-
Two Kinds
Amy Tan
My
mother believed
you could be anything
you wanted to be in America. You
could open a restaurant. You could work
for the government and get good retirement.
You
could
buy
a
house
with
almost
no
money
down.
You
could
become
rich.
You
could become instantly famous.
“Of course,
you can be
a
prodigy
1
, too,”
my mother told me when I was nine.
“You
can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know?
Her daughter, she is only
best
tricky.”
America was where
all my m
other’s hopes lay. She had come
to San Francisco in
1949
after
losing
everything
in
China:
her
mother
and
father,
her
home,
her
first
husband, and two daughters, twin baby
girls. But she never looked back with regret.
Things could get better in so many
ways.
We didn’t immediately pick the
right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought
I
could
be
a
Chinese
Shirley
Temple
2
.
We’d
watch
Shirley’s
old
movies
on
TV
as
though they were training
films. My mother would poke my arm and say, “Ni
watch.” And
I would see
Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor
song, or pursing
her lips into a very
round O while saying “Oh, my goodness.”
“Ni
kan,”
my
mother
said,
as
Shirley’s
eyes
flooded
with
tears.
“You
already
know how. Don’t need
talent for crying!”
Soon
after
my
mother
got
this
idea
about
Shirley
Temple,
she
took
me
to
the
beauty training school
in
the Mission
District
and put
me in
the hands
of a student
who could
barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead
of getting big fat curls, I
emerged
with an uneven mass of crinkly black
fuzz
3
. My mother dragged me
off to
the bathroom and tried to wet
down my hair.
“You look
like a Negro Chinese,” she lamented, as if I had
done this on purpose.
The
instructor of the beauty training school had to
lop off
4
these soggy clumps
to
make
my
hair
even
again.
“Peter
Pan
5
is
very
popular
these
days”
the
instructor
assured my
mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy’s,
with curly bangs that
hung at a slant
two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut,
and it made me
actually look
forward to my future fame.
In fact, in the beginning I was just as
excited as my mother, maybe even more so.
I pictured this prodigy part of me as
many different images, and I tried each one on
for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl
standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music
that would send me floating on my
tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of
the
straw
manger,
crying
with
holy
indignity.
I
was
Cinderella
6
stepping
from
her
pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon
music filling the air.
In
all
of
my
imaginings
I
was
filled
with
a
sense
that
I
would
soon
become
perfect: My mother and father would
adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would
never feel the need to sulk, or to
clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in
me became impatient. “If you don’t
hurry up and get me out of here, I’m disappearing
for good,” it warned. “And then you’ll
always be nothing.”
Every
night
after
dinner
my
mother
and
I
would
sit
at
the
Formica
7
topped
kitchen
table.
She
would
present
new
tests,
taking
her
examples
from
stories
of
amazing children that she read in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping,
Reader’s digest, or any of a dozen
other magazines she kept in a pile in our
bathroom.
My mother got these magazines
from people whose houses she cleaned. And since
she
cleaned many houses each week, we
had a great assortment. She would look through
them all, searching for stories about
remarkable children.
The
first night she brought out a story about a three-
year-old boy who knew the
capitals of
all the states and even the most of the European
countries. A teacher was
quoted
as
saying
that
the
little
boy
could
also
pronounce
the
names
of
the
foreign
cities correctly.
“What’s the capital of Finland?” my mother
aske
d me, looking at the
story.
All I knew was the
capital of California, because
Sacramento
8
was the name of
the street we lived on in
Chinatown
9
.
“Nairobi
10
!” I quessed,
saying the most foreign
word
I
could
think
of.
She
checked
to
see
if
that
might
be
one
way
to
pronounce
“Helsinki
11
”
before showing me the answer.
The
tests
got
harder
-
multiplying
numbers
in
my
head,
finding
the
queen
of
hearts
in
a
deck
of
cards,
trying
to
stand
on
my
head
without
using
my
hands,
predicting the daily temperatures in
Los angeles, New York, and London.
One
night I had to look at a page from the Bible for
three minutes and then report
everything I could remember. “Now
Jehoshaphat had riches
12
and
honor in abundance
and
that’s all I remember, Ma,” I
said.
And after seeing,
onc
e again, my mother’s disappointed
face, something inside
me
began
to
die.
I
hated
the
tests,
the
raised
hopes
and
failed
expectations.
Before
going to bed that night I looked in the
mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only
my face staring back---and understood
that it would always be this ordinary face ---I
began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I
made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal,
trying to scratch out the face in the
mirror.
And then I saw what seemed to
be the prodigy side of me---a face I had never
seen before. I looked at my reflection,
blinking so that I could see more clearly. The
girl
staring
back
at
me
was
angry,
powerful.
She
and
I
were
the
same.
I
had
new
thoughts, willful thoughts or rather,
thoughts filled with lots of won’ts. I won’t let
her
change me, I promised myself. I
won’t be what I’m not.
So
now
when
my
mother
presented
her
tests,
I
performed
listlessly,
my
head
propped
on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I
got so bored that I started
counting
the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while
my mother drilled me in
other areas.
The sound was comforting and reminded me of the
cow jumping over the
moon. And the next
day I played a game with myself, seeing if my
mother would give
up on me before eight
bellows. After a while I usually counted ony one
bellow, maybe
two at most. At last she
was beginning to give up hope.
Two or
three months went by without any mention of my
being a prodigy. And
then one day my
mother was watching the Ed Sullivan
Show
13
on TV
. The
TV was
old and the sound kept shorting
out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the
sofa to adjust the set, the sound would
come back on and Sullivan would be talking.
As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would
go silent again. She got up, the TV broke
into loud piano music. She sat down,
silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and
loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless
dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she
stood by the set with her hand on the
sound dial.
She
seemed
entranced
by
the
music,
a
frenzied
little
piano
piece
with
a
mesmerizing
quality,
which
alternated
between
quick,
playful
passages
and
teasing,
lilting ones.
“Ni
kan,”
my
mother
said,
calling
me
over
with
hurried
hand
gestures.
“Look
here.”
I could
see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It
was being pounded
out by a little
Chinese girl, about nine years old, with a Peter
Pan haircut. The girl had
the
sauciness
of
a
Shirley
Temple.
She
was
proudly
modest,
like
a
proper
Chinese
Child. And she also did a fancy sweep
of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white
dress cascaded to the floor like petals
of a large carnation.
In spite of these
warning signs, I wasn’t worried. Our family had no
piano and
we couldn’t afford to buy
one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano
less
ons. So I
could be
generous in my comments when my mother
badmouthed
14
the little girl
on
TV
.
“Play note
right, but doesn’t sound good!” my mother
complained “No singing
sound.”
“What are
you picking on her for?” I said carelessly. “She’s
pretty good. Mayb
e
she’s not
the best, but she’s trying hard.” I knew almost
immediately that I would be
sorry I had
said that.
“Just like you,” she said.
“Not the best. Because you not trying.” She gave a
little
huff as she let go of the sound
dial and sat down on the sofa.
The little Chinese girl sat
down also,
to
play
an encore of “Anitra’s
Tanz,” by
Grieg
15
. I
remember the song, because later on I had to learn
how to play it.
Three
days
after
watching
the
Ed
Sullivan
Show
my
mother
told
me
what
my
schedule
would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She
had talked to Mr. Chong,
who lived on
the first floor of our apartment building. was a
retired piano
teacher, and my mother
had traded housecleaning services for weekly
lessons and a
piano for me to practice
on every day, two hours a day, from four until
six.
When my mother told me this, I
felt as though I had been sent to hell. I wished
and then kicked my foot a little when I
couldn”t stand it anymore.
“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!” I cried.
My mother
slapped me. “Who ask you be genius.”she shouted.
“Only ask you be
your best. For you
sake. You think I want you be genius? Hnnh! What
for! Who ask
you!”
“So ungrateful,”I heard her mutter in
chinese. “If she had as much talent as she
had temper, she would be famous
now.”
Mr.
Chong,
whom
I
secretly
nicknamed
Old
Chong,
was
very
strange,
always
tapping his fingers to the silent music
of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in
my eyes. He had lost most of the hair
on top of his head and he wore thick glasses and
had eyes that always thought, since he
lived with his mother and was not yet married.
I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was
enough. She had a peculiar smell, like
a baby that had done something in its
pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person’s,
like an old peach I once found in the
back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off
the
flesh when I picked it up.
I soon found out why Old
Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was
deaf.
“Like Beethoven!” he shouted to
me “We’re both listening only in our head!” And he
would start to conduct his frantic
silent sonatas
16
.
Our lessons went like this.
He would open the book and point to different
things,
explaining, their purpose:
“Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is
C major!
Listen now and play after
me!”
And then he
would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord,
and then, as if
inspired by an old
unreachable itch, he would gradually add more
notes and running
trills and a pounding
bass until the music was really something quite
grand.
I
would
play
after
him,
the
simple
scale,
the
simple
chord,
and
then
just
play
some nonsense that
sounded like a cat running up and down on top of
garbage cans.
Old Chong would smile and
applaud and say “Very good! Bt now ou must learn
to
keep time!”
So
that’s how I discovered that Old Chong’s eyes were
too slow to keep up with
the wrong
notes I was playing. He went through the motions
in half time. To help me
keep rhythm,
he stood behind me and pushed down on my right
shoulder for every
beat.
He
balanced pennies on top
of my
wrists
so
that
I
would keep them
still as
I
slowly
played scales and
arpeggios
17
. He had me curve
my hand around an apple and
keep that
shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to
show me how to make