to meet up to her mother’s standards but no matter how hard she tries, she doesn’t succeed.

How does the narrator’s tone shift during this scene?
At first, she was peacefully playing her song, and while not caring about how she sounded, she was enjoying how beautiful she looked while all of a sudden she hit a wrong note and she kept hitting one wrong note after the other. All of her confidence and her peacefulness was gone and unlike how she thought that she wouldn’t care if she messes up, she got really nervous and started shaking. Even though at first she wasn’t even trying to be good, eventually she wanted to be good and she was trying her best to be good. Her tone switches from a calm tone to a very nervous and stressful tone.

Why do you think Tan uses fragments to describe the acts in the show?
This novel excerpt is in informal voice and using fragments makes her sentences sound more casual. Also, by separating the acts using fragments, she draws your full attention to all of them individually but if she was to put them all together in once sentence you would most likely not pay as much attention to the acts that she is mentioning.

What shift is happening here and how is it related to the central conflict in...