“Two Kinds” By Amy Tan is a heartbreaking story, it’s a powerful example of conflicting personalities and needs that cause a struggle between parent and child. In every family, parents have, at one point, imposed their failures and expectations on their children and in worse cases have even tried to live through their children. At times, it can be in the best interest of the child to have a parent motivate them in a specific direction, but as in this story it can sometimes backfire, and the child can be left with feelings of disapproval and questions of self-worth. Instead of enforcing these standards parents should let their children be individuals, and have them learn through their own conscious decisions, and only interfere when the …show more content…

However, after the mother dies at the end of story, the tone changed to remorse, now realizing the mother’s intentions. She regrets not trying her best, and the way she has taken her mother for granted in her life. A strong message like this makes us reflect on our own lives and relationships with the ones we love. Amy constructs the story in a way that makes the plot flow, and we are interested in what will happen to her next. Some of us may even feel like she is too hard on the protagonist—her mother. The ending resolves these feelings, because we discover she feels this, too.
Reading this story, I had two totally different insights. At first I truly thought the mother was way too hard on the little girl and that she was simply trying to mold her daughters' life into something that she really wanted but couldn’t achieve. I had to read the story a couple of times to realize that this is was a little nine year old girl only giving her point of view of the events. When a story is only one-sided, you never really know why the other person did what they did. Being a mother of two girls, I see that the mother just wants the best for her little girl. She will do anything and sacrifice whatever to get the best for her daughter. Which of course growing up like I did me never understood why parents did what they did; I just thought they were trying to control every aspects of my life. But