Tan's experience with the piano underscores the stark contrast between the way her mother believed fame and fortune work in America, and the way she believed they worked. She writes, "Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me. And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible declarations afterward at the piano bench.... So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable," (Tan). To Tan, the goals associated with the American dream were simply so lofty, and so exaggerated, that assessing blame to the individual for failing to live-up to them was completely unjustified. Still, to the very end -- even though her mother eventually stopped pushing her to become a prodigy -- her mother held the belief...
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