First of all, if “Two Kinds” was from the mother’s point of view, we would have a better understanding of why she pushed her daughter so hard. Jing-mei’s mother, Mrs. Woo, is a Chinese immigrant. She has struggled in her life and is trying to help her daughter to succeed and have the opportunities she didn’t. There is some indication of this in how Jing-mei understands her mother. "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 a good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down." Jing-mei is telling this from her point of view as a daughter, and she does not really understand why this is so important to her mother. If her mother was telling the story, we might better understand her hopes and fears for her daughter. When Jing-mei tells her mother she wishes she was not her daughter, her mother’s reaction probably would have been real sadness. When she yells at her daughter, it is out of frustration, but she probably regrets it. When Jing-mei sees her mother beginning to get very angry, she intentionally tries to hurt her. "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." This is a terrible thing to say. Her mother walks away. We can imagine that her mother is thinking that she can’t believe her daughter would be so ungrateful and so hurtful, and feeling that she really does not get it. Her mother just wants her to have what the others did not.
The story “Two Kinds” is from the daughter’s point of view. If it was from the mother’s point of view, it would be quite different.
First of all, if “Two Kinds” was from the mother’s point of view, we would have a better understanding of why she pushed her daughter so hard. Jing-mei’s mother, Mrs. Woo, is a Chinese immigrant. She has struggled in her life, and is trying to help her daughter to successful...
