A daughter pushed to the limit in Joy Luck ClubIn Amy Tan's novel Joy Luck Club, Jing-mei's mother only recognizes two types of girls : those who are obedient and those who follow their own spirit. Perhaps the reader of this novel will recognize only two types of mothers: pushy mothers and patient mothers. The two songs, "Pleading Child" and "Perfectly Contented", that the girl plays, reinforce the underlying tension of the novel. These songs represent the feelings that the girl, Jing-mei, felt throughout her life. The mother in this novel is insistent. She wants her daughter to become a child prodigy so badly that she can practically taste it. She has Jing-mei take tests from magazines to see if she might, by chance, be one of those amazing kids they always read about and watch on TV. Jing-mei has no interest in becoming a child prodigy; ends up abandoning these tests, and so his mother abandons them too. The mother also pushed Jing-mei to try to be something whose appearance she did not mind. After watching Shirley Temple on TV, Jing-mei's mother took her to beauty training school so she could have her hair cut to look like a Chinese Shirley Temple. Well, just like the tests, the haircut also failed. She ended up with an uneven haircut, resembling Peter Pan's. Jing-mei's mother said that she "now looked like a black Chinese" as if it was her fault that her hair was that way (Tan 1208). After the first two attempts to make her daughter a child prodigy, the mother is about to give up on the idea that her daughter can be better than she already is, when her last idea hits her. She was watching the Ed Sullivan show, when she saw a girl playing in the middle of a paper because her mother was pushing her too hard to do things she just didn't want to do. If her mother had just been a little more relaxed and less concerned about 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 risk ending up, like Jing-mei's mother, paying for it. Works cited and consulted: Ghymn, Ester. Images of Asian American women by Asian American women writers. flight. 1. NY: Peter Lang 1995. Mouse, Stephen. "'Only Two Kinds of Girls:'" Inter-monologue dialogue 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 Ed. Harold Bloom Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia. 1997.