Two Kinds Style, Form, and Literary Elements
by Amy Tan

Tan describes herself as a lover of language, not a scholar of English. Therefore, it is her translation into English of what she calls her mother’s internal language that is at the heart of this story. Drawing the reader into the story, the narrator directs the reader through a world in which readers experience the power of a rich, colorful language. For example, when Mother Woo characterizes Auntie Lindo’s daughter, an accomplished chess player at a young age, as “best tricky,” the reader knows not only what it means but also how it sounds. This brand of English, often called fractured or broken, becomes a vernacular that captures the tone and color of the experience of growing up in a bilingual environment.

Further illustrating the conflict between Chinese mother and American-born daughter, the spoken language of the two creates a verbal duel. For example, when June demands that her mother look at who she really is, saying “I’m not a genius!” her mother responds with, “Who ask you be genius?” The mother’s question, although incomplete grammatically, projects her confusion over being unable to understand her daughter’s anger or ungratefulness.

The language also characterizes the rich, layered texture of a household built on two languages and two cultures, which often are combined to form, for example, a Chinese Shirley Temple. As her mother offers her the piano, the tense shift in her words is purposeful: “You could been genius if you want to.” Even though it starts in the past, the sentence ends in the present, indicating to June and to the reader that it is not too late for June to find her genius. Ultimately, it is Tan’s command of the “Englishes” that transforms the short story into one that captures not only her mother’s voice but also other mothers’ voices that have been silenced or, at best, standardized into an “imperfect” English that does not convey their essence, their internal language.

Memoir
All the stories in The Joy Luck Club are interlocking personal narratives in different voices. Because the narrators appear as characters in each other's stories, as well as tell their own stories, Tan does not have to fully develop the narrator's voice in each story. Nevertheless, the stories can stand alone, and "Two Kinds'' was published separately; therefore it is possible to discuss the narrative technique utilized in the story.

In "Two Kinds'' the perspective moves back and forth between the adult and the child. In this way, Tan tells the story through the child's innocent view and the adult's experienced eyes. This allows readers to make judgments of their own, to add their own interpretations of the mother-daughter struggle. This literary device also invites readers to think about the way memory itself functions, how we use events in the past to help make sense of our present. Literary critic Ben Xu explains that "it is not just that we have 'images,' 'pictures,' and 'views' of ourselves in memory, but that we also have 'stories' and narratives to tell about the past which both shape and convey our sense of self. Our sense of what has happened to us is entailed not in actual happening but in meaningful happenings, and the meanings of our past experience ... are constructs produced in much the same way that narrative is produced.’’ In other words memory is a two-way street; it shapes the story as much as the story makes the memory. In Xu's words,...