The Joy Luck Club 8

This chapter tells the story of Jing-Mei Woo, the character from the first chapter.

This chapter really proves the point that I had originally presented in my first post: there is a very dysfunctional situation in this family.

Jing-Mei's mother had different ideas and thoughts about everything than Jing-Mei. She believed that Jing-Mei could be anything she wanted and make something of herself because America was a land of opportunity and freedom. She had never done anything great herself, so she pushed all of her dreams and desires onto her daughter and hoped that she would be a prodigy. 

After a while, Jing-Mei decides that she doesn't want to be what her mother keeps trying to force her to be. She just wants to be a normal person and doesn't want to achieve because her mother keeps trying to make her into something that she is not.

Soon after Jing-Mei stops trying to complete her mother's little tests, she thinks that it is over. Unfortunately, she finds that her mother will never stop. She becomes convinced that Jing-Mei will become an amazing pianist and will conquer the keys in order to show off to Auntie Lindo!

Jing-Mei finds a way to avoid having to actually play completely correctly as she practices with her deaf piano teacher, thus avoiding fulfilling her mother's expectations. When she enters a talent show, she must play a song called "Pleading Child". This is a SYMBOL for Jing-Mei's side that she tries to show her mother as she wishes to just be herself. She fails horribly when she plays this, and her mother gives up on Jing-Mei, to the point where it seems as though she no longer cares.

The chapter ends with Jing-Mei picking up the piano from her mother's home after she has passed away and looking back at the old pieces she had to play. She sees the book with the piece she played for the concert and sees that the opposite page has a song called "Perfectly Contented". She plays this piece along with "Pleading Child" and realizes that they are both halves of the same song. This is a SYMBOL, showing that these were both parts of Jing-Mei. 

I have chosen this quote for the chapter: "For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me."

This quote best describes the entire occurrences of this chapter. Jing-Mei purposely fails because she does not want to be a product of her mother's insistence on being "special".