Two Kinds

In “Two Kinds,” the Woo family experiences grief in secret and keeps it hidden away. Suyuan certainly doesn’t exhibit grief in front of the children. As an adult, Jing-mei is able to contextualize her mother’s grief and pin it down to the family Suyuan left behind in China in the aftermath of World War II. Her guilt and sadness would have been unbearable, and without a healthy outlet, she expressed it in unpredictable ways, including her heightened expectations for her daughter. While some of these expectations come from the concept of the American dream, others likely come from her grief. Suyuan’s unshakeable faith in her daughter’s natural talent and resilience borders on obsessive; as a nine-year-old, her daughter is working through quizzes during her free time to the point of frustration. When she is taking piano lessons, Suyuan does not check in on her daughter’s progress, but she is disappointed with her performance at the talent show. Suyuan will not let Jing-Mei give up and refuses to see her fail; to achieve this, she becomes critical and pushy.

It is only after she has pushed Jing-mei too hard that she comprehends the extent of her daughter’s frustration and anger. In the climactic argument of the story, Jing-mei expresses that she wishes she were dead, like the half-sisters her mother left in China, “the ones we never talked about” (25). Suyuan’s reaction is telling; she’s “stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless” (26). Jing-mei refers to this incident as a failure of hers, but objectively, it is ­­perhaps not a failure at all. Jing-mei was a 10-year-old girl trying to hurt her mother by telling her she wished they had never known each other. Suyuan was overwhelmed with grief and unable to express her feelings in any healthy or meaningful ways; she could not discuss her first family with her second husband and would never think to confide in her daughter.

In the third part of the story, Jing-mei reveals that her mother, Suyuan, has recently died and that she has been tasked with helping her aged father pack up and remove her mother’s belongings from their apartment, including the secondhand piano her family bought for her on the eve of her performance. Several years prior, on her thirtieth birthday, her mother had gifted her the piano, which she had taken as a sign of forgiveness, despite acknowledging that “for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unspeakable” (26). The return to her childhood piano is sentimental, after having it tuned up on a whim; she plays the piece she had tried out so long ago, and the following piece, and feels they are two halves of the same piece—“two kinds” just as there were two kinds of children; perhaps, she feels, she played the wrong one all those years before, because the new one, “Perfectly Contented” is quite easy for her. This moment signifies the release of Jing-mei’s grief concerning her mother’s death and their falling out.