In Amy Tan's "Two Kinds," Jing-Mei fails miserably when she plays piano in front of an audience. She thought playing wonderfully in front of an audience was going to be easy:
...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 to myself, This is it! This is it!
But when her performance begins she is so into how beautiful she looks, and she is such a poor player because she has not practised seriously, that first she hits one bad note, then another and another. She thinks that somehow her hands will just magically correct themselves and the errors will stop, but they don't. When she sees her mother's face she feels the shame she has caused her.
Her deaf piano teacher is exposed when he claps wildly and praises her, just as Jing-Mei and her mother are exposed.
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