You Can't Always Get What You Want

Amy Tan’s short story Two Kinds tells the struggles of a young Chinese American girl who is unable to live up to the the lofty expectations her mother has set for her in an attempt to achieve the American Dream. The narrator’s mother believes her daughter can become the next child prodigy, showcased on screens around the nation due to her extraordinary skills. However, while the narrator realizes that she has the potential to become America’s next child sweetheart, she simply wants to live a normal life. This leads to the narrator and her mother clash constantly over the narrator's lack of motivation. The more the narrator’s mother pushed for perfection and starved for stardom, the farther apart she and her daughter grew. The narrator started to feel that her mother did not see her as a daughter, and simply viewed her as an expensive investment that was not paying dividends. After one especially hard piano practice, the narrator pronounced, “Why don't you like me the way I am? I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!" (Tan, 213). The pressure had finally gotten to the narrator and from that point on, her relationship with her mother rapidly deteriorated. The narrator continued to half-heartedly practice piano without achieving results, and because of this her mother became increasingly disappointed with her daughter until the final boiling point, a concert at the local community center. The narrator performed in front of the families of her community and proceeded to play her entire song out of time and with the wrong notes, leading to embarrassment for her and her family. This embarrassment was so great that her mother stopped the narrator from the playing the piano and allowed the piano to simply sit in their living room and collect dust. Ultimately, this removal of piano from the narrator’s life allowed her to develop her own interests and go on to live a happy and successful life of her own. As the Rolling Stones sing, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.” (Jagger, You Can’t Always Get What You Want) These words resonate with the narrator's mother because, even though her daughter did not become the child prodigy that she had hoped for, her mother realises that at the end of the day her daughter was happy and that is what matters most.