In "two kinds" why does the mother take the daughter to the mission district to get her hair curled

The answer is to make them look like Shirley Temple.
Shirley Temple used to be one of America's best actress. In the story of Two Kinds, Jing Mei's mother wanted her to become the Chinese Shirley Temple. She had a great expectation on her daughter.

Base on my research  john berryman is  a talented scholar driven to write poetry, is best known for transforming his personal suffering into verse. like robert frost and randall jarrell, he loved teaching poetry and felt most at home with literature and the humanities while  bradstreet enjoyed a relatively privileged life in england, but at the age of eighteen she, her husband, and her parents sailed with john winthrop for the puritan settlement at massachusetts bay.