What is the meaning of the last paragraph in Amy Tan's short story "Two Kinds"?
And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side. It was called "Perfectly Contented." I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with the same flowing rhythm and turned out to be quite easy. "Pleading Child" was shorter but slower; "Perfectly Contented" was longer but faster. And after I had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
Throughout the story, the narrator has been struggling to come to terms with the reach of childhood memories into her adult life. She reflects on both her mother's desire for her to become a child prodigy, her mother's desire to make the family proud of her, and her own rejection of her mother's expectations. The mother/daughter conflict symbolically centers on the piano she has recently inherited. She was forced...
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by her mother to take lessons and practice, though she had little desire to do so.
The two songs mentioned in the last paragraph seem to represent two periods in the narrator's life. On the right, which could be read as the present, she is, as the title goes, "Perfectly Contented" with where she is in her life. She has found her vocation, writing, though she never did achieve the goals her mother continued to have for her: class presidency, admission to Stanford, and timely graduation from college.
"The Pleading Child," is on the left, representing the past. It could symbolize her feelings of wanting her mother to understand, accept, and support who she was instead of making demands on her to be a prodigy.
The narrator's declaration that they are "two halves of the same song" symbolizes that she has come to terms with her past and her present and accepts that each has had its place in her life. She also could be observing that time seems to pass slowly when we are children because we are held back from doing what we want, but when we are adults and free to live on our own terms, life takes on increasing momentum.
What is the significance of the last paragraph in "Two Kinds"?
June is learning to play the piano, as her mother wants her to be a child prodigy. June's mother has found her a piano teacher, a deaf man by the name of Mr. Chong, and despite his disability, June seems to be making fairly good progress in her lessons.
One of the pieces that June learns is called "Pleading Child" by the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann. The title of the piece is somewhat symbolic, as June herself is a pleading child. She pleaded with her mother not to make her attend piano lessons, but all to no avail.
June's heart isn't really in her lessons, and so when she plays "Pleading Child" at a public recital, her performance is an absolute disaster. June's career as a child prodigy has ended before it's begun, but not before she has a major falling out with her mother.
Years later, when mother and daughter have reconciled, June's mother gives her a gift of a piano for her birthday. Inside the bench are the same pieces she used to practice when she was younger. One of these pieces is "Pleading Child", which June now finds much easier to play than she did during her brief prodigy phase.
There's also a piece called "Perfectly Contented". Though longer and faster than "Pleading Child" it has the same flowing rhythm and turns out to be quite easy to play. In the last line of the story, June tells us that she then realized that these pieces were two halves of the same song. In other words, with the benefit of experience, she now realizes that she had to go through all the downsides associated with being a pleading child, and all that it entailed, to achieve the perfect contentment she now experiences in her life. In June's life, as in everyone's life, there is good and bad, and June has now discovered that the two cannot exist without each other.