TOP GIRLS PLAY ANALYSIS FULL
Now that Angie is coming into her own womanhood, she is full of rage, brimming with questions, and in dire need of guidance. Marlene’s sister Joyce has, for the last sixteen years, been raising Marlene’s daughter, Angie, as her own. However, for all her financial and corporate success, Marlene’s dark past constantly threatens to unseat her from all she has worked for. As the play unfolds, Marlene is shown to be an adroit, smart, cunning, and sharp-tongued woman, and a powerful individual at Top Girls. To celebrate, she convenes a dinner party at a chic London restaurant-but rather than inviting friends, family, or coworkers, Marlene is surrounded only by women plucked from history and legend alike. One message of Tan’s ‘Two Kinds’ is that you cannot force someone to be free: they have to embrace it and define it in their own way, otherwise it is not worthy of being called freedom.The protagonist of the play, Marlene is a high-ranking official at the Top Girls Employment Agency in London, and, at the start of the action, has just received an important promotion. Except, of course, Jing-mei doesn’t want them, because they’re not her ambitions.
TOP GIRLS PLAY ANALYSIS FREE
Instead, she had to live out her own thwarted ambitions through someone who is, now, free to pursue them.
Her journey mirrors her mother’s, oddly, in that they have both had to struggle out of situations where they were not allowed to be free, but the difference is that Jing-mei embraces her freedom whereas her mother didn’t know what to do with hers. Jing-mei realises that doing your best and making yourself proud is the key to a happy life: trying to win talent shows or outdo other people (or, worse, other people’s children through your own child) is only going to leave you trapped in a perpetual cycle of goal-chasing and ambition-pursuing.Īnd yet, Amy Tan has Jing-mei point out that the latter was dependent on the former: in order to be fully content as an adult, she had to plead and fight for her own independence while growing up. These are the ‘Two Kinds’ of person she has been: she had to struggle slowly through the years as a pleading child longing for independence and the right to choose what she pursued, but now she has reached adulthood, she is indeed perfectly contented, in a way that her mother never could be. Yet Tan’s title ‘Two Kinds’ does itself have two kinds of meaning: it can also refer to the final section of the story, in which Jing-mei discovers the other piece of music from the talent show, and realises – in a moment laden (perhaps too conveniently) with symbolism – that ‘Pleading Child’ is complemented by ‘Perfectly Contented’. Ironically, her mother has fled a totalitarian state only to set up a petty tyrannical regime in her own home (you can take the girl out of Communism, but …).
The story’s title, ‘Two Kinds’, is ostensibly explained by the mother’s comment to her daughter that there are two kinds of daughter: obedient and free-thinking. She wants an opportunity to confront her mother and air her frustration at having to live out her mother’s own fantasies by becoming a child prodigy. It is significant that, after the talent show, Jing-mei is disappointed that her mother doesn’t shout angrily at her when they get home. This becomes obvious when Jing-mei overhears her mother boasting to a friend, Lindo Jong, about her daughter’s natural talent for music, and she realises that her mother is only making her learn the piano so she can brag to other mothers about how talented her daughter is.
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