Two Kinds by Amy Tan
Quick answer: Two Kinds by Amy Tan: summary with the ending, Jing-mei and her mother, Old Chong's piano lessons, the talent show, and the two halves of the Schumann piece.
A mother who lost everything in China, including twin baby daughters, decides that her American-born child can be a prodigy, and begins with Shirley Temple curls. Amy Tan published Two Kinds in The Atlantic in February 1989, and it became a chapter of The Joy Luck Club the same year.
It is the most anthologised story of the Chinese American experience, taught for its mother-daughter conflict and for an ending that arrives years after the fight.
The story in brief, ending included
Jing-mei's mother tests her nightly with facts from magazines, hoping to find her genius, and the girl learns to fail on purpose until the tests stop. Then the mother sees a Chinese girl play piano on The Ed Sullivan Show and arranges lessons with Mr Chong, a retired teacher in their building who is deaf and cannot hear the mistakes. At a talent show Jing-mei plays Schumann's Pleading Child before the whole community, hits wrong note after wrong note, and finishes to thin applause and her parents' silent shame.
Two days later her mother tells her to practise. Jing-mei refuses, and her mother says there are only two kinds of daughters, obedient ones and those who follow their own mind, and only the obedient kind live in her house. Jing-mei screams that she wishes she were dead like the babies her mother lost in China. Her mother leaves the room, and the piano is never mentioned again. Years later, on Jing-mei's thirtieth birthday, her mother offers her the piano. After her mother's death Jing-mei has it tuned, plays Pleading Child, and notices for the first time the piece on the facing page, Perfectly Contented. They are two halves of the same song.
The characters
A mother, a daughter, a deaf teacher.
Themes: two kinds of daughter, two halves of a song
The classroom readings are the conflict between immigrant parents and American children, identity formed in rebellion, and love mistaken for pressure. The mother's ambition is fed by loss; the daughter's refusal by fear of failing her.
The sharper observation is the title's reversal. The mother names two kinds of daughter; the ending names two kinds of music that turn out to be one piece. Jing-mei was both children all along, and only the adult can play the second half.
The craft: a fight that ends thirty years later
The opening promises a prodigy and delivers small comic failures rising to the talent show, which is the turn: public humiliation, then a private and unforgivable fight. The story skips decades, and the ending makes the piano an inheritance.
The technique to steal is the delayed resolution. Let the confrontation end in silence, jump years, and give the resolution to an object rather than a conversation. The two-titled music sheet is a closing image that does the work of a speech, the kind of earned ending that scores highest for Emotional Impact in Writory's contest, where every entrant gets a certificate with the score.
For class and essays
Model answers, vocabulary, one misreading.
What writers can take from this
- For exams, connect the two kinds of daughter to the two titles on the music sheet.
- Cite Old Chong's deafness as the story's comic and sad centre: nobody could hear the mistakes.
- Discuss the dead-babies line as the moment the fight becomes unforgivable.
- Writers: end a family fight in silence and resolve it years later through an object.
- Let a final image do the work of a reconciliation speech.
Try it yourself
Write a story about a child pushed toward a talent they do not have, culminating in a public performance that fails. Let the private fight afterward end with one unforgivable sentence and then silence. Jump decades, and resolve the story through the object at the centre of the fight rather than through conversation.
Questions
What is the theme of Two Kinds?
The conflict between an immigrant mother's hopes and an American daughter's need to be herself, and the late discovery that the two are not opposites. Pleading Child and Perfectly Contented are halves of one song.
Why does Two Kinds end with the two pieces of music?
Jing-mei, playing the piano after her mother's death, sees that the piece she failed at and the one on the facing page belong together. The obedient and the wilful daughter were the same girl.
Who is Old Chong in Two Kinds?
Mr Chong, a retired piano teacher in the family's building who is deaf and cannot hear Jing-mei's mistakes. He teaches her in exchange for housecleaning by her mother.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory story contest
Enter the Writory Short Story Contest and have your own story read and scored out of 100. Entries close 25 November. That first entry makes you a Writorian.