shown to be influenced by that staple of American culture: television? (B) How does the profusion of magazines in the apartment of the narrator’s family (par. 12) reveal several facets of the mother’s character or personality? (C1). Sometimes the narrator’s mother is portrayed by the implication that she is speaking in Chinese -- not only in the paragraphs when Chinese words are explicitly used -- (e.g., pars. 14, 34) and sometimes by the implication that she is speaking in English (e.g., pars. 26, 28, 33, 45-47, 64-65). How does the author convey in these passages that the mother is speaking Chinese or English, when only English words are used? (C2) How do these passages -- or the overall motif of whether the mother is speaking in English or Chinese -- help portray aspects of the mother? (C3) How do the two languages help portray the daughter as well as the mother, and the relationship between the two?

4. (a) How is the content of the Biblical passage about Jehoshaphat (par. 17) relevant to what the mother wants for her daughter’s future life? (b) What personality traits and values are revealed about the narrator’s mother by how and why she gathers magazines? (c) How is the mother portrayed both positively and negatively in the short story?

5. (A) How is Mr. Chong revealed to have an obsession, and how does this obsession in some way parallel that of the narrator’s mother and perhaps the narrator and other characters in the story, as well? (B) How is the narrator’s father portrayed as a contrast to the narrator’s mother? How is the father portrayed both positively and negatively in the short story?

6. (A) How does her relationship with Waverly Jong (pars. 44-47, 53, 61) characterize both the narrator and Waverly? What features of not only childhood relationships but adult relationships are conveyed? (B) How does the narrator’s fascination with curtsying (pars. 51 and 55) reveal aspects of the narrator’s personality or character? (C) How is the narrator’s intention relative to her mother’s “pride” (par. 48) partly what could be called in psychological terms rationalizing (cf. par. 62)?

7. (a) Why is Auntie Lindo’s smile “stiff-lipped” when the narrator goes to perform her piano piece (par. 53)? (b) Why is Waverly Lindo’s expression “sulky” when the narrator goes to perform her piano piece (par. 53)? What aspects or features of Auntie Lindo’s and Waverly Jong’s character or personality are conveyed here? (c) Through implication or inference, what ironic comment is made, and how, about siblings by something the narrator says about her relationship with Waverly Jong?

8. How does the exchange between a child and his parent about the narrator’s piano recital (par. 55) ironically echo an earlier exchange between the narrator and narrator’s mother (pars. 25-28)?

9. (A) What are the meanings or implications of the peculiar phrase “the breasted girl” that the narrator uses in describing the remainder of the talent show (par. 57)? (B) Other questions on style: (B1) How does parallelism work to suggest multiplicity and equality of opportunity in America in par. 1? (B2) What is conveyed about Chinese culture or family life by the narrator’s oxymoron in her reference to the TV performer as “proudly modest like a proper Chinese child” (par. 24)?

10. (A) What are the implications and relevance to the whole story of the narrator’s final statement about the two Schumann pieces “I realized they were two halves of the same song” (par. 95)? (B) What multiple meanings or applications to the story might the story’s title (“Two Kinds”) have?