The Lottery and Two Kinds - Short Stories Review

...

about making a new one, indicating that the tradition is fading away and this is upsetting the mentors because they are blinded by the fact that this is the only tradition they have ever known (1, 2).

In the story “Two Kinds” Amy Tan’s allusion to Shirley Temple when Ni Kan, the initiate, tells the readers that “At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple” explains the mothers wishes for her daughter was to be a famous child prodigy, which is what Shirley Temple was (1). Ni Kan’s mother, the mentor, “believed that you could be anything you wanted to be in America” indicating that when her mother moved from China to America, she had to transition into a new culture that influenced her to believe that America is where prodigies are created (1). Her mother had many tests in order to discover the skills that Ni Kan possessed that would allow her to become a child prodigy. Ni Kan explained that “in the beginning” she was “Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage”, this allusion to Cinderella reveals that she was as excited and as happy as her mother of the dream of being a prodigy (1). After she failed so many of her mother’s tests, she began to become “angry” and thought of the “cow jumping over the moon” (2). The fact that Tan decided to allude the story to the cow jumping over the moon from the bedtime story “Goodnight Moon” indicates that the dream of being a prodigy was now a fairy tale, just like “Goodnight Moon”. This shows that a mentor cannot force an initiate to follow the same cultural beliefs. One must decide what their own traditions and beliefs will be.