two kinds译文
(完整版)twokinds译文
Two Kinds 译文妈相信，在美国，任何梦想都能成为事实。
你可以做一切你想做的：开家餐馆，或者在政府部门工作，以期得到很高的退休待遇。
你可以不用付一个子儿的现金，就可以买到一幢房子。
你有可能发财，也有可能出人头地，反正，到处是机会。
在我九岁时，妈就对我说：“你也能成为天才。
你会样样事都应付得很出色的。
琳达姨算什么？她那女儿，只不过心眼多一点而已。
”妈将一切未遂的心愿、希望，都寄托在美国这片土地上。
她是在1949年来到美国的。
在中国，她丧失了一切：双亲，家园，她的前夫和一对孪生女儿。
但她对过去的一切，从不用悲恸的目光去回顾，眼前，她有太多的打算，以便将生活安排得更好。
至于我将成为哪方面的天才，妈并不急于立时拍板定案。
起初，她认为我完全可以成为个中国的秀兰·邓波儿。
我们不放过电视里的秀兰·邓波儿的旧片子，每每这时，妈便会抬起我的手臂往屏幕频频挥动：“你——看，”这用的是汉语。
而我，也确实看见秀兰摆出轻盈的舞姿，或演唱一支水手歌，有时，则将嘴唇撅成个圆圆的“0”字，说一声“哦，我的上帝”。
当屏幕上的秀兰双目满噙着晶莹的泪珠时，妈又说了：“你看，你早就会哭了。
哭不需要什么天才！”立时，妈有了培养目标了。
她把我带去我们附近一家美容培训班开办的理发店，把我交到一个学员手里。
这个学生，甚至连剪刀都拿不像，经她一番折腾，我的头发，成了一堆稀浓不均的鬈曲的乱草堆。
妈伤心地说：“你看着，像个中国黑人了。
”美容培训班的指导老师不得不亲自出马，再操起剪刀来修理我头上那湿漉漉的一团。
“彼得·潘的式样，近日是非常时行的。
”那位指导老师向妈吹嘘着。
我的头发，已剪成个男孩子样，前面留着浓密的、直至眉毛的刘海。
我挺喜欢这次理发，它令我确信，我将前途无量。
确实刚开始，我跟妈一样兴奋，或许要更兴奋。
我憧憬着自己种种各不相同的天才形象，犹如一位已在天幕侧摆好优美姿势的芭蕾舞演员，只等着音乐的腾起，即踮起足尖翩然起舞。
Lesson 2 Two Kinds
“lilting”: A cheerful or lively manner of speaking, in which the pitch of the voice varies pleasantly
她似乎被这音乐吸引住了。这钢琴曲不长， 但有点狂乱，有着迷人的特点，乐曲一开 始是快节奏的，接着是欢快跳动的节拍， 然后又回到嬉戏的部分。
Para. 19 What did the girl see in the mirror? The true side prodigy side of me, a strong
character and an independent mind. What new thoughts did she have now? She had new thoughts which were filled
payments）
You could buy a house without any down payment, that is, completely on loan.
(Para. 4) We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy.
What were the warning signs?
Mother would think: If that Chinese girl could be a Shirley Temple-like prodigy, why not her own daughter?
Watching that girl’s performance, the mother had a new idea: to make her daughter learn the piano.
twokinds
Para 32
妈当即给了我一个巴掌。“谁要你做什么 天才，”她厉声叱责着我，“只要你尽力 就行了。还不都是为了要你好！难道是我 要你做什么天才的？你成了天才，我有什 么好处！哼，我这样操心，到底是为的什 么呀！”
中国母亲强调个人服从集体，个体要与集 体保持一致，如果出现不一致则需要调整 自己的行为。美国人强调个性差异，教师 总是根据孩子不同的个性与能力安排活动。 目的是为了使每个孩子都能成为有别于他 人的独特个体。
对景梅的母亲而言，她的性格形成一是由于 她惨痛的经历，战争的恐怖和摧残，逃离中国前 遭遇的失去孩子的人间悲剧。其二、在融入美国 文化之中她有着很多的困难，像许多新移民一样， 她坚信着美国梦想: 凭借坚韧不拔和持之以恒的毅 力，以及少许好运，景梅就一定能达到她所期望 的任何高度，会有一个光明灿烂的未来，只要她 按照母亲的指导去做就是。可惜的是，她的母亲 空自有一腔美好愿望而已。
女孩愤怒于她母亲每天都给她一长串的命 令和训示，如同军队里一般，索然无趣味， 尽管根据加勒比文化，这样的训示是司空 见惯的。这些例子表明，文化冲突普遍存 在，而且通常和宗教与历史有着千丝万缕 的联系，而这些文化冲突对家庭关系和子 女教育有着不可估量的影响。
Jing-mei Woo (daughter’s character)
父母和子女双方都要懂得尊重信任理解对方。这 种尊重和信任的态度是能互相感染的。子女们往 往象他们的父母看待自己那样去认识自己，而父 母则要问问他或她希望听到的观点，然后才拿来 分享。在故事《两类人》中，景梅的母亲却很少 与女儿进行有效的沟通，因为她完全按照自己的 方式去行事，很少考虑到景梅的存在，所以才产 生了冲突，但随着岁月增长，女儿慢慢理解了母 亲，懂得体谅与尊重，这种冲突才得以缓和。
《TwoKinds》读后感[五篇模版]
![《TwoKinds》读后感[五篇模版]](https://img.taocdn.com/s3/m/4eeb1a15dc36a32d7375a417866fb84ae45cc3d8.png)
《TwoKinds》读后感[五篇模版]第一篇：《Two Kinds》读后感The Bittersweetness in the StoryIn the story ‘two kinds’, the author wrote a story between a Chinese immigrant mother and her daughter.Their relationship is not very good, even many years of time is spent in silence.Because this Chinese immigrant mother always forced her daughter to do something that her daughter didn’t like.And the mother hoped her daughter could be a prodigy in the future.So, she forced her daughter to have piano training course and other texts at their home every day.However, her daughter didn’t like these training and she disappointed her mother again and again so that her mother lost her hope in the end and let her fly freely.Although since then, her daughter lived not very good and experienced many hardships.in the end of this story, when the daughter received a piano from her mother and played easier than before in her 30 years old birthday, she finally understood her moth er’s love.As far as I am concerned, the mother’s love for her daughter is bittersweetness, and in many times this love is bitter.Because the mother putting her into all kinds of training without asking her daughter’s permission.So her daughter felt very unhappy and in most of time she acted a rebel in their daily life.Finally, the contradictions between mother and daughter burst in a Chinese young people talent show, the daughter’s bad performance let her mother lose her hope and no longer forced her practice piano.And they live in silence for many years.So I believed that before the daughter’s 30 years old, she was living in a bitter.However, in my opinion, all of the turning point occurred in the daughter’s 30 years old birthday.Whenshe received a birthday gift from her mother, she played the piano again and found that the music which she played suddenly became easier than before.And then she understood her mother’s great effort of training her when she was young.Also at that time, she felt her mother’s lo ve is sweet although is was too late to understand that, because her mother couldn’t live with her and showed her love to her daughter.From conflicts to understanding each other, it took a very long time.In addition, mother’s bitter love in this daughter’s heart suddenly became sweet.In conclusion, story ‘two kinds’ showed us about love and hate between mother and daughter.Let us see a daughter’s bittersweetness life and the process of hate to understand her mother’s love.第二篇：读后感中国梦我的梦读《走复兴路圆中国梦》有感今天，我怀着激动的心情，拿着刚发下来的《走复兴路，圆中国梦》这本书，由此丰富了我对中国梦的解读。
twokinds的中心思想
twokinds的中心思想
《Twokinds》是一部以奇幻为背景的网络漫画，它的中心思想可以概括为和解与团结。
这部漫画通过人类、兽人和其他各种种族的角色，以及他们之间的复杂关系，传达了几个核心主题。
首先，漫画强调了种族之间的和解。
故事的背景是一个充满了不同种族的世界，包括人类、兽人、狼人等等。
这些种族之间经常发生紧张关系和冲突，但《Twokinds》试图描绘一个更和谐的世界，其中种族之间能够和平共处。
通过人物之间的友谊和相互理解，漫画传达了种族之间和解的重要性。
其次，团结是《Twokinds》另一个重要的主题。
主人公们通常面临许多困难和挑战，但他们通过团结和合作，克服了各种障碍。
无论是面对外部威胁还是内部矛盾，他们始终相互支持，并通过团结的力量取得胜利。
漫画通过这种团结的精神，强调了团队合作和互助的重要性。
此外，个人成长也是《Twokinds》的中心思想之一。
主人公和其他角色们都经历了个人的成长和变化。
他们通过面对困难、学习从错误中汲取教训，逐渐发展成更加成熟和坚强的个体。
这种个人成长的过程在整个漫画中得到了精心描绘，并传达了努力、坚持和改变的重要性。
综上所述，《Twokinds》的中心思想可以归结为和解与团结。
two kinds-英语读物
Two KindsAmy TanMy mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. "Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky." America was where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.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. My mother would poke my arm and say, "Ni kan. You watch." And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying "Oh, my goodness." Ni kan," my mother said, as Shirley's eyes flooded with tears. "You already know how. Don't need talent for crying!" Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair. "You look like a Negro Chinese," she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose. The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days" the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy's, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows.I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so.I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air. In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me.I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned. "And then you'll always be nothing."Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica topped kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley's Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader's digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children. The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. "What's the capital of Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the story. All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown. "Nairobi!" I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that might be one way to pronounce Helsinki before showing me the answer. The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember."Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance and...that's all I remember, Ma," I said. And after seeing, once again, my mother's disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back - and understood that it would always be this ordinary face - I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high - pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror. And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me - a face I had never seen before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts - or rather, thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not. So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted only one bellow, maybe two at most. At last she was beginning to give up hope. Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up - the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down - silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial. She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones. "Ni kan," my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. "Look here." I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with aPeter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a large carnation. In spite of these warning signs, I wasn't worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn't afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother badmouthed the little girl on TV. "Play note right, but doesn't sound good!" my mother complained "No singing sound." "What are you picking on her for?" I said carelessly. "She's pretty good. Maybe she's not the best, but she's trying hard." I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that. "Just like you," she said. "Not the best. Because you not trying." She gave a little huff as she let go of the sound dial and sat down on the sofa. The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of "Anitra's Tanz," by Grieg. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr. Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I whined, and then kicked my foot a little when I couldn't stand it anymore. "Why don't you like me the way I am?" I cried. "I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!" My mother slapped me. "Who ask you to be genius?" she shouted. "Only ask you be your best. For you sake. You think I want you to be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!" "So ungrateful," I heard her mutter in Chinese, "If she had as much talent as she has temper, she'd be famous now." Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the h air on the top of his head, and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired. But he must have been youngerthat I though, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married. I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person's, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up. I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. "Like Beethoven!" he shouted to me: We're both listening only in our head!" And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas. Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their purpose: "Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!" And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand. I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that sounded like a rat running up and down on top of garage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say Very good! Bt now you must learn to keep time!" So that's how I discovered that Old Chong's eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios. He had me curve my hand around an apple and keep that shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger dance up and down, staccato, like an obedient little soldier. He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn't practiced enough, I never corrected myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie. So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns. Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother andher friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lindo’s daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as "Chinatown's Littlest Chinese Chess Champion." "She bring home too many trophy." Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. "All day she play chess. All day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings." She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who pretended not to see her. "You lucky you don't have this problem," Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother. And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: "our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room. For the talent show I was to play a piece called "Pleading Child," from Schumann's Scenes From Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else.The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile. My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops in pink ballet tutus, and when theybowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, "Awww, and then clap enthusiastically. When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother's blank face, my father's yawn, Auntie Lindo's stiff-lipped smile, Waverly's sulky expression. I had on a white dress, layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV. And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I wasn't worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn't stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes staying with me all the way. When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room was quiet, except for Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting "Bravo! Bravo! Well done!" By then I saw my mother's face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. "That was awful," and mother whispered "Well, she certainly tried." And now I realized how many people were in the audience - the whole world, it seemed. I was aware of eyes burning into my back.I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest of the show. We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen-year-old boy with a fake moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly and got an honorable mention. And theeleven-year-old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee. After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my mother and father. "Lots of talented kids," Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. "That was somethin' else," my father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even remembered what I had done. Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. "You aren't a genius like me," she said matter-of-factly. And if I hadn't felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach. But my mother's expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got home before shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery.I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV. "Four clock," she reminded me, as if it were any other day.I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV. "Turn off TV," she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn't budge. And then I decided, I didn't have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one. She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. "Four clock," she said once again, louder. "I'm not going to play anymore," I said nonchalantly. "Why should I? I'm not a genius." She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way. "No!" I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self hadfinally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along. "No! I won't!" I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying. "You want me to be something 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 weren't your daughter, I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last. "Too late to change this," my mother said shrilly. And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that's when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. "Then I wish I'd never been born!" I shouted. " I wish I were dead! Like them." It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn't get straight As. I didn't become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me. And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her about whatfrightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? 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," my mother said, as if she knew this was certain. " You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to." "No, I couldn't." "You just not trying," my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if announcing 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 window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy that I had won back.Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent's apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been begetting things in order for my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put 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, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me. After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that 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 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 "PerfectlyContented." I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with 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 had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.11。
twokinds英语读物
Two KindsAmy TanMy mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. "Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky." America was where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.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. My mother would poke my arm and say, "Ni kan. You watch." And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying "Oh, my goodness." Ni kan," my mother said, as Shirley's eyes flooded with tears. "You already know how. Don't need talent for crying!" Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair. "You look like a Negro Chinese," she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose. The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days" the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy's, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air. In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me.I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned. "And then you'll always be nothing."Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica topped kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley's Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader's digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children. The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. "What's the capital of Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the story. All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown. "Nairobi!" I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that might be one way to pronounce Helsinki before showing me the answer. The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember. "Now Jehoshaphath ad riches and honor in abundance and...that's all I remember, Ma,"I said. And after seeing, once again, my mother's disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back - and understood that it would always be this ordinary face - I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high - pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror. And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me - a face I had never seen before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts - or rather, thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not. So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted only one bellow, maybe two at most. At last she was beginning to give up hope. Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up - the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down - silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial. She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which alternated between quick, playful passagesa nd teasing, lilting ones. "Ni kan," my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. "Look here." I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with aPeter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudlymodest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a large carnation. In spite of these warning signs, I wasn't worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn't afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother badmouthed the little girl on TV. "Play note right, but doesn't sound good!" my mother complained "No singing sound." "What are you picking on her for?" I said carelessly. "She's pretty good. Maybe she's not the best, but she's trying hard." I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that. "Just like you," she said. "Not the best. Because you not trying." She gave a little huff as she let go of the sound dial and sat down on the sofa. The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of "Anitra's Tanz," by Grieg. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr. Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I whined, and then kicked my foot a little when I couldn't stand it anymore. "Why don't you like me the way I am?" I cried. "I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!" My mother slapped me. "Who ask you to be genius?" she shouted. "Only ask you be your best. For you sake. You think I want you to be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!" "So ungrateful," I heard her mutter in Chinese, "If she had as much talent as she has temper, she'd be famous now." Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the h air on the top of his head, and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired. But he must have been younger that I though, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married. I met Old Lady Chong once, and that wasenough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person's, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up. I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. "Like Beethoven!" he shouted to me: We're both listening only in our head!" And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas. Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their purpose: "Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!" And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand. I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that sounded like a rat running up and down on top of garage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say Very good! Bt now you must learn to keep time!" So that's how I discovered that Old Chong's eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios. He had me curve my hand around an apple and keep that shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger dance up and down, staccato, like an obedient little soldier. He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn't practiced enough, I never corrected myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie. So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns. Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother and her friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lindo 's daughter, Waverly, who was my age,was standing farther down the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as "Chinatown's Littlest Chinese Chess Champion." "She bring home too many trophy." Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. "All day she play chess. All day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings." She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who pretended not to see her. "You lucky you don't have this problem," Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother. And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: "our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room. For the talent show I was to play a piece called "Pleading Child," from Schumann's Scenes From Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else.The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile. My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops in pink ballet tutus, and when they bowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, "Awww, and then clap enthusiastically. When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It wasas if I knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother's blank face, my father's yawn, Auntie Lindo's stiff-lipped smile, Waverly's sulky expression. I had on a white dress, layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV. And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I wasn't worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn't stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes staying with me all the way. When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room was quiet, except for Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting "Bravo! Bravo! Well done!" By then I saw my mother's face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. "That was awful," and mother whispered "Well, she certainly tried." And now I realized how many people were in the audience - the whole world, it seemed. I was aware of eyes burning into my back. I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest of the show. We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen-year-old boy with a fake moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly and got an honorable mention. And the eleven-year-old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee. After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my mother and father. "Lots of talented kids,"Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. "That was somethin' else," my father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even remembered what I had done. Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. "You aren't a genius like me," she said matter-of-factly. And if I hadn't felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach. But my mother's expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got home before shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery.I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV. "Four clock," she reminded me, as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV . "Turn off TV ," she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn't budge. And then I decided, I didn't have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one. She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. "Four clock," she said once again, louder. "I'm not going to play anymore," I said nonchalantly. "Why should I? I'm not a genius." She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way. "No!" I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along. "No! I won't!" I screamed. She snapped off the T,V yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now,looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying. "You want me to be something 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 weren't your daughter, I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last. "Too late to change this," my mother said shrilly. And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that's when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. "Then I wish I'd never been born!" I shouted. " I wish I were dead! Like them." It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn't get straight As. I didn't become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me. And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? 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 notplayed 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," my mother said, as if she knew this was certain. " You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to." "No, I couldn't." "You just not trying," my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if announcing 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 window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy that I had won back.Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent's apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been begetting things in order for my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put 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, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me. After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that 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 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 "PerfectlyContented." I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with 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 had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.。
(完整版)twokinds全文复习加赏析
piano lessons
performance in the talent bad performance show, high expectation
the most fierce quarrel being disobedient &
giving up hope
rebelliousห้องสมุดไป่ตู้
be herself
“Two kinds”, which is taken from it, is about the story of one of mothers and daughters: Suyuan Woo(吴夙愿)
and Jing-mei(精美)
Content
1 Warm-Up 2 Background Introduction 3 Genre & organization 4 Details to the text 5 Rhetorical device & assignment
Lesson 2
About Amy Tan & Joy Luck Club
The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first and most successful novel
About the lives of four Chinese women in pre-1949 China and their American-born daughters in California
pleading child
Why did the Jingmei think she is a pleading child before? When she was a child, she only saw one side and couldn’t understand her mother, regarding her mother’s hope as tormenting pressure and regard herself as pleading child.
two-kinds-英语读物
Two KindsAmy TanMy mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. "Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky." America was where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.We didn't immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thoughtI could be a Chinese Shirley Temple. We'd watch Shirley's old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother would poke my arm and say, "Ni kan. You watch." And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying "Oh, my goodness." Ni kan," my mother said, as Shirley's eyes flooded with tears. "You already know how. Don't need talent for crying!" Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged meoff to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair. "You look like a Negro Chinese," she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose. The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days" the instructor assured m y mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy's, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows.I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so.I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one onfor size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air. In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me.I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned. "And then you'll always be nothing."Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica topped kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley's Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader's digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children. The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. "What's the capital of Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the story. All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown. "Nairobi!" I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that might be one way to pronounce Helsinki before showing me the answer. The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember."Now Jehoshaphat h ad riches and honor in abundance and...that's all I remember, Ma," I said. And after seeing, once again, my mother's disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back - and understood that it would always be this ordinary face - I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high - pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror. And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me - a face I had never seen before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts - or rather, thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not. So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted only one bellow, maybe two at most. At last she was beginning to give up hope. Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up - the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down - silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial. She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones. "Ni kan," my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. "Look here." I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with aPeter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded t o the floor like petals of a large carnation. In spite of these warning signs, I wasn't worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn't afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother badmouthed the little girlon TV. "Play note right, but doesn't sound good!" my mother complained "No singing sound." "What are you picking on her for?" I said carelessly. "She's pretty good. Maybe she's not the best, but she's trying hard." I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that. "Just like you," she said. "Not the best. Because you not trying." She gave a little huff as she let go of the sound dial and sat down on the sofa. The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of "Anitra's Tanz," by Grieg. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr. Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I whined, and then kicked my foot a little when I couldn't stand it anymore. "Why don't you like me the way I am?" I cried. "I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!" My mother slapped me. "Who ask you to be genius?" she shouted. "Only ask you be your best. For you sake. You think I want you to be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!" "So ungrateful," I heard her mutter in Chinese, "If she had as much talent as she has temper, she'd be famous now." Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the h air on the top of his head, and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired. But he must have been youngerthat I though, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married. I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person's, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I pickedit up. I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. "Like Beethoven!" he shouted to me: We're both listening only in our head!" And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas. Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their purpose: "Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!" And thenhe would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand. I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that sounded like a rat running up and down on top of garage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say Very good! Bt now you must learn to keep time!" So that's how I discovered that Old Chong's eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios. He had me curve my hand around an apple and keep that shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger dance up and down, staccato, like an obedient little soldier. He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with mistakes,lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn't practiced enough, I never corrected myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting hisown private reverie. So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick upthe basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns. Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother andher friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lindo’s daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as "Chinatown's Littlest Chinese Chess Champion." "She bring home too many trophy." Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. "All day she play chess. All day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings." She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who pretended not to see her. "You lucky you don't have this problem," Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother. And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: "our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room. For the talent show I was to play a piece called "Pleading Child," from Schumann's Scenes From Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking upto see what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else.The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile. My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops in pink ballet tutus, and when theybowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, "Awww, and then clap enthusiastically. When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother's blank face, my father's yawn, Auntie Lindo's stiff-lipped smile, Waverly's sulky expression. I had on a white dress, layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV. And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I wasn't worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn't stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through tothe end, the sour notes staying with me all the way. When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The roomwas quiet, except for Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting "Bravo! Bravo! Well done!" By then I saw my mother's face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. "That was awful," and mother whispered "Well, she certainly tried." And now I realized how many people were inthe audience - the whole world, it seemed. I was aware of eyes burning into my back.I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest of the show. We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen-year-old boy with a fake moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly and got an honorable mention. And theeleven-year-old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded likea busy bee. After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my mother and father. "Lots of talented kids," Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. "That was somethin' else," my father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even remembered what I had done. Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. "You aren't a genius like me," she said matter-of-factly. And if I hadn't felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach. But my mother's expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got home before shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery.I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV. "Four clock," she reminded me, as if it were any other day.I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV. "Turn off TV," she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn't budge. And then I decided, I didn't have todo what mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one. She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. "Four clock," she saidonce again, louder. "I'm not going to play anymore," I said nonchalantly. "Why should I? I'm not a genius." She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way. "No!" I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self hadfinally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along. "No! I won't!" I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying. "You want me to be something 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 weren't your daughter, I wishyou weren't my mother," I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last. "Too late to change this," my mother said shrilly. And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that's when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. "Then I wish I'd never been born!" I shouted. " I wish I were dead! Like them." It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall shortof expectations. I didn't get straight As. I didn't become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me. And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her about whatfrightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? 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," my mother said, as if she knew this was certain. " You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to." "No, I couldn't." "You just not trying," my mother said. Andshe was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if announcing 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 frontof the bay window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy that I had won back.Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent's apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been begetting things in order for my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put 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, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me. After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that I remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench were the same exercise notes with handwritten scales, the same secondhand m usic 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 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 "PerfectlyContented." I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with 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 had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.。
two kinds
小说《两类人》里的母女冲突<转自书斋原创天下>文/ 紫色王家思絮絮在小说《两类人》("two kinds") 里，作者美藉华裔小说家谭恩美(amy tan) 描述了一对住在加州的母女之间的关系和冲突。
故事的主人公吴景梅(景梅"珠妮"，jing-mei "june" woo) 的母亲在中国出生长大，后来因为中国政局动荡的缘故而移居美国。
她是个传统的中国女人，多年来依然保持了较完整的中国传统价值观，并且一直刻意去遵守它，并不知不觉地将这种中国传统文化价值理念强加给她的女儿景梅。
景梅却是在美国出生并且成长的，尽管有一个遵从中国传统文化的母亲，她却对中国文化陌生得很。
出于一种“望子成龙、望女成凤”的心态，景梅的母亲希望景梅尽自己最大的努力，成为一个钢琴家，能出名、得到社会广泛承认。
当景梅得知母亲这一决定后，她开始变得心慌意乱，潜意识里也产生了反抗抵触情绪。
随后的过程中她发现她即使再努力也达不到母亲对她的殷切期望，因此她决定不再按照母亲的吩咐去做，代之以我行我素，只是想做她真正的自己。
事实上，二十年后当景梅回忆这些往事时，她仍然觉得难以理解当初她母亲的动机和一片苦心。
谭恩美以景梅母女的纠葛来揭示不同文化背景下母女之间的矛盾。
事实上这个故事只不过是作者的畅销书《喜福会》("the joy luck club")系列故事中的一个而已。
小说《喜福会》出版后马上登上了纽约时报的最佳畅销书榜。
该书以包括景梅母女在内的四对在美的华裔母女为中心，分别描述她们几个家庭几十年的遭遇和矛盾冲突(tan 11)。
《两类人》是《喜福会》里的第八个故事，这本畅销书“交织了家庭里的女性因为代沟和不同的文化背景而导致的错综复杂的关系和矛盾” (schilb 346)，这些故事基本上也是根据作者谭恩美亲身的家庭矛盾和中美之间的文化冲突而完成的。
《喜福会》在1993年改编为同名电影，由华裔导演王颖执导。
twokinds英语读物
Two KindsAmy TanMy mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant. You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous. "Of course, you can be a prodigy, too," my mother told me when I was nine. "You can be best anything. What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky." America was where all my mother's hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.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. My mother would poke my arm and say, "Ni kan. You watch." And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying "Oh, my goodness." Ni kan," my mother said, as Shirley's eyes flooded with tears. "You already know how. Don't need talent for crying!" Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz. My mother dragged me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair. "You look like a Negro Chinese," she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose. The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days" the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy's, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows.I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so.I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air. In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father would adore me.I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned. "And then you'll always be nothing."Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica topped kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley's Believe It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader's digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children. The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. "What's the capital of Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the story. All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown. "Nairobi!" I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that might be one way to pronounce Helsinki before showing me the answer. The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London. One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember."Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance and...that's all I remember, Ma," I said. And after seeing, once again, my mother's disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back - and understood that it would always be this ordinary face - I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high - pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror. And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me - a face I had never seen before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts - or rather, thoughts filled with lots of won'ts. I won't let her change me, I promised myself. I won't be what I'm not. So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted only one bellow, maybe two at most. At last she was beginning to give up hope. Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up - the TV broke into loud piano music. She sat down - silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on the sound dial. She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones. "Ni kan," my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. "Look here." I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl, about nine years old, with aPeter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a large carnation. In spite of these warning signs, I wasn't worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn't afford to buy one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when my mother badmouthed the little girl on TV. "Play note right, but doesn't sound good!" my mother complained "No singing sound." "What are you picking on her for?" I said carelessly. "She's pretty good. Maybe she's not the best, but she's trying hard." I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that. "Just like you," she said. "Not the best. Because you not trying." She gave a little huff as she let go of the sound dial and sat down on the sofa. The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of "Anitra's Tanz," by Grieg. I remember the song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment building. Mr. Chong was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I whined, and then kicked my foot a little when I couldn't stand it anymore. "Why don't you like me the way I am?" I cried. "I'm not a genius! I can't play the piano. And even if I could, I wouldn't go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!" My mother slapped me. "Who ask you to be genius?" she shouted. "Only ask you be your best. For you sake. You think I want you to be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!" "So ungrateful," I heard her mutter in Chinese, "If she had as much talent as she has temper, she'd be famous now." Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the h air on the top of his head, and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always looked tired. But he must have been youngerthat I though, since he lived with his mother and was not yet married. I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person's, like an old peach I once found in the back of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up. I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. "Like Beethoven!" he shouted to me: We're both listening only in our head!" And he would start to conduct his frantic silent sonatas. Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their purpose: "Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!" And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the music was really something quite grand. I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that sounded like a rat running up and down on top of garage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud and say Very good! Bt now you must learn to keep time!" So that's how I discovered that Old Chong's eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios. He had me curve my hand around an apple and keep that shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger dance up and down, staccato, like an obedient little soldier. He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn't practiced enough, I never corrected myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie. So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns. Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother andher friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with stiff white petticoats. Auntie Lindo’s daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters, squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as "Chinatown's Littlest Chinese Chess Champion." "She bring home too many trophy." Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. "All day she play chess. All day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings." She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who pretended not to see her. "You lucky you don't have this problem," Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother. And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged: "our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It's like you can't stop this natural talent." And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room. For the talent show I was to play a piece called "Pleading Child," from Schumann's Scenes From Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere else, about being someone else.The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile. My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops in pink ballet tutus, and when theybowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, "Awww, and then clap enthusiastically. When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I knew, without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother's blank face, my father's yawn, Auntie Lindo's stiff-lipped smile, Waverly's sulky expression. I had on a white dress, layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV. And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I wasn't worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn't stop playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back, like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes staying with me all the way. When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room was quiet, except for Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting "Bravo! Bravo! Well done!" By then I saw my mother's face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. "That was awful," and mother whispered "Well, she certainly tried." And now I realized how many people were in the audience - the whole world, it seemed. I was aware of eyes burning into my back.I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest of the show. We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen-year-old boy with a fake moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly and got an honorable mention. And theeleven-year-old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee. After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my mother and father. "Lots of talented kids," Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. "That was somethin' else," my father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even remembered what I had done. Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. "You aren't a genius like me," she said matter-of-factly. And if I hadn't felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach. But my mother's expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we got home before shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame her for all my misery.I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV. "Four clock," she reminded me, as if it were any other day.I was stunned, as though she were asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV. "Turn off TV," she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn't budge. And then I decided, I didn't have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn't her slave. This wasn't China. I had listened to her before, and look what happened she was the stupid one. She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. "Four clock," she said once again, louder. "I'm not going to play anymore," I said nonchalantly. "Why should I? I'm not a genius." She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way. "No!" I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self hadfinally emerged. So this was what had been inside me all along. "No! I won't!" I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor. She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was crying. "You want me to be something 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 weren't your daughter, I wish you weren't my mother," I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good, that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last. "Too late to change this," my mother said shrilly. And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that's when I remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. "Then I wish I'd never been born!" I shouted. " I wish I were dead! Like them." It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin, brittle, lifeless.It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn't get straight As. I didn't become class president. I didn't get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me. And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her about whatfrightened me the most: Why had she given up hope? 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," my mother said, as if she knew this was certain. " You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to." "No, I couldn't." "You just not trying," my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if announcing 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 window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy that I had won back.Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent's apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been begetting things in order for my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put 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, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me. After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that 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 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 "PerfectlyContented." I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with 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 had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.。
two kinds 课文翻译
妈相信，在美国，任何梦想都能成为事实。
你可以做一切你想做的：开家餐馆，或者在政府部门工作，以期得到很高的退休待遇。
你可以不用付一个子儿的现金，就可以买到一幢房子。
你有可能发财，也有可能出人头地，反正，到处是机会。
在我九岁时，妈就对我说：“你也能成为天才。
你会样样事都应付得很出色的。
琳达姨算什么？她那女儿，只不过心眼多一点而已。
”妈将一切未遂的心愿、希望，都寄托在美国这片土地上。
她是在1949年来到美国的。
在中国，她丧失了一切：双亲，家园，她的前夫和一对孪生女儿。
但她对过去的一切，从不用悲恸的目光去回顾，眼前，她有太多的打算，以便将生活安排得更好。
二至于我将成为哪方面的天才，妈并不急于立时拍板定案。
起初，她认为我完全可以成为个中国的秀兰?邓波儿。
我们不放过电视里的秀兰?邓波儿的旧片子，每每这时，妈便会抬起我的手臂往屏幕频频挥动：“你——看，”这用的是汉语。
而我，也确实看见秀兰摆出轻盈的舞姿，或演唱一支水手歌，有时，则将嘴唇撅成个圆圆的“０”字，说一声“哦，我的上帝”。
当屏幕上的秀兰双目满噙着晶莹的泪珠时，妈又说了：“你看，你早就会哭了。
哭不需要什么天才！”立时，妈有了培养目标了。
她把我带去我们附近一家美容培训班开办的理发店，把我交到一个学员手里。
这个学生，甚至连剪刀都拿不像，经她一番折腾，我的头发，成了一堆稀浓不均的鬈曲的乱草堆。
妈伤心地说：“你看着，像个中国黑人了。
”一团。
“彼得?潘的式样，近日是非常时行的。
”那位指导老师向妈吹嘘着。
我的头发，已剪成个男孩子样，前面留着浓密的、直至眉毛的刘海。
我挺喜欢这次理发，它令我确信，我将前途无量。
确实刚开始，我跟妈一样兴奋，或许要更兴奋。
我憧憬着自己种种各不相同的天才形象，犹如一位已在天幕侧摆好优美姿势的芭蕾舞演员，只等着音乐的腾起，即踮起足尖翩然起舞。
我就像降生在马槽里的圣婴，是从南瓜马车上下来的灰姑娘……反正我觉得，我立时会变得十分完美：父母会称赞我，我再不会挨骂，我会应有尽有，不用为着没有能得到某样心想的东西而赌气不快。
two kinds
例如中国人的生活基本上以人际关系网为中心并 被它束缚，每一个大抵只是关心他她自己的事， 信奉明哲保身，很少与陌生人和关系网络之外的 人来往；而美国人恰恰相反，通常以个人为中心。 中国人在那个社会网里，保证不“丢面子”，在 同僚中出人头地、被关系网中的人尊敬是很重要 的；为了这个目标，孩子们应努力学习，“以成 为最好的、第一名为目标” ，而对大多数的美国 人来说恰恰相反，他们不会因为在同类人中不能 脱颖而出而觉得“丢面子”。
Para 32
妈当即给了我一个巴掌。“谁要你做什么 天才，”她厉声叱责着我，“只要你尽力 就行了。还不都是为了要你好！难道是我 要你做什么天才的？你成了天才，我有什 么好处！哼，我这样操心，到底是为的什 么呀！”
中国母亲强调个人服从集体，个体要与集 体保持一致，如果出现不一致则需要调整 自己的行为。美国人强调个性差异，教师 总是根据孩子不同的个性与能力安排活动。 目的是为了使每个孩子都能成为有别于他 人的独特个体。
Analysis：from Para 25
中国人在评价孩子的性情时，“稳重听话” 是一大优点，“听话的孩子是好孩子”已 在国人中形成共识。学校教育强调秩序井 然，用各种规章来约束孩子的行为。美国 人喜欢孩子富有孩子气，小学和幼儿园的 课堂上允许孩子随便说话，甚至相互打闹， 美国人总觉得中国孩子在课堂上太死板， 没有生气。
毫无疑问，天下所有的母亲，不论背景文 化如何，都多少有一个共同的心愿: 希望自 己的孩子有一个美好的未来，正所谓可怜 天下慈母心。 但是，如何实现这个目标却是很复杂的， 尤其当家庭里不同的人成长于不同的文化 背景时更加如此。
the analysis of the characters' features
对景梅的母亲而言，她的性格形成一是由于 她惨痛的经历，战争的恐怖和摧残，逃离中国前 遭遇的失去孩子的人间悲剧。其二、在融入美国 文化之中她有着很多的困难，像许多新移民一样， 她坚信着美国梦想: 凭借坚韧不拔和持之以恒的毅 力，以及少许好运，景梅就一定能达到她所期望 的任何高度，会有一个光明灿烂的未来，只要她 按照母亲的指导去做就是。可惜的是，她的母亲 空自有一腔美好愿望而已。
unit 2 two kinds
Introduction of The Joy Luck Club(3)
The different points of view enable us to look at the bittersweet mother-daughter relations from different angles. The mothers and daughters treat one another cautiously小心的, playing a game of love and fear, need and rejection.
Introduction of The Joy Luck Club(2)
•It tells stories about four pairs of mothers and daughters---Suyuan Woo and Jing-mei (June); Anmei Hsu and Rose; Lindo Jong and Waverly; Ying-ying St. Clair and Lena. These stories are told by seven voices, those of the mothers and daughters except for Suyuan Woo, who is dead when the story begins in the book.
“Two Kinds” is fiction. Although
this passage is taken from a novel 长篇小说, it can be read as a complete short story. It has a complete plot of its own.
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Two Kinds 译文妈相信，在美国，任何梦想都能成为事实。
你可以做一切你想做的：开家餐馆，或者在政府部门工作，以期得到很高的退休待遇。
你可以不用付一个子儿的现金，就可以买到一幢房子。
你有可能发财，也有可能出人头地，反正，到处是机会。
在我九岁时，妈就对我说：“你也能成为天才。
你会样样事都应付得很出色的。
琳达姨算什么？她那女儿，只不过心眼多一点而已。
”妈将一切未遂的心愿、希望，都寄托在美国这片土地上。
她是在1949年来到美国的。
在中国，她丧失了一切：双亲，家园，她的前夫和一对孪生女儿。
但她对过去的一切，从不用悲恸的目光去回顾，眼前，她有太多的打算，以便将生活安排得更好。
至于我将成为哪方面的天才，妈并不急于立时拍板定案。
起初，她认为我完全可以成为个中国的秀兰·邓波儿。
我们不放过电视里的秀兰·邓波儿的旧片子，每每这时，妈便会抬起我的手臂往屏幕频频挥动：“你——看，”这用的是汉语。
而我，也确实看见秀兰摆出轻盈的舞姿，或演唱一支水手歌，有时，则将嘴唇撅成个圆圆的“0”字，说一声“哦，我的上帝”。
当屏幕上的秀兰双目满噙着晶莹的泪珠时，妈又说了：“你看，你早就会哭了。
哭不需要什么天才！”立时，妈有了培养目标了。
她把我带去我们附近一家美容培训班开办的理发店，把我交到一个学员手里。
这个学生，甚至连剪刀都拿不像，经她一番折腾，我的头发，成了一堆稀浓不均的鬈曲的乱草堆。
妈伤心地说：“你看着，像个中国黑人了。
”美容培训班的指导老师不得不亲自出马，再操起剪刀来修理我头上那湿漉漉的一团。
“彼得·潘的式样，近日是非常时行的。
”那位指导老师向妈吹嘘着。
我的头发，已剪成个男孩子样，前面留着浓密的、直至眉毛的刘海。
我挺喜欢这次理发，它令我确信，我将前途无量。
确实刚开始，我跟妈一样兴奋，或许要更兴奋。
我憧憬着自己种种各不相同的天才形象，犹如一位已在天幕侧摆好优美姿势的芭蕾舞演员，只等着音乐的腾起，即踮起足尖翩然起舞。
我就像降生在马槽里的圣婴，是从南瓜马车上下来的灰姑娘……反正我觉得，我立时会变得十分完美：父母会称赞我，我再不会挨骂，我会应有尽有，不用为着没有能得到某样心想的东西而赌气不快。
然而看来，天才本身对我，颇有点不耐烦了：“你再不成才，我就走了，再也不来光顾你了，”它警告着，“这一来，你就什么也没有了。
”每天晚饭后，我和妈就坐在厨房桌边，她每天给我作一些智力测试，这些测试题目，是她从《信不信由你》、《好管家》、《读者文摘》等杂志里收罗来的。
在家里洗澡间里，我们有一大堆这样的旧杂志，那是妈从她做清洁工的那些住户家里要来的。
每周，她为好几户住户做清洁工。
因此这里有各式各样的旧杂志，她从中搜寻着各种有关天才孩子的智力培养和他们成才的过程。
开始这种测试的当晚，她就给我讲了一个三岁神童的故事，他能诸熟地背出各州的首府，甚至大部分欧洲国家的名字。
另一位教师证明，这小男孩能正确无误地拼出外国城市的名字。
“芬兰的首都是哪？”于是，母亲当场对我开始测试了。
天呀，我只知道加州的首府！因为我们在唐人街上住的街名，就叫萨克拉曼多。
“乃洛比！”我冒出一个莫名其妙的，所能想象得出的最奇特的外国字。
测试的题目越来越复杂了：心算乘法，在一叠扑克牌里抽出红心皇后，做倒立动作，预测洛杉矶、纽约和伦敦的气温。
还有一次，妈让我读三分钟《圣经》，然后说出我所读过的内容。
“现在，耶和华非有丰富的财富和荣誉……妈，我只记得这一句。
”再次看到妈失望的眼神之后，我内心对成才的激动和向往，也消遁了。
我开始憎恨这样的测试，每一次都是以满怀希望开始，以失望而告终。
那晚上床之前，我站在浴室的洗脸盆镜子前，看到一张普普通通，毫无出众之处的哭丧着的脸——我哭了。
我尖叫着，跺脚，就像一只发怒的小兽，拼命去抓镜中那个丑女孩的脸。
随后，忽然我似乎这才发现了真正的天才的自己，镜中的女孩，闪眨着聪明强硬的目光看着我，一个新的念头从我心里升起：我就是我，我不愿让她来任意改变我。
我向自己起誓，我要永远保持原来的我。
所以后来，每当妈再要我做什么测试时，我便做出一副无精打采的样子，将手肘撑在桌上，头懒懒地倚在上面，装出一副心不在焉的样子。
事实上，我也实在无法专心。
当妈又开始她的测试课时，我便开始专心倾听迷雾茫茫的海湾处的浪涛声，那沉闷的声响，颇似一条在气喘吁吁奔跑的母牛。
几次下来，妈放弃了对我的测试。
两三个月安然无事地过去了，其间，再没提一个有关“天才”的字眼了。
一天，妈在看电视，那是艾德·索利凡的专题节目，一个小女孩正在表演钢琴独奏。
这是台很旧的电视机，发出的声音时响时轻，有时甚至还会停顿。
每每它哑巴的时候，妈就要起身去调整它，待她还没走到电视机前，电视机又讲话了，于是就像故意要作弄她一番似的，反正她一离沙发，电视就出声了，她一坐下，艾德就变哑巴。
最后，妈索性守在电视机边，将手按在键盘上。
电视里的琴声似令她着迷了，只见演奏者既有力，又柔和地敲着琴键，突地，一阵密切铿锵的琶音倾泻而下，犹如决堤的洪水，翻江倒海地奔腾起来，只见她手腕一抬，那激动急骤的旋律顿时烟消云散了，那含有诗意、温存的音符，从她手指尖下飘逸出来。
“你——看！”我妈说着，急促地把我叫到电视机前。
我马上领会了，妈为什么这样深深地被琴声迷住。
原来，那个正在向观众行屈膝礼的演奏者，不过只八九岁的光景。
而且同样是一个留着彼得·潘发式的中国女孩子。
她穿着蓬松的白色短裙，就像一朵含苞欲放的康乃馨。
在她优雅地行礼时，既有秀兰·邓波儿的活泼，又持典型的中国式的谦和。
我们家反正没有钢琴，也没有钱买钢琴，所以，当妈一再将这个小钢琴家作话题时，我竟失却了警惕，大咧咧地说起大话了。
“弹倒弹得不错，就是怎么她自己不跟着唱。
”我妈对我批评着那个女孩子。
“你要求太高了，”我一不小心说溜了嘴！“她弹得蛮不错了。
虽然说不上最好，但至少，她已很下过一番苦功了。
”话一出口我就后悔了。
果然，妈抓住我小辫子了。
“所以呀，”她说，“可你，连一点苦功都不肯下。
”她有点愠怒地拉长着脸，又回到沙发上去。
电视里的那个中国女孩子，也重番坐下再弹了一曲《安尼托拉的舞蹈》，是由格林卡作曲的。
我之所以印象这么深，是因为后来，我花了很大功夫去学习弹奏它。
三天后，妈给我制定了一张钢琴课和练琴的课程表。
原来，她已跟我们公寓里一楼的一位退休钢琴教师商量妥，妈免费为他做清洁工，作为互惠，他则免费为我教授钢琴，而且每天下午的四点到六点，将他的琴供我练习。
当妈把她的计划告诉我时，我即感头皮发麻，有一种被送进炼狱的感觉。
“我现在这样不是很好嘛！我本来就不是神童，我永远也成不了天才！我不会弹钢琴，学也学不会。
哪怕你给我一百万元，我也永远上不了电视！”我哭着嚷着，跺着脚。
妈当即给了我一个巴掌。
“谁要你做什么天才，”她厉声叱责着我，“只要你尽力就行了。
还不都是为了要你好！难道是我要你做什么天才的？你成了天才，我有什么好处！哼，我这样操心，到底是为的什么呀！”“没有良心！”我听见她用汉语狠狠地嘟哝了一句，“要是她的天分有她脾气这般大就好了，她早就可以出人头地了！”那个钟先生，我私下称他为老钟，是个很古怪的老头。
他似已很老很老了，头顶秃得光光的，戴着副啤酒瓶底一样厚的眼镜，在层层叠叠的圈圈里，一双眼睛整日像昏昏睡的样子。
他常常会悠然地对着一支看不见的乐队，指挥着听不见的音乐。
但我想，他一定没我想象的那般老朽，因为他还有个妈妈。
而且，他还没有结婚吧。
那钟老太，可真让我够受了。
她身上带有一股怪味，那种……尿骚味。
她的手指看着就像是烂桃子的感觉。
一次我在冰箱后边摸到过一只这样的烂桃子，当我捡起它时，那层皮，就滑漉漉地脱落了下来。
我很快就明白了，老钟为什么只好退休。
原来他是个聋子。
“像贝多芬一样，”他常常喜欢扯大嗓门说话，“我们俩都是只用心来倾听！”他如此自诩着，说毕，依旧陶醉在对无人无声乐队的指挥中，如痴如醉地挥动着他的手臂。
我们的课程是这样进行的。
他先打开琴谱，指着各种不同的标记，向我解释着它们各自代表的意义：“这是高音谱号！低音谱号！没有升号和降号的，就是C调。
喏，跟着我。
”随后他弹了几个C调音阶，一组简单的和弦，然后似受一种无法抑制的渴望所激动，他的手指在琴键上按了更多的和弦，仿佛是感情的迸发和泛滥，他弹出了令人神魂震荡、形销骨立的颤音，接着又加进了低音，整个气氛，颇有一种豪迈的，雷霆万钧的浑厚气概。
我就跟着他，先是简单的音阶和和弦，接着，就有点胡闹了，只是些杂乱的噪声，那声音，活像一只猫在垃圾洞顶上窜蹦不停。
老钟却大声叫好：“好！非常好，但要学会掌握弹奏的速度。
”他这一说，倒让我发现了，他的目力也不行了，来不及对照谱子来核准我有无按出正确的音符。
他的目光要比我弹奏的速度慢半拍。
他在教我弹奏琶音时，便在我手腕处放上几个硬币，以此训练我的手腕保持平衡。
在弹奏和弦时，则要求我的手握成个空圆弧状，有如手心里握着一只苹果。
然后，他又示范给我看，如何令每一个手指，都像一个独立的小兵似的，服从大脑的指挥。
在他教会我这一整套技巧时，我也学会了如何偷懒，并掩盖自己的失误。
如果我按错了一个琴键，我从来不去纠正，只是坦然地接着往下弹。
而老钟，则自顾往下指挥着他自己的无声的音乐。
或许，我确实没有好好地下过功夫，否则，我想我极有可能在这方面有所作为的；或许我真的会成为一个少年钢琴家。
就我这样学钢琴，也很快地掌握了基本的要领和技巧。
可我实在太执拗，那么顽固地拒绝与众不同，所以我只学会弹震耳欲聋的前奏曲和最最不和谐的赞美诗。
我就这样我行我素地学了一年。
一天礼拜结束后，听到妈和琳达姨正在互相用一种炫耀的口气吹嘘着各自的女儿。
“哎，薇弗莱捧回来的奖品实在太多了，”琳达姨以一种似是抱怨，实在是夸耀的口吻说，“她自己整天只顾着下棋，我可忙坏了。
每天，就光擦拭她捧回的那些奖品，就够我忙的了。
”薇弗莱与我同年。
我俩从小一起玩耍，就像姐妹一样，我们也吵架，也争夺过彩色蜡笔和洋娃娃。
换句话说，我们并不太友好。
我认为她太傲慢了。
薇弗莱的名气很大，有“唐人街最小的棋圣”之称。
琳达姨得意地抱怨了一番后，长长地嘘了一口气，对妈说：“你真福气，你可没这种烦心事。
”“谁说呀，”妈妈高高地耸起了双肩，以一种得意的无奈说，“我可比你还要烦心呢。
我们的精美，满耳只有音乐，叫她洗盆子，你叫哑了嗓子她也听不见。
有啥办法，她天生这样一副对音乐失魂落魄的模样！”就是这时，我萌生出个报复的念头，以制止她这种令人可笑的攀比。
几星期后，老钟和我妈试图要我在一次联谊会上登一次台，这次联谊会将在教堂大厅里举行。
那阵，父母已储足钱为我买了架旧钢琴，那是一架黑色的乌立兹牌，连带一张有疤痕的琴凳。
它也是我们起居室的摆设。
在那次联谊会上，我将演奏舒曼的《请愿的孩童》。
这是一首忧郁的弹奏技巧简单的曲子，但听起来还是像很有点难度的。