Amy Tan uses her own experiences as being a Chinese American. Jing-Mei wants nothing but to be herself. She feels as if her mother is not happy with her as a person. “Why don’t you like me the way I am? I’m not a genius! I can’t play the piano.” (Tan 1120) Jing-Mei just wanted to live her life as a regular American teenager. Instead her mother wanted her to be a pianist, and prodigy. “My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America,” Suyuan did not have the opportunity to be what she wanted to be, due to the fact that she got pregnant. It is almost like Suyuan Woo wants to live through her