Amy Tan's Two Ways To Belong In America

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“We must take adventures in order to know where we truly belong.” -Unknown. The different adventures one takes gives another person a different outlook on life and the future. They begin to look at the world and people differently from the experiences they have been through. Culture greatly informs the way one views the world and others. In the novel “Two Kinds,” by Amy Tan, the little girl is under the control of her mother. Her mother believed that you can be whatever you want to be in America, but Jing-mei did not want to be what her mother wanted her to be. At first, she was having fun with her mom, she then started wanting to be her own person. However she was tired of being someone she was not, so she found herself. She stated “I won’t…show more content…
She stated, “When we [Bharati and Mira] left India, we were almost identical in appearance and attitude. We dressed alike, in saris; we expressed identical views on politics, social issues, love and marriage in the same Calcutta convent-school accent. We would endure our two years in America, secure our degrees, then return to India to marry the grooms of our father’s choosing.” (Mukherjee 70). They grew up believing the same thing. When they moved to America, everything changed. Mira fell in love with an Indian student and soon, they both began the process of being able to receive their green cards of hassle-free residence and employment. Bharati married an American of Canadian parentage. They both abandoned the beliefs that they grew up with because they weren’t in the presence of their culture and heritage and it was not being established. They were in a place where they could do anything they set their minds to. They still loved India, but decided to leave a little bit of it behind. Bharati stated, “America spoke to me—I married it—I embraced the demotion from expatriate aristocrat to immigrant nobody, surrendering those thousands of years of “pure culture,” the saris, the delightfully accented English.” (Mukherjee 71). She explains how she embraced the American culture and how it affected her. It changed her views of
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