Amy Tan’s short story “Two Kinds” is at its core a story about grief. She has set up a nonlinear narrative in two parts: in the current day (presumably 1989) and approximately 25 years prior, when the narrator was nine years old. The narrator imparts facts about other times (i.e. 1949), but the plot and narrative itself is constrained to these two timelines.

The story begins with a short description of the mother, Suyuan, and what her life was like before moving to the United States and having Jing-mei. By framing the story this way, Tan emphasizes the distance from which this narrative will be told; this is not a story about a child’s relationship with her mother told from the perspective of that child, but rather a story told by that child once she has grown up and had a chance to process her feelings.

The grief is also twofold; it manifests both in the mother’s story, through her past trauma in China of losing her first family, and in the daughter’s story, of losing her innocence, her confidence, and her trust in adults and herself. This story addresses the moment Jing-mei becomes aware of herself and her own limitations: “In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations” (26).