“‘You want me to be someone that I’m not!’ I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!’
“Only two kinds of daughters,’ she shouted in Chinese. ‘Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!’
‘Then I wish I wasn’t your daughter. I wish you weren’t my mother,’ I shouted” This is a conversation between Jing-mei woo and her mother and an example of a dialogue. In the dialogue Jing-mei and her mother are fighting after a talent show in which Jing-mei played the piano badly. She then expects her mother to stop making her practice, but her mother is adamant that Jing-mei should keep trying.
“We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple. We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films.” In this quote, Jing-mei’s mother is convinced that her daughter is going to be a child prodigy. She thinks that Jing-mei is going to be like Shirley Temple and is pushing her to be something she is not. This situation is a lot like pageant moms on the television show Toddlers and Tiaras. The mothers push their children through beauty pageants hoping that they will win and be good at something. The parents push the children to do things that their children may not be interested in doing. The girls then throw tantrums and complain about the clothes their parents make them wear and the makeup they have to put on.
I enjoyed reading Hannah’s comparison of the argument between Suyuan and Jing-mei to the quarrels between bossy moms and whiny children on the television show Toddlers and Tiaras. I have seen one or two episodes of Toddlers and Tiaras, and that fact that the mothers usually force their children to compete against their will is very true. Because of this, I think that Hannah’s comparison is very accurate; however, I do notice one small difference between these two scenarios. The difference lies in the fact that the mothers on Toddler and Tiaras usually force their children to compete in these pageants because of their own selfish desires to live vicariously through their children. Suyuan, on the other hand, simply wanted Jin-mei to ascertain the talent that was already within her so that she could reach her full potentional; unlike the mothers on Toddlers and Tiaras, Suyuan was not being selfish at all. Regardless, I still think Hannah made a very clever comparison!
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