A Daughter Pushed to the Limit in the Joy Luck Club In Amy Tan's novel, Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei's mother recognizes only two types of daughters: those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind. Perhaps the reader of this novel will recognize only two types of mothers: intrusive mothers and patient mothers. The two songs, "Pleading Child" and "Perfectly Contented", played by the daughter, reinforce the underlying tension of the novel. These songs represent the feelings that the daughter, Jing-mei, has felt throughout her life. The mother in this novel is intrusive. He wants his daughter to be a child prodigy so badly that he can practically taste it. She has Jing-mei take tests from magazines to see if perhaps she might be one of those amazing kids they always read about and watch on TV. Jing-mei has no interest in becoming a child prodigy; he ultimately gives up on these tests, and thus his mother gives up on them too. Her mother also pushed Jing-mei to try to be something that didn't hinder her appearance. After seeing Shirley Temple on TV, Jing-mei's mother took her to beauty training school so she could cut her hair to look like a Chinese Shirley Temple. Well, like the tests, the haircut also failed. She ended up with an uneven, Peter Pan haircut. Jing-mei's mother said that she now "looked like a Chinese negro" as if it were her fault that her hair ended up that way (Tan 1208). After the first two attempts to turn her daughter into a child prodigy, the mother is on the verge of giving up on the idea that her daughter could be better than she already is, when her latest idea hits her. He was watching the Ed Sullivan show when he saw a girl playing... middle of paper... because her mother was pushing her to do things she just didn't want to do. If her mother had been a little more relaxed and not so caught up in her daughter becoming a child prodigy, then they would have had a better relationship. If parents push their children to do something they don't want to do, they may end up, like Jing-mei's mother, paying the consequences. Works cited and consulted: Ghymn, Ester. Images of Asian American women by Asian American writers. vol. 1. NY: Peter Lang 1995. Souris, Stephen. "'Only Two Kinds of Daughters:' "Inter-Monologue Dialogic in The Joy Luck Club." Melus 19.2 (Summer 1994): 99-123. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. Vintage Contemporaries. New York: A Division of Random House, Inc. 1993.Willard, Nancy Asian American Writers Harold Bloom Publishers 1997.