24
For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped. The lid to the piano was closed, shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.
So she surprised me. A few years ago, she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed.
“Are you sure?” I asked shyly. “I mean, won’t you and Dad miss it?”
“No, this your piano,” she said firmly. “Always your piano. You only one can play.”
“Well, I probably can’t play anymore,” I said. “It’s been years.”
“You pick up fast,” said my mother, as if she knew this was certain. “You have natural talent. You could been genius if you want to.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
25
“You just not trying,” said my mother. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if to announce a fact that could never be disproved. “Take it,” she said.
But I didn’t at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, every time I saw it in my parents’ living room, standing in front of the bay windows, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy I had won back.
Last week I sent a tuner over to my parents’ apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before, and I had been getting things in order for my father, a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters she had knitted in yellow, pink, bright orange—all the colors I hated—I put those in mothproof boxes. I found some old Chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk against my skin, then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them home with me.
26
After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer than I remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench were the same exercise notes with handwritten scales, the same secondhand music books with their covers held together with yellow tape.
I opened up the Schumann book to the dark little piece I had played at the recital. It was on the left-hand side of the page,“Pleading Child.” It looked more difficult than I remembered. I played a few bars, surprised at how easily the notes came back to me.
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 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 played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
Making Meanings
Two Kinds
Reading Check
a. What does Jing-mei’s mother want for her daughter?
b. How does Jing-mei feel about her mother’s plans for her?
c. What happens when Jing-mei plays the piano in front of an audience?
d. What does Jing-mei say to hurt her mother in their last struggle over the piano lessons?
e. What is the resolution to this mother-daughter conflict?
First Thoughts
1. You may never have been forced to take piano lessons, but you’ve probably been expected to do something you didn’t want to do. Did this story bring any experience like that back to your mind? When you talk about how the story connected with your own life, be sure to discuss whether or not it helped you see your experiences in a new light. Your Quickwrite notes might help you make this connection with the text.
Shaping Interpretations
2. What do you think motivates the mother to push Jing-mei into being a prodigy? Consider:
• the mother's life in China
• her life in America
3. Why do you think Jing-mei’s mother wants her to keep playing the piano, even after her disastrous performance? What kind of daughter does she really want Jing-mei to be?
4. How do you think other children might respond to the pressure to become a prodigy? What inferences can you make about Jing-mei’s character from her response to her mother’s pressure?
5. Near the end of the story, Jing-mei says, “In the years that followed, I failed her so many times. . . .” What do you think she means by that? Do you agree that Jing-mei failed her mother? Does Amy Tan think so? Give your reasons.
6. What do you think the title of the story means? Do you think Jing-mei’s discovery about the two Schumann songs also relates to the story’s title? Why, or why not?
7. This story is in a collection called “Hearts That Love.” Are there “hearts that love” in Tan’s story? Find details from the text to support your response.
Extending the Text
8. Do you think someone else’s high expectations can make a person want to fail, or do you think failure results more often from low expectations? Explain your opinion, drawing examples when you can from your own experiences and those of people you know.