argumentative essay about mother tongue

A Summary and Analysis of Amy Tan’s ‘Mother Tongue’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Mother Tongue’ is an essay by Amy Tan, an American author who was born to Chinese immigrants in 1952. Tan wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ in 1990, a year after her novel The Joy Luck Club was a runaway success. In the essay, Tan discusses her relationship with language, and how her mother’s influence has shaped her use of English, as well as her attitude to it.

You can read ‘Mother Tongue’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Amy Tan’s essay below.

‘Mother Tongue’: summary

Amy Tan begins her essay by offering her personal opinions on the English language. She recalls a recent talk she gave, when, upon realising her mother was in the audience, she was confronted with the fact that the formal standard English she was using in the public talk was at odds with the way she spoke at home with her mother. She then contrasts this with a moment when she was walking down the street with her mother and she used the more clipped, informal English she naturally uses with her mother, and her husband.

Tan calls this a ‘language of intimacy’. She points out that her mother is intelligent and reads things which Tan herself cannot begin to understand. But many people who hear her mother speak can only partially understand what she is saying, and some even say they can understand nothing of what she says, as if she were speaking pure Chinese to them.

Tan calls this clipped informal language her ‘mother tongue’, because it was the first language she learned and it helped to shape the way she saw the world and made sense of it.

Tan notes the difficulty of finding a term to describe the style of English her mother, as a Chinese immigrant to the United States, speaks. Many of the terms, such as ‘broken’ or ‘limited’, are too negative and imply her English is imperfect.

She acknowledges that when she was growing up, she was ashamed of the way her mother spoke. Her mother, too, was clearly aware of how her use of the language affected how seriously people took her, for she used to get her daughter to phone people and pretend to be ‘Mrs Tan’.

She observes that her mother is treated differently because of the way she speaks. She recounts a time when the doctors at the hospital were unsympathetic towards her mother when they lost the results of the CAT scan they had undertaken on her brain, but as soon as the hospital – at her mother’s insistence – called her daughter, they issued a grovelling apology.

Amy Tan also believes her mother’s English affected her daughter’s school results. Tan acknowledges that, whilst she did well in maths and science, subjects with a single correct answer, she was less adept at English. She struggled with tests which asked students to pick a correct word to fill in the blanks in a sentence because she was distracted by the imaginative and poetic possibilities of other words.

Indeed, Tan conjectures that many Asian American children are probably encouraged to pursue careers in jobs requiring maths and science rather than English for this reason. But because she is rebellious and likes to challenge people’s assumptions about her, Tan bucked this trend. She majored in English at college and began writing as a freelancer.

She began writing fiction in 1985, and after several false starts trying to find her own style and idiom, she began to write with her mother in mind as the ideal reader for her stories. Indeed, her mother read drafts of her work.

And Tan drew on all the Englishes , plural, that she knew: the ‘broken’ English her mother used, the ‘simple’ English Tan used when talking to her mother, the ‘watered-down’ Chinese her mother used, and her mother’s ‘internal’ language which conveyed her passion, intent, imagery, and the nature of her thoughts. When her mother told her that what she had written was easy to read, Tan knew that she had succeeded in her aims as a writer.

‘Mother Tongue’: analysis

The title of Amy Tan’s essay is a pun on the expression ‘mother tongue’, referring to one’s first language. But Tan’s language, or ‘tongue’, has been shaped by her actual mother, whose first language (or mother tongue) was not English, but Chinese.

The different forms of English that mother and daughter speak are also a product of their backgrounds: whilst Tan’s mother is a Chinese immigrant to America, Tan was born in the United States and has grown up, and been educated, in an English-speaking culture.

Much of Tan’s 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club is about daughters and their relationships with their mothers. But Tan’s interest in language, both as a cultural marker and as a way of expressing thought and personality, is also a prevailing theme of the novel.

In this respect, if the parable ‘ Feathers from a Thousand Li Away ’ acts as preface to the novel, ‘Mother Tongue’, in effect, acts as a kind of postscript. It helps us to understand the way Tan approaches and uses language within the stories that make up The Joy Luck Club .

An overarching theme of Tan’s novel is mothers emigrating to America in the hope that their daughters will have better lives than they did. This is a key part of ‘Feathers from a Thousand Li Away’, and it helps us to understand Tan’s conflicted attitude towards her mother’s use of language as explored in ‘Mother Tongue’.

Many of the mothers in The Joy Luck Club , such as Betty St. Clair in ‘The Voice from the Wall’, feel isolated from those around them, never at home in America, and hyper-aware of their outsider status, despite becoming legal permanent citizens in the country. Tan’s autobiographical revelations in ‘Mother Tongue’ show us that her own mother struggled to be taken seriously among Americans, and Tan diagnoses this struggle as a result of her mother’s different way of speaking.

Tan, by contrast, used standard English – what used to be referred to, in loaded phrases, as ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ English – and was thus able to succeed in getting herself, and by extension her mother, taken seriously by others. Language is thus more than just a cultural marker: Tan reveals, in ‘Mother Tongue’, the extent to which it is a tool of power (or, depending on the use, powerlessness), particularly for those from migrant backgrounds.

In this connection, it is noteworthy that Tan chooses to focus on the school tests she undertook before concluding that her mother’s ‘broken’ style of English has been misunderstood – not just literally (by some people who’ve known her), but in terms of the misleading perceptions of her it has led others to formulate.

The class tests at school which reduced English proficiency to an ability to recognise a ‘correct’ answer are thus contrasted with Tan’s resounding final words of ‘Mother Tongue’, which see her seeking to capture the passion of her mother, the ‘nature of her thoughts’, and the imagery she uses: all things which her daughter has clearly inherited a respect for, and which school tests fail to capture or observe.

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Mother Tongue

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Amy Tan's Mother Tongue . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Mother Tongue: Introduction

Mother tongue: plot summary, mother tongue: detailed summary & analysis, mother tongue: themes, mother tongue: quotes, mother tongue: characters, mother tongue: terms, mother tongue: symbols, mother tongue: theme wheel, brief biography of amy tan.

Historical Context of Mother Tongue

Other books related to mother tongue.

• Full Title: Mother Tongue
• When Written: 1989
• When Published: 1990
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Essay, Memoir
• Setting: Oakland, California; San Francisco, California; New York City, New York
• Climax: Tan’s mother attends one of her talks about The Joy Luck Club .
• Antagonist: Societal ignorance and bias
• Point of View: First Person

Extra Credit for Mother Tongue

Sagwa. Tan’s 1994 children’s book, The Chinese Siamese Cat , was adapted for television and broadcast by PBS as “Sagwa The Chinese Siamese Cat.” First aired in 2001, the series follows Sagwa, the protagonist kitten, on her adventures as a palace cat in historic China.

Music. Tan’s talents aren’t limited to pen and paper. A member of the band “Rock Bottom Remainders” since 1993, Tan has performed with fellow authors Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Scott Turow.

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3.3: Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue"

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Here, you will find the readings "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan.

The articles are .docx. file or posted on a website. I recommend either printing it our, or annotating the digital copy on your computer, or taking notes on the story on a separate piece of paper.

While reading the articles, keep these questions/ideas in mind:

• What is identity?
• What aspect of identity does Tan discuss?
• How does Tan's experiences with racism change her?
• How does Tan's experiences with language define her?
• What is her "mother's tongue?" What does it mean to her?
• How does education shape Tan?
• How does Tan's refusal to listen to stereotypes make her into the person that she is today?

Essay Topic

As a reminder, your essay topic is: How are identities shaped/constructed? What factors shape the authors identity? What factors shape your own?

(Example: "Identities are constructed through overcoming obstacles, becoming in-touch with one's culture, having a connection to one's family, and by accepting oneself for who they are." OR "Identities are shaped by our family, culture, religion, and education")

"Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan.docx

Video Lecture-"Mother Tongue- 00:06:15

CC Shared by https://english.washington.edu/sites/english/files/documents/ewp/teaching_resources/amy_tan_s_mother_tongue.pdf

Links to an external site.

Exploring Language and Identity: Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" and Beyond

• Resources & Preparation
• Instructional Plan
• Related Resources

In the essay “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan explains that she “began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with.” How these “different Englishes” or even a language other than English contribute to identity is a crucial issue for adolescents. In this lesson, students explore this issue by brainstorming the different languages they use in speaking and writing, and when and where these languages are appropriate. They write in their journals about a time when someone made an assumption about them based on their use of language, and share their writing with the class. Students then read and discuss Amy Tan's essay “Mother Tongue.” Finally, they write a literacy narrative describing two different languages they use and when and where they use these languages.

Featured Resources

Discussion Questions for "Mother Tongue" : Have students discuss Amy Tan's essay in small groups, using these discussion questions.

Literacy Narrative Assignment : This handout describes an assignment in which students write a literacy narrative exploring their use of different language in different settings.

From Theory to Practice

NCTE has long held a commitment to the importance of individual student's language choices. In the 1974 Resolution on the Students' Right to Their Own Language , council members "affirm[ed] the students' right to their own language-to the dialect that expresses their family and community identity, the idiolect that expresses their unique personal identity." The Council reaffirmed this resolution in 2003 , "because issues of language variation and education continue to be of major concern in the twenty-first century to educators, educational policymakers, students, parents, and the general public."

Rebecca Wheeler and Rachel Swords assert that: "the child who speaks in a vernacular dialect is not making language errors; instead, she or he is speaking correctly in the language of the home discourse community. Teachers can draw upon the language strengths of urban learners to help students codeswitch-choose the language variety appropriate to the time, place, audience, and communicative purpose. In doing so, we honor linguistic and cultural diversity, all the while fostering students' mastery of the Language of Wider Communication, the de-facto lingua franca of the U.S."

This lesson focuses on ways to investigate the issues of language and identity in the classroom in ways that validate the many languages that students use. To help students gain competence in their ability to choose the right language usage for each situation, explorations of language and identity in the classroom are vital in raising students' awareness of the languages they use and the importance of the decisions that they make as they communicate with others.

Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 1. Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works.
• 4. Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
• 9. Students develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles.
• 10. Students whose first language is not English make use of their first language to develop competency in the English language arts and to develop understanding of content across the curriculum.
• 11. Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

Materials and Technology

• Copy of "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan
• Blue pens, Black pens, and pencils (optional)
• Discussion Questions for "Mother Tongue"
• Literacy Narrative Assignment
• Essay Rubric
• Student Self-Assessment

Preparation

• Arrange for copies of the essay "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan. The essay is widely anthologized. It was originally published in The Threepenny Review in 1990.
• Make an overhead transparency of the Discussion Questions for "Mother Tongue," or arrange for an LCD projector to show the questions to the class.
• Make copies of the Literacy Narrative Assignment , Literacy Narrative Rubric , and Student Self-Assessment .
• Test the Venn Diagram on your computers to familiarize yourself with the tools and ensure that you have the Flash plug-in installed. You can download the plug-in from the technical support page.

Student Objectives

Students will

• develop critical reading strategies.
• discuss and evaluate the impact of language on identity formation and self-esteem of several writers.
• expand their awareness of the role language plays in identity formation.
• write their own literacy narratives.

Session One

What are the different "languages" you use? When and why? Consider both reading and writing, and don't forget about email! If you speak another language, include it (or possibly them if you know more than one).

• Encourage students to read their responses aloud.
• As they do, keep track on the board or on an overhead transparency of the different "languages" they are describing.
• Discuss the interaction of language usage and choice with audience and occasion by focusing on the examples the students have provided.
• For homework, ask students to write a journal entry that describes a time when someone made assumptions or even a judgment (negative or positive) about them based on their language usage (written or spoken). For those who say they've never had such an experience, suggest writing about a situation they've observed involving someone else.

Session Two

• Open the class by asking volunteers to share their journal entries.
• Look for similarities among the experiences students describe, and discuss them as a group. Ask whether they notice stereotypes at work in the situations they describe.
• If students have access to the Internet, introduce Amy Tan by sharing audio and video clips of her talking and reading. Biographical information about Amy Tan can be found at Bookreporter.com .
• Hand out copies of "Mother Tongue," and read the first two paragraphs aloud.
• Discuss why Tan opens with an explanation of what she is not .
• Read the next two paragraphs. Ask students to explain what Tan means by "different Englishes."
• Shift the discussion by asking why Tan speaks a "different English" with her mother than with her husband. Ask students to consider whether doing so is hypocritical.
• Assign the remainder of the essay as reading for homework.

Session Three

• What point is Tan making with the example of her mother and the hospital?
• What point is she making with the example of the stockbroker?
• Tan says that experts believe that a person's "developing language skills are more influenced by peers," yet she thinks that family is more influential, "especially in immigrant families." Do you think family or peers exert more influence on a person's language?
• Why does Tan discuss the SAT and her performance on it?
• Why does she envision her mother as the reader of her novels?
• After about 15 minutes, ask each group to explain their responses to the questions. Encourage them to support their responses with specific reference to Tan's essay.
• Ask them to write notes and ideas in their journals using the Literacy Narrative Assignment . Stress that students are only gathering ideas. They are not creating the polished essay at this point.

Session Four

• Open by discussing the assignment itself. Explain that a literacy narrative tells a specific story about reading or writing. Tan's article is essentially a literacy narrative because it discusses events about language use from her past (whether good or bad) and reflects on how those events influence her writing today.
• If desired, ask students to choose examples from the essay that connect writing from Tan's past to her present.
• Pass out copies of the Essay Rubric , and discuss the required components for the finished paper.
• Discuss the possibilities that students raised in their journal entries.
• To begin developing ideas further, ask students to use the Venn Diagram to map and compare the two "languages" that they will explore in their essays. Ask them to think creatively about the qualities and characteristics of the "languages."
• Allow students time to work on their literacy narratives in class.
• Assign a draft of the literacy narrative as homework; each student should bring his or her draft to the next class session (on a disk if you are working in a computer lab, or a printed copy otherwise).
• Additionally, if you are not working in a computer lab, ask students to bring a pencil, a black pen, and a blue pen to class.

Session Five

• Begin with a discussion of the problems students are encountering with the assignment.
• Brainstorm ways to address one or two of the challenges.
• Remind students of the criteria for the assignment in the Literacy Narrative Essay Rubric . For the peer review, ask students to compare the drafts that they read to the characteristics described in the rubric.
• Each student will read three papers, each written by someone else.
• On the first paper that you read, make your comments with your black ink pen or in bold.
• On the second paper, make your comments with the blue ink pen or in italics.
• On the third paper, make your comments with your pencil or with underlined letters.
• Finally, you'll return to your own essay and read over the comments.
• Arrange the students in small groups of four, having students rotate the drafts among group members as they read and respond. Adjust groupings as needed to accommodate the number of students in your class.
• Once students have read and responded to all the drafts, discuss questions, comments, and concerns students have as they prepare to revise.
• Encourage students to pay particular attention to comments that all of their peer readers agreed upon when reading their drafts.
• For homework, have students create their final, polished draft of the literacy narratives. Collect the papers at the beginning of the next session.
• To explore a more controversial response to language usage, students might read "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is" by African American author James Baldwin. Written before the term "ebonics" came into usage, it is a brief but highly political argument about the link between language and identity and the damage school systems can cause by privileging one language (or dialect) over another. It can be found in the New York Times archives (29 July 1979, page E19).
• Students also might examine a passage from the fiction of Cormac McCarthy, Sandra Cisneros, or another author who includes Spanish in his or her work—without translating it. What is the effect on a reader who does not know Spanish? What might be the purpose of an author making the decision to write whole sections in Spanish?
• To pursue the link between power and language, students might read the poem "Parsley" by Rita Dove. It explores the historical incident in which the Dominical Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo used the pronunciation of the word "parsley" to separate Dominicans who speak Spanish from the persecuted Haitians who speak a French Creole (a topic Edwidge Danticat takes up in her novel The Farming of Bones ).

Student Assessment / Reflections

Observe students for their participation during the exploration and discussion of Tan’s essay and their own language use. In class discussions and conferences, watch for evidence that students are able to describe specific details about their language use. Monitor students’ progress and process as they work on their lilteracy narratives. For formal assessment, use the Literacy Narrative Rubric . Ask students to complete the Student Self-Assessment to reflect on their exploration of language and their literacy narratives.

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Mother Tongue

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Summary and Study Guide

Summary: “mother tongue”.

“Mother Tongue” explores Amy Tan’s relationship with the English language, her mother, and writing. This nonfiction narrative essay was originally given as a talk during the 1989 State of the Language Symposium; it was later published by The Threepenny Review in 1990. Since then, “Mother Tongue” has been anthologized countless times and won notable awards and honors, including being selected for the 1991 edition of Best American Essays .

The original publication of “Mother Tongue,” which this study guide refers to, breaks the essay into three sections. In the first Tan briefly primes the reader on her relationship with “different Englishes” (7). Tan bridges the first and second parts of the essay with descriptions of her “mother’s English,” or her “mother tongue” (7). In the second section Tan describes the impact her mother’s language had on her; Tan’s mother is a Chinese immigrant who often relied on her daughter to produce “perfect English” (7). In the concluding section Tan then connects her mother’s English to Tan’s own choices regarding writing style and career.

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In the initial section of “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan locates her position as “a writer… someone who has always loved language” (7). She describes the multiple Englishes that she uses, from formal academic language to the English she uses with her mother to the English she uses at home with her husband. The section concludes with Tan’s description of her mother’s “expressive command of English” (7), which is in conflict with her mother’s fluency in the language. Although her mother might speak English that is difficult for native speakers to understand, to Tan, her mother’s language is “vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery” (7).

As Tan moves through the second section of “Mother Tongue,” she describes some of the more difficult aspects of being raised by a parent who spoke English that others struggled to understand. Tan references the oft-used language of “broken” English and suggests that her mother’s English and way of speaking, despite its obvious interpersonal and social limitations (including harming Tan’s performance on such metrics as standardized tests), provided Tan a different semantic way of understanding the world.

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The final section of “Mother Tongue” transitions into personal reflection as Tan describes how she has reckoned with being raised by her mother in a xenophobic society. As a writer, Tan only found success when she moved away from more proper, academic register and instead wrote “in the Englishes [she] grew up with” (8). The essay concludes with Tan’s mother’s opinion about Tan’s most famous novel, The Joy Luck Club , in which Tan attempted to write in this fashion. Her mother’s “verdict: ‘So easy to read’” (8).

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Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” : Rhetorical Analysis

In the essay Mother Tongue , Amy Tan believes that everyone speaks different languages in certain settings and are labeled by the way they speak. The author interested by how language is utilized in our daily life” and uses language as a daily part of her work as a writer. Throughout her life she recognizes her struggles applying proper English instead of the broken used in her home.

She became aware of how she spoke was when giving a lecture about her book The Joy Club and realized her mother who was in the audience did not understand what was being discussed. This was because she never used proper English in her home or talking to her mother. It is her belief utilizing proper English and broken English is essential in communication depending who you are talking to. The next time she noticed this about her English was when walking with her parents, she made the statement “not waste money that way”. This is due to the language barrier in her household that is used only by her family. Her mother was raised in China and spoke Mandarin her English always came across as broken to everyone outside the family, which made it hard for her to understand when someone spoke proper English.

Amy insured everyone that met her mother’s that even though her English seem “broken” it does not reflect her intelligence. Even though people placed this label on her mother of the way she spoke she rejected the idea that her mother English is “limited”. She highlights the fact that even her mother recognizes that her opportunities and interactions in life are limited by the English language. Amy Tan realizes that how you communicate within the family dynamic, especially for immigrant families plays a large role in in the growth of the child. It allowed her to acknowledge that perhaps her family’s language had an effect on the opportunities she was provided in her life. For instance in her experience, she notices that Asian students actually do better in math tests than in language tests, and she questions whether or not other Asian students are discouraged from writing or directed in the direction of math and science. Tan changed her major from pre-med to English and she decided to become a freelance writer even though her boss told her she couldn’t write. She eventually went on to write fiction , she celebrates the fact that she did not follow the expectations that people had of her because of her struggle with writing and language. With her mother as an influence Tan decided to write her stories for people like her, people with “broken” or “limited” English. In the essay , Mother Tongue, Amy Tan goes to great length to persuade the readers of her experiences being multicultural family that the effectiveness and the price an individual pays by insuring that their ideas and intents do not change due to the way they speak, whether they use “perfect” or “broken” English. Tan also clarifies to the readers that her “mother’s expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands”. She uses many examples to take readers into her life experiences to discover this truth. She utilizes the first person view throughout the essay and adds her firsthand knowledge of growing up with a multiple languages spoken in the home. This was done to validate of her argument and shine a light on the importance of this issue in her life as well as her culture.

The examples she uses is when she tells a story of her mother’s struggles with a stockbroker because of her “broken “ English, Tan quotes her mother’s words “Why he not send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money”. Amy Tan did this to give the readers an idea on how this particular situation played out and how her mother’s English affected outcome. The authors writing is also very emotional and somewhat angry at throughout the essay , it makes her and her family very sympathetic figures. Tan’s specific concern is being shunned by both white-America and the Asian population. This also further her strengthen her views that puts her in an equally frustrating position from the perspective of Americans with the stereotypical views of Asians. Many people in college looked at her funny for being an English major instead of Math as a major. Individuals of Chinese decent are associated with math or science and that is because of the stereotyping that Asian receive. This is based on studies being conducted that a majority of Asians do in fact excel in mathematics and sciences.

Amy also observed that many of her instructors towards math and science as well and was even told by a former boss that writing was not biggest attribute and should focus more onto her account management skills. The author states that “perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me”. The author utilized the nonfiction essay form to discuss how language played a major role in her life. This also allowed her to show the readers how her relationship with the English language and her mother has changed over the years. In her essay , Mother Tongue Amy Tan describes numerous incidences that helped shape her views as a writer. The uses of first persons account to describe her experiences with her mother and how her mother’s use of the English language influenced her upbringing, such as a story her mother once told her about a guest at her mother’s wedding “Du Yusong having business like fruit stand. Like off-the-street kind. He is Du like Du Zong – but not Tsung-ming Island people….That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn’t look down on him, but didn’t take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Now important person, very hard to inviting him. She may have chosen to focus on this type sentence structure because it gave the readers sense of awareness into her life and also to make it easier for them to understand the factors that shaped her style as a writer. In conclusion after reading Mother Tongue, it became very apparent that her mother played an important part in the author’s life. However, after further reading, I determined that she could have been addressing a specific group of people. She is also explaining her story to people who read her works, since so much of her literature seems to be influenced by how she views of the English language. Amy Tan goes to great lengths in the essay to give bits and pieces of how she overcame the perception that many people had of her, since she did not do as well with English-related schooling as she did with the Sciences, or Math.

Mother Tongue Analysis Essay

Introduction.

Over time, language has played a fundamental role in various societies across the globe. From enhancing simple things like general communication to creating a viable environment for social, economic, political and economic growth, language and literature have become very crucial tools in the growth of human life through constant progress. It is based on these reasons that some important aspects of language will be analyzed in this paper.

In essence, this paper seeks to analyze the essay Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, in which various aspects of language and rhetorical evaluation are detailed. It is important to note that Amy Tan not only uses the article to give us an insight into her world of writing and the continuous commitments she made to better her mastery of the English language, but she also expresses different rhetorical values and emotional aspects of her mother tongue that greatly helped in advancing her expertise in English and literature. It is upon these features of her language learning that the rhetorical evaluation, in this paper, will be done.

Topic Statement: An individual’s mother tongue contributes greatly to the advancement of one’s expertise and mastery of language and literature.

Thesis Statement: Even though there are many aspects and characteristics of mother tongue that are important in facilitating skill in language and literature, the most important ones are the educational qualifications and academic expertise, mastery in the use of emotions to express ideas, and the appeal to shared values of the audience.

Brief Summary of the Essay

In brief, the essay is a literary account given by Amy Tan about her life and how she gradually learned various aspects of the English language. Some of these issues include the differences between her “professional” English (the English she spoke at official forums like lectures or when writing) and her “intimate” English (the English she spoke at home with family and friends), the language and literature challenges brought by her mother tongue (Chinese) in speaking good English, and how we should generally strive to use simple English (or any language, for that matter) that is easy to understand by both native and non-native English speakers.

In expressing these important facts, ideas, notions and opinions, Amy Tan personalizes her talk by using her literature audience, her mother and her husband as examples of her mother tongue influence on her English.

These personal accounts of her life and the people close to her greatly help in passing the intended message to the readers since many people, especially audiences that use English as a second language, can easily relate to her personal experiences.

Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies

Is the author qualified.

Considering the fact that Amy Tan is not a native English speaker, she has strived to master the English language to the point that she earns a living out of her writings like the Joy Luck Club; it is evidently clear that she is indeed highly qualified as a good English writer and speaker.

In addition, Amy Tan’s good qualifications are demonstrated by the fact that she has been able to give over half a dozen talks to different groups of people on how to improve on their English. Furthermore, Amy is not a professional, she would have not been able to give these many lectures in an efficient way.

Finally, Amy Tan’s qualification and trustworthiness as an effective English communicator are made clear when her mother, who has a “limited” skills in English, is able to read Amy’s book until she gives the verdict “so easy to read”.

Does the author appeal to the shared values of her audience?

To a great extent, Amy Tan appeals to the shared values of her targeted audience, people whose English speaking or writing skills are somewhat influenced by their mother tongue. This literary appeal is, essentially, the reason Amy’s mother is able to read her book in an easy way.

Again, despite the influence of her Chinese mother tongue, Amy Tan still manages to master the English language and gives lectures to a professional audience while ensuring that she follows all the necessary English speaking skills principles.

As we move towards the end of her essay, Amy embraces the need to find a way of communicating and appealing specifically to audiences like her mother who needed simple English, the English that she grew up with. Being able to appeal to the values of both complex and simple English audiences is undoubtedly a great literary skill.

However, it is worth stating that there are some sections of the essay where Amy admits that her initial writings were majorly based on her life experiences and her environment. In as much as this may be viewed as a good thing, the writings do not entirely represent the happenings in other places that people struggle with the influence of mother tongue on their English. For example, the family routines, while she was growing up or the “judgment” calls she made when faced with tricky English tests, are not the same for all non-native English speakers.

Does the author use emotions effectively?

Amy Tan’s many adventures and experiences as she strived to learn English evoke a lot of feelings. For example, when she felt mad and rebellious when her mother did something that she thought was not good for her learning. On the other hand, she praises her mother and the influence of their mother tongue in shaping who she was as a writer.

There are also instances that Amy talks about how she felt about her writings and career progress as a writer. All these good and bad feelings clearly demonstrate her effectiveness as a speaker and writer on the use of emotions to make her readers feel or react to her work in a certain way.

Overall Evaluation of the Text’s Effectiveness

Through different language tools, personal experiences and literary expression of certain emotional issues, Amy Tan greatly communicates to her readers. Of course there are some instances in the essay that she overstates her experiences and opinions to the point of forgetting about her audiences and the need to be precise. Nonetheless, in overall, her essay can be said to be effective.

From the above analysis, it is evidently clear that a person’s qualifications and academic expertise, mastery in the use of emotions to express ideas, and the appeal to shared values of the targeted audience are key factors that greatly contribute towards the improvement or worsening of mother tongue’s influence on language mastery. For this reason, language learners should ensure that these aspects are keenly considered in their learning processes.

• Mother Tongue by Amy Tan: What Does Your Language Say about Your Identity?
• Amy Tan’s and Personal English Learning Experience
• "Mother Tongue" by Tan
• Hypothesis of the Pronunciation Words
• Bilingualism in East Asia Countries
• Differences in Languages between Arabic and English
• Multilingualism and Identity
• Korean and Japanese Honorific Systems
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Mother Tongue By Amy Tan Argumentative Essay

Type of paper: Argumentative Essay

Topic: Women , Family , Parents , Skills , Mother , English , Amy Tan , Language

Published: 11/14/2019

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‘Mother Tongue’ by Amy Tan is part personal memoir, part reflection on the “broken English” of her mother. Tan traces her own reaction to her mother’s use of English. As a child she was often embarrassed by her mother’s spoken English skills. As she was growing up she admits “I was ashamed of my mother’s English.” She describes with some humor making telephone calls on her mother’s behalf, pretending, for the sake of the call, that she was her mother. But she admits to feeling uncomfortable with calling her mother’s use of English “broken” or “ fractured” or “limited.” This is largely because her mother is clever; she simply lacks a grasp of idiomatic and colloquial English.

There is a very serious point to all this: if you dismiss someone’s English as “broken” it may lead you to dismiss the individual whose language is “limited” as somehow limited in their humanity. This point is shown in the anecdote about her mother waiting for the results of a brain scan. The hospital staff are distinctively unhelpful until they field a call from Amy Tan on her mother’s behalf, after which they treat her politely and courteously. Tan also uses this evidence about language skills to observe that while lots of Chinese Americans become engineers, there are very few who become writers. Tan herself admits to having problems on verbal achievement tests where her Math scores were always much better than her English ones.

Tan does have the refreshing ability to look at herself and criticize her own writing towards the end of the essay she takes a sentence from one of her early novels – The Joy Luck Club – and mocks its pretentiousness: “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state.” Since then, she argues, she has tried to write imagining that her mother is her potential reader and it has worked: Tan’s mother said of a more recent, unnamed work of Fiction, “So easy to read.” Tan seems to take pride in imitating her mother’s use of English, because of her mother’s “intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.”

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Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

What’s Spanish for ‘Chutzpah’?

This week’s announcements by the governments of Ireland, Norway and Spain that they will recognize a Palestinian state are drawing predictable reactions from predictable quarters. Some see them as useful rebukes to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war strategy in Gaza that will further isolate Israel. Others, including me, view them as feckless gestures that reward Hamas’s terrorism.

That’s a column for another day. For now, it’s enough to note the Spanish government’s sheer nerve.

Though Spanish public opinion overwhelmingly supports swift recognition of Palestinian statehood, it’s another story when it comes to Spain’s own independence movements. In 2017 the regional government of Catalonia held a referendum, declared illegal by Spain’s Constitutional Court , on the question of Catalan independence. Though turnout was low — in part because Spanish police forcibly blocked voting — the Catalan government said nearly 90 percent of voters favored independence.

The central government in Madrid responded by dismissing the Catalan government, imposing direct rule. Two years later, under the current left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez, Spain sentenced nine Catalan independence leaders to prison on charges of sedition, though they were later pardoned. This year the lower house of the Spanish Parliament voted to grant amnesty to those involved in the 2017 campaign as part of a deal to prop up Sánchez’s government, despite a Senate veto. Seventy percent of the Spanish public opposes the amnesty .

Catalans aren’t the only ethnic minority in Spain that has sought independence, only to encounter violent suppression. In the 1980s the Spanish Interior Ministry under a socialist government responded to the long-running Basque separatist movement with state-sponsored death squads, notoriously responsible for a string of kidnappings, tortures and assassinations. The Spanish government called the separatists terrorists — as indeed some were — though their tactics look tame compared with Hamas’s. By the time the conflict ended in 2011, it had claimed more than 1,000 lives.

Spain possesses two cities on the African continent, Ceuta and Melilla, both of which are claimed by Morocco and have been stormed by African migrants seeking entry into the European Union. They are protected by extensive border fences and fortifications strikingly reminiscent of Israel’s breached border fence with Gaza.

There are many other independence movements throughout Europe, from Scotland to Flanders to Corsica and the Balkans. Many of these movements tend to have affinities with Palestinians, for reasons that are obvious. More difficult to explain are governments that suppress independence seekers at home while applauding those abroad. Some might call it deflection. To others, it looks like hypocrisy.

Brent Staples

Editorial Board Member

Fixing the Calamity in U.S. Math Knowledge Starts With Algebra

The federal government made a disastrous choice a decade ago when it abandoned an accountability system (known as No Child Left Behind) that required schools to focus intently on helping the lowest-performing students catch up with their peers. Since then, the already alarming achievement gaps that separate poor and wealthy children have only widened.

Math scores have plummeted, raising fears that the United States is destined to fall permanently behind its competitor nations when it comes to preparing young people for careers in science, technology and engineering.

As Troy Closson of The Times wrote this week , some school systems have opted for policies that disguise the achievement gap without remedying it. A decade ago, for example, the San Francisco public schools responded to high failure rates and achievement gaps by moving algebra — which is foundational to the study of math — from eighth grade to ninth grade, meaning that no one was allowed to take the course in eighth grade simply because some students struggled with it.

This system wrote off poor students who might have benefited from exposure to new material and denied well-prepared children the opportunity to forge ahead in their studies. Not surprisingly, the policy failed to achieve its central goal, which was to close racial gaps in the taking of advanced math courses. Chastened by parental outrage, San Francisco reversed course .

Only about a quarter of American students study algebra in eighth grade . That proportion needs to grow. Fortunately a few states, including North Carolina and Texas , are adopting systems under which children who meet specified performance levels on state exams are automatically channeled into advanced math classes.

In Dallas there are no hoops to jump through. As The Dallas Morning News reported last year , young people no longer have to wait for counselors to recommend them or for parents who know little about how schools operate to sign them up. Students who were unaware that honors courses even existed are now being enrolled.

The gravest challenge facing the country today is redressing the devastating learning losses that children suffered during the Covid pandemic. Among other things, solving this problem will mean equipping teachers to manage classrooms that include students of different preparation levels.

One new study offers reason for optimism. It shows that students who would ordinarily be tracked into remedial work can perform well in algebra classes that include higher-performing peers — and experience broader academic success — when teachers are trained to handle heterogeneous groups and are given more time to prepare.

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Michelle Cottle

Opinion Writer

In the Bronx, Trump Imagines His New York Glory Days

Donald Trump is still such a New Yorker.

Rarely has this been clearer than at Thursday evening’s rally in the Bronx. Sure, his speech featured his usual campaign folderol: the “rigged election” lies, the claims of legal persecution, the scaremongering about migrants and, of course, the wild claims of how, during his presidency, America was richer, stronger, smarter, safer, more respected, more peaceful, more beautiful, sexier — all the things — than at any other point in the history of the planet.

But the parts that were a little different and that the former president clearly enjoyed the most were his rose-colored reminiscences about his years as a player in his hometown — back when most New Yorkers thought he was a harmless joke rather than a serious threat to American democracy.

Trump went on and on about the local landmarks he had worked to renovate and the big ol’ buildings he built, and he could not stop talking about his dealings with the city’s rough and tough contractors. “These are killers!” he gushed. “By comparison, talking to world leaders is, I believe, easier.” Or how about this bit of schmaltz? “I knew that if I could build a skyscraper in Manhattan, I could do anything.”

These tales of his past heroism and genius tended to be rambling to the point of incoherent and probably confused many people with their utter irrelevance to the presidential race at hand. But the guy was obviously having so much fun with them, he was practically glowing.

This was all history according to Trump, of course, meaning his many and varied business failures didn’t make the cut. The whole display was kinda goofy. But it was also a shrewd play to New Yorkers’ sense of exceptionalism.

The dark side of this was Trump’s false hyperbole about how his beloved city has become a dirty, crime-ridden hellhole — that only he can fix, of course. Which goes for the rest of the nation as well, he told the crowd: “If a New Yorker can’t save this country, no one can.”

Aww. How adorable. But what this country really needs is someone to save it from this particular New Yorker.

Frank Bruni

Contributing Opinion Writer

Haley as Veep? Don’t Bet on It

Touched, amused, baffled — none of those words precisely captures my reaction to many people’s surprise at Nikki Haley’s announcement that she’d vote for Donald Trump . Did they think that Haley, who’d so recently pantomimed a principled stand against Trump, actually stood on principle? How quaint. How amnesic. She has always wobbled like a Weeble . The only real suspense is whether she’ll wobble onto the Republican presidential ticket.

I’m betting not, but then my record in the casino of American politics is a spotty one.

Haley would say yes if Trump asked her to be his running mate. Of that much I’m confident. Her overwhelming defeat in the Republican presidential primaries, the polls that show Trump beating President Biden and other developments over the past few months have clearly convinced her that the only path to viability in the Republican Party right now is the one that leads to the doorstep of Mar-a-Lago, where a supplicant must arrive on bended knee.

So here she is, performing her genuflection — despite having called Trump “totally unhinged,” despite her expressions of disgust at his fealty to Vladimir Putin, despite dozens of ways in which Trump contradicts her putative convictions, despite having warned us emphatically that another Trump presidency would be ruinous folly. Never mind! She has personal ambitions to attend to, a future to blaze.

In a post on Truth Social a week and a half ago, Trump stated that he was not considering Haley as his choice for vice president. But he would hardly feel bound by that. He wants to win, period. If she’s the way, it would be her all the way.

She’s not, though. Many of the Republican primary voters who chose her over Trump aren’t likely to follow her into the Trump camp. They were opposing and defying him more than they were supporting and deifying her, and they would recoil from the stench of rank opportunism surrounding a Haley-Trump partnership.

While she arguably complements Trump, she inarguably complicates his anti-establishment message. Picking her would be in cynical league with presidential politics as usual. What’s more, the media coverage of her vice-presidential candidacy would be dominated by her past denunciations of Trump, by all the U-turns and switchbacks on the rocky road of their relationship. It’s not the story line he wants.

He’d be wise, though, to figure out some other prize to dangle before her. You never know when she might wobble in an unhelpful direction.

Biden’s Powerful Reminder of Trump’s Racist History

Just how worried is the Biden campaign about its standing with Black men?

Worried enough, apparently, that it has rolled out an unusually blunt campaign ad reminding the group that President Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump, is an inveterate racist.

“Donald Trump disrespecting Black folk is nothing new,” a male voice, clearly Black-coded, booms in the spot, following a 1989 clip of Trump saying, “Of course I hate these people,” referring to the Central Park Five, who were wrongly convicted.

He was sued for refusing to rent his apartments to Black families, and called for the execution of five innocent Black and brown teenagers. It’s why Trump stood with violent white supremacists, warned of a blood bath if he loses the next election, and if he is president again vowed to be a dictator who wants revenge on his enemies. Now, who do you think that is?

Black voters are more likely to support Biden than voters of any other race. But polls in recent months have suggested that support may be softening, especially among Black men.

Heavy-handed ads like this one from the Biden campaign might help reacquaint lower-information Black voters (but especially men) with Trump’s loathsome racial attitudes. There’s value in that, particularly in what could be a very close election.

And yet, most Black voters already hold strong negative views of Trump and have no trouble recognizing his abhorrent views on race. The possibility that a sizable portion of these voters are considering voting for Trump anyway should provoke a flurry of soul-searching in the Democratic Party, as well as outreach and relationship building.

Black voters appear to be at least somewhat open to the idea of finding a new political home. The real task before the Biden campaign, and the Democratic Party, is to give them good reasons to stay. That’s something no 30-second spot can buy.

Zeynep Tufekci

A Blistering Congressional Hearing Forces Accountability on Covid Origins

The unraveling of a high-level attempt to avoid transparency about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic began with a single email uncovered via a Freedom of Information Act request published last year.

Dr. David Morens, a senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had emailed a small group of outspoken scientists who opposed the idea that a lab leak was the source of Covid-19. “I always try to communicate on my Gmail,” he wrote , “because my N.I.H. email is FOIA’d constantly.”

If he had to email the group from his N.I.H. email, he promised, “I will delete anything I don’t want to see in The New York Times.”

When the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic subpoenaed those emails, it found that Morens advised his colleagues to avoid oversight requirements and that he intimated he would delete emails related to Covid origins.

Many of those conversations involved EcoHealth Alliance — a nonprofit that collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology , often criticized for its risky research and lax biosafety standards — and Peter Daszak, EcoHealth’s president. The Trump administration had terminated an EcoHealth grant, but as these emails showed, Morens was working to reverse that decision. (The termination was eventually reversed, but last week the Biden administration barred EcoHealth from all federal funding, after a hearing in which the organization was scorched by lawmakers from both parties for misrepresenting its work with Chinese virologists.)

After Morens rebuffed the committee’s request for a voluntary interview, it subpoenaed him to testify.

Morens told the committee he used a private email account because he was merely trying to avoid having his personal correspondence with Daszak, whom he described as a longtime friend, become public information. However, the subpoenaed emails revealed Morens advised Daszak on how to publicly respond to the termination of EcoHealth’s grant and demeaned other scientists who worried about biosafety lapses.

Morens wrote to Daszak, “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did, we wouldn’t put them in emails, and if we found them we would delete them.”

Representative Raul Ruiz, a physician who is the committee’s ranking Democrat, told Morens his actions were a “stain on the legacy” of his colleagues. Representative Debbie Lesko, Republican of Arizona, read email after email from Morens on his avoidance techniques and snapped, “When you say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know this. I didn’t intentionally use my Gmail,’ are you kidding me?”

Morens replied to that and many other pointed questions with a version of “I don’t remember,” drawing strong rebukes from members of both parties.

The only way to reassure the public that smoking guns weren’t deleted is proper transparency.

Farah Stockman

The Importance of a Personal Bridge Between the U.S. and China

There aren’t a lot of things that make me optimistic about U.S.-China relations these days, but Nicholas Burns’s speech on Wednesday to graduating students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government came close. Burns wasn’t speaking in his capacity as the U.S. ambassador to Beijing. His role that day was as a professor who taught at the Kennedy School, with its remarkably international student body, for 13 years.

He made a point of meeting with 25 of the Chinese citizens studying there and told them in his speech, “We’re proud of you, too.”

“Thank you for being 25 of the 300,000 Chinese students in the United States,” he said. “You’re very welcome in our country.”

He also spoke about bumping into his former students in Beijing, including at church during an Easter Sunday Mass.

“There’s a point in the Catholic Mass where you turn to the person beside you when you say, ‘Peace be with you,’” he recalled. “I turned to my left and before I could say anything, this young woman said: ‘Professor Burns, peace be with you. I was in your Great Powers class in 2014.’”

It struck me as he spoke that it is a fortuitous thing that our man in Beijing has personal relationships with some of China’s best and brightest. When ties between the two governments get strained to the brink, he can still see his Chinese counterparts as human beings, with all the complexity and nuance that entails.

It also means that he knows what’s at stake when negotiating agreements with China, including the U.S.-China Science and Technology Agreement , which has been the basis of scientific cooperation since 1979. That pact, which was once renewed every five years without much debate, has been living on life support, with short-term six-month extensions.

There are good reasons to renegotiate it, and the terms of the U.S.-China relationship itself. China has changed, and we must change, too. But let’s work to preserve what we can of these people-to-people ties and make sure that our interactions are characterized by knowledge of one another, and ideally, mutual respect.

Opinion Researcher

When Antitrust Law Rescues Olivia and Taylor Fans

On a Friday afternoon last fall, Jonathan Kanter, the Department of Justice’s head of antitrust enforcement, met with Times Opinion. I should have been paying attention, but I was staring at a cursed Ticketmaster countdown for Olivia Rodrigo tickets. I never got them.

I later showed Kanter my screen, pointing out the struggle that I (along with teenage girls across America) had endured — indifferent customer service and exorbitant fees. Taylor Swift fans, too, had lodged their Ticketmaster complaints with the D.O.J. after their disastrous experience of buying tickets to the Eras Tour. Kanter assured me he was on the case.

On Thursday, the D.O.J. and dozens of state governments finally filed a suit against Live Nation Entertainment, a corporate glob of revenue streams encompassing music venues, concert promotion, tour merchandise and, of course, Ticketmaster. Kanter stated that all this made Live Nation an “illegal monopoly.” Live Nation called this allegation “absurd” and blamed scalpers and increased demand for high prices.

Live Nation functions both as the middleman and the supplier for a concert’s needs — shuttling both concertgoers and musicians to its own venues, vendors and promoters, while setting the prices and fees as it sees fit. In a news conference, Attorney General Merrick Garland, also a Swiftie , said “it is time to restore competition and innovation in the entertainment industry.”

The net effect of this is an industry strangled by a parasite. We all know how frustrating the concert-ticket experience is for consumers, but the effects of this monopoly on performers is also often disastrous. The musician Clyde Lawrence wrote a guest essay for The Times in 2022 about how the company’s perverse incentives were able to take a cut of nearly every one of his band’s revenue streams. He said if someone paid $42 to Ticketmaster to see his band, Lawrence, perform, the band ended up with $6.

Today’s suit against Live Nation appears to be part of the Biden administration’s broader antitrust playbook, which chooses targets for antitrust suits based on issues like market structure and capacity for innovation, rather than just exorbitant prices. Yes, the “Ticketmaster tax” is high, but the true target of the suit is the power that this company exercises over a large majority of the concert experience. Breaking up Live Nation, as the suit prescribes, might stimulate competition in an industry that has had too little of it for far too long.

Until then, as Olivia Rodrigo would put it , “God, it’s brutal out here.”

Katherine Miller

Opinion Writer and Editor

Nikki Haley, Ever Pragmatic, Tries to Keep Her Options Open

Nikki Haley’s announcement on Wednesday that she’s going to vote for Donald Trump wasn’t that much of a surprise. Eight years ago, she basically did the same thing: She was critical of him before he got the nomination, then once he did, said she’d vote for him and sort of faded into the background, before her surprise arrival in the administration.

She’ll probably end up in the vice-presidential conversation again, even though Trump already said she won’t be, partly because he seems to like the curveball consideration.

I wrote a lot in the winter about what Haley would do after she lost, specifically how much her plans hung over her campaign long before she lost, and then how for a month she subverted those expectations. And, of course, she has now done what many of the skeptics thought she’d do: say she’d vote for Trump.

But part of the reason I wrote a good deal about this topic is that, to me, it always seemed the after-the-loss phase would be much less interesting for Haley and almost everyone else in the Republican field. Most of the failed candidates would probably say they were voting for Trump, as most Republican officials you can think of have been saying they would do for years — and the far more active issue would be that Trump would be the nominee.

The value proposition was entirely in winning and moving past the Trump era by default. Haley wanted to win, she didn’t, she probably wants to run again as a Republican, and here she is preserving some optionality. That’s probably profoundly disappointing to some people who were invested in her campaign. Maybe they had hoped she would just never say anything about voting this year, as it’s not eight years ago; a lot of dark stuff has happened since 2016.

Haley, as a political figure, is not especially focused on moral cases. The larger ones she made against Trump centered on electability and Ukraine in an ideological sense. Even in the late stages of her presidential campaign, she did not frame her criticism of Trump around Jan. 6 or anything similar but more around his recent behavior.

This is a practical politician who is used to winning and seemed to envision a fusion path to victory that didn’t quite congeal. There are various reasons for that. One is that the segment of Republican voters who want to move past the Trump era is just a small fraction of the party. That might make her a bit of an inverse Pat Buchanan 30 years later, articulating the opposite ideological view and representing only a quarter of the party — the bookend to an era that’s really over or the faint strands of a different era we’ll be able to see only long in the future.

Ariel Kaminer

Opinion Editor for Ideas and Investigations

Why Congress Loves Toying With University Presidents

When the heads of Northwestern University, Rutgers University and U.C.L.A. arrived on Capitol Hill on Thursday morning to answer questions about antisemitism on their campuses, they faced what may be the scariest end-of-term exam on record. But they had a bountiful study guide, in the testimony of the other university leaders the House of Representatives had called on.

The transcripts of those encounters amount to a powerful syllabus of what not to do.

As you may recall, in early December, Claudine Gay, then the president of Harvard; Elizabeth Magill, then the president of the University of Pennsylvania; and Sally Kornbluth, the president of M.I.T., were hauled — er, invited — to congressional hearings about campus protests over the war in Gaza. It didn’t go well .

In response to questions about what they were doing to protect Jewish students, the presidents produced responses only a very bad lawyer could love. You had to wonder what kinds of questions they had expected. They certainly weren’t brought there for their scholarly expertise, little of which was on display anyway. It seemed more likely that they were there so that critics of academia — particularly those on the right — could score one very big point. The presidents played along beautifully, if unwittingly. Only one of them still has her job.

In April, Nemat Shafik , the president of Columbia, came much better prepared, clearly determined not to make the same mistakes. But her testimony, though it pleased her interrogators, might have been even more damaging. Dutifully reassuring Representative Rick Allen, Republican of Georgia, that no, she definitely did not want “Columbia University to be cursed by God,” eagerly agreeing to punish outspoken faculty members in defiance of the institution’s rules for due process, Dr. Shafik — who capped her testimony by summoning the New York Police Department to dismantle the encampments and arrest scores of protesters — looked like someone frantically throwing ballast overboard to keep from sinking. Well, it worked. For now, she still has her job.

Today’s witnesses, and those who follow, need a better way to navigate this moment. Because critics in Congress have a winning formula, and they’re not going to tire of it any time soon.

Neel V. Patel

Opinion Staff Editor

Does New York City Really Need More Smoke Shops?

When it comes to weed, I’m not a crank. But I am getting cranky.

Legalized marijuana is a good thing. I live in New York City, and New York State legalized recreational cannabis in the spring of 2021. Since then, I have seen an explosion of shops that sell marijuana products. Some are licensed, but many, many more are not. Ten years ago, I could walk down the block to a dry cleaner or hardware store or a favorite coffee shop for a pastry. Now I’m relearning my neighborhood because these stores have become the umpteenth cannabis shops — legal or otherwise — within a five-minute stroll.

The city was supposed to prevent this from happening, but it botched the rollout of marijuana licenses during legalization. Now the city is flooded with black-market sellers , contributing to an aggravating sense that there is too much marijuana floating around.

And it’s not just New Yorkers: A new report by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 17.7 million people are using marijuana daily or nearly every day, which is three million more than those who report the same frequency of drinking alcohol.

No, marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as other Schedule 1 substances like heroin. But our understanding of the health effects of very frequent cannabis use is still unsettled . Most of us can accept it’s generally not good to be recreationally consuming mind-altering substances every day.

This week, Maia Szalavitz argued in Times Opinion for balanced policies regulating the probable federal legalization of marijuana. I’d add that we need to think deeper about a psychological balance for our society. It’s wonderful to see marijuana use destigmatized and decriminalized. But it feels as though New York City is tripping over itself to sell us the idea that the whole world is toking up now — and that you should be, too.

How our neighborhoods look should be defined by the things we do and the services we need every day. Having every dry cleaner I know replaced by a front for weed isn’t making our day-to-day lives better.

Thomas L. Friedman

Western Europe Is Starting to Send a Vital Warning to Israel

The decision by Spain, Norway and Ireland on Wednesday to recognize an independent Palestinian state marks the latest brick in the wall of rejection being built around Israel’s current far-right government, which is asking the world to let it destroy Hamas in Gaza while refusing to work on a new future with non-Hamas Palestinians.

More than 140 countries and the Holy See have recognized the right of Palestinians to have a state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. What is noteworthy about this latest move, though, is that major Western European countries, and the United States, had resisted going there, arguing that peace should be worked out between the two parties. Until today.

My focus is always on the practical: Will these recognitions of a nonexistent Palestinian state with undefined borders lead to the only sustainable solution — a real-life peace between two states for two indigenous communities — Jews and Palestinians? The answer is yes and no.

In the short term, these diplomatic recognitions from fellow democracies will not move the Israeli public, Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, told me. In the wake of the horrific murders, rapes and kidnappings perpetrated by Hamas on Oct. 7, he said, Europeans telling Israel that it must accept a Palestinian state — “without even mentioning that it must be demilitarized or any obligations on the part of Palestinians to reject Hamas” — will be “rejected” by the Israeli silent majority.

In the long term, though, it is precisely these kinds of diplomatic shocks that could lead the opposition leaders in Israel to finally escape from the gravitational pull of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who dominates what is or is not permissible to say on this subject — and start calling for two states on terms Israel can live with. One can already see signs of that.

If that does not transpire, though, Israel is heading for a world of hurt. Those recognitions of a Palestinian state by European nations “are a huge straw in the wind, that will grow into a hurricane if Israel does not change course,” Craig Charney , a pollster who was a member of Nelson Mandela’s polling team in the 1990s, told me.

Charney explained that the isolation of South Africa’s apartheid regime started with a voluntary arms embargo in the 1960s, which after the Soweto uprising morphed in the 1970s into a formal U.N. arms embargo, which grew into a popular cause on campuses and in boardrooms in the early 1980s, which grew into a broader economic, military and travel embargo in the mid-1980s — until two great leaders, Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk, finally emerged to end apartheid. “But it was a very painful journey,” he said.

David Firestone

Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board

I’m Donald Trump, and I Disapprove of the Message I Just Posted

In the distant and innocent year of 2002, lawmakers really thought they could cut back on negative and corrosive political advertising with one simple trick: Making candidates personally stand behind their ads. Within a year of passage of the McCain-Feingold Act, politicians started appearing at the end of their ads mouthing much-mocked platitudes like, “I’m John Kerry, and I approve this message!”

Though the requirement is technically still in effect, it seems fantastically quaint now. The law never applied to independent or super PAC ads, which drenched the airwaves in mud, and the “stand by your ad” requirements never applied to internet ads, which would soon become one of the dominant ways in which candidates misled voters.

More crucially, the requirement apparently had little effect on the era of Donald Trump. That was evident as recently as Monday , when Trump reposted a video in which he precelebrated his 2024 victory and answered the question of “what’s next for America?” with an image containing the words: “the creation of a unified Reich.”

It was clear in Trump’s first presidential campaign that this level of cartoonish outrageousness would help him get the attention he craved. As Jim Rutenberg of The Times wrote in 2018 , the campaign law never stopped Trump or other Republican candidates from advertising blatant lies and overt racism; being crudely aggressive and openly authoritarian, in fact, had become a useful tool.

Former Representative David Price of North Carolina, an architect of the “stand by your ad” provision in 2002, summed up the new attitude this way 16 years later: “I’m the baddest, meanest, most politically incorrect guy in town and will say whatever pops into my head and I regard that as a political virtue.”

The “stand by your ad” law couldn’t prevent this attitude, but if it had been more effective, it might at least have spared the country the embarrassing spectacle of blaming bad ads on some low-level staff member somewhere. In 2015, when Trump retweeted a dumb post mocking Iowa voters for preferring Ben Carson, he later deleted the tweet and put full responsibility on an intern , who he said had apologized. (Trump himself, of course, almost never apologizes.)

In the case of the Reich video, the campaign said it was created by a “random account online” and reposted “by a staffer,” though the posting was done in Trump’s own name. (The campaign took it down the next day, after the inevitable outcry.) Too bad Congress didn’t prohibit blaming the help for a candidate’s deeply offensive messages.

Jonathan Alter

An Attack on Justice Merchan Is an Attack on the Rule of Law

No fair-minded person sitting in the courtroom of the Trump felony trial can doubt that Justice Juan Merchan is a wise, impartial and fair judge. He proved it again on Tuesday when he held an important “charging conference” to determine how he will instruct the jury before it begins deliberating next week.

That’s why I was so appalled to see House Speaker Mike Johnson standing outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse last week denouncing the trial as a “travesty of justice.” Echoing Donald Trump, who has repeatedly called the judge “corrupt” and the whole thing “rigged,” the speaker said he was “disgusted” by the trial, though he clearly knows almost nothing about it.

This kind of talk is not only wrong, it’s a threat to the integrity of the American judiciary, which, for all its faults, is the crown jewel of our constitutional system. Johnson, second in line to the presidency, is using some kind of authoritarian playbook when he assaults another branch of government. When an independent judiciary dies, so does democracy.

Inside the courtroom, my go-to guy is Judge George Grasso, retired from the New York bench, who is attending the trial as a spectator.

“This judge is evenhanded,” Grasso told me at the end of the day. “He makes rulings sometimes for the benefit of one side, sometimes for the other. He’s very careful on the facts and everyone has the opportunity to be heard. Even if he’s decided already,” Grasso said, referring to pretrial motions, “he’s willing to listen.”

I got up to leave but Grasso, a former deputy New York police commissioner, wasn’t finished yet, adding: “To attack him is to attack the rule of law.”

Merchan’s Solomonic nature was in evidence Tuesday as he discussed with lawyers for both sides how he will instruct the jury.

On the critical issue of “accessorial liability” — how responsible Trump should be given his distance from the Trump Organization’s bookkeeping department — Merchan said he would instruct the jurors that they “need not to be unanimous on whether the defendant” is liable on each element of the case, though they do have to be unanimous on the overall verdict. This was a win for the prosecution. So was his ruling that the jury will be instructed that “intent to defraud can extend beyond economic concerns.”

At the same time, Merchan seemed to be leaning toward the defense in limiting how far the prosecution could go in pushing accessorial liability. When the district attorney’s office sought to broaden the concept, Merchan said that would mean a “material change” in the state statute and he would not use it in his instructions. And he reserved judgment on the extent to which Trump’s violations of tax laws can be brought into the case.

We won’t know until later this week exactly what the judge’s instructions to the jury will be. But we do know this: When you trash a judge like Merchan, you’re trashing America.

Charles M. Blow

The Viral Defiance of Jasmine Crockett

Why, exactly, was Marjorie Taylor Greene’s dig at Jasmine Crockett’s fake eyelashes so upsetting?

The two members of the House Oversight Committee tore into each other last week in a verbal assault that was widely seen as a new low for personal relationships in this polarized Congress. Greene began the descent by saying to Crockett that her “fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”

For Crockett, it was about much more than a rules violation for attacking another member’s physical appearance. For her, it was an insinuation of inferiority.

As Crockett told me, “It triggered me because MAGA is constantly on social media doing all these wild memes about my lashes and talking about my nails.” She continued, “They call me ghetto trash and D.E.I. hire.”

Greene, in that moment, became the personification of her online harassment, Crockett said.

“I interpreted that as not, ‘oh girl, you don’t need to wear lashes because you’re more than enough and you’re beautiful,’” she said, “I interpreted that as, ‘you’re basically like, oh, you ghetto piece of trash.’”

So, Crockett shot back with her one insult about Greene’s appearance, asking the committee chairman, “I’m just curious, just to better understand your ruling, if someone on this committee then starts talking about somebody’s bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body, that would not be engaging in personalities, correct?”

The alliteration became a viral sensation. People made songs about it. Crockett herself is making apparel featuring the phrase, and she moved to trademark the term.

Crockett has gained a reputation for producing such moments. But the incident also speaks to the nature of the modern Congress, in which spectacle generates its own form of power, in which being a social media clip star is just as important as being an advancer of legislation.

This is not to defend Greene in any way. She is a bully who has proved to be a bona fide stunt queen, exploiting outrage for personal advancement. I think Crockett was right when she told me, “People have really been waiting on someone to put her in her place, because she’s been so out of place and so outlandish this entire time.”

And yet, going toe to toe and tit for tat with someone like Greene is also to descend into chaos, and ultimately into indecorous absurdities, because that is precisely where Greene is most comfortable.

Even Crockett concedes that the clipbait-ification of Congress is a bad thing, saying, “I really dislike that social media and virality is playing a part in legislating.”

But she offered an explanation for her own actions: “I don’t try to create these moments, but I think that what’s happening is that Democrats have been craving someone who would be responsive in the moment to misinformation and disinformation and do it in a very forceful way.”

In her view, it is the motivation that matters most: standing for truth vs. standing for institutional and societal degradation.

The problem is that the country has been lied to so often and for so long that many people can only see their party’s representatives on the noble side of that equation.

Scarlett Johansson’s Voice Isn’t the Only Thing A.I. Companies Want

When OpenAI introduced its virtual assistant, Sky, last week, many gasped. It sounded just like Scarlett Johansson, who had famously played an artificial intelligence voice assistant in the movie “Her.”

On the surface, the choice made sense: Last year, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, had named it his favorite science fiction movie, even posting the single word “her” around the assistant’s debut .

OpenAI approached Johansson to be the voice for its virtual assistant, and she turned it down. The company approached her again two days before the debut of Sky, but this time, she said in a blistering statement, it didn’t even wait for her official “no” before releasing a voice that sounds so similar to hers that it even fooled her friends and family.

In response to Johansson’s scathing letter, OpenAI claimed that the voice was someone else and “was never intended to resemble hers,” but it took Sky down anyway.

The A.I. industry is built on grabbing our data — the output that humanity has collectively produced: books, art, music, blog posts, social media, videos — and using it to train their models, from which they then make money or use as they wish. For the most part, A.I. companies haven’t asked or paid the people who created the data they grab and whose actual employment and future are threatened by the models trained on it.

Politicians haven’t stepped in to ask why humanity’s collective output should be usurped and monopolized by a handful of companies. They’ve practically let the industry do what it wants for decades.

I am someone who believes in the true upside of technology, including A.I. But amid all the lofty talk about its transformational power, these companies are perpetuating an information grab, a money grab and a “break the rules and see what we can get away with” mentality that’s worked very well for them for the past few decades.

Altman, it seems, liked Johansson’s voice, so the company made a simulacrum of it. Why not?

When you’re a tech industry star, they let you do anything.

Serge Schmemann

Why the Crash in Iran Was Almost Certainly an Accident

When the first reports came out on Sunday that a helicopter carrying the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, had gone down, the first question on most minds was probably, “Who did it?”

That’s not a far-fetched question. Only last month, several senior Iranian officers were killed in a drone strike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus, Syria — a hit broadly attributed to Israel, though Israel rarely acknowledges such things. And in 2020 the United States acknowledged responsibility for the drone strike that killed Qassim Suleimani, a powerful Iranian general.

This time, however, the United States and Israel were quick to say: Not us. Washington even expressed “condolences” after it was confirmed that Raisi had died . Iran was equally quick to declare that the crash, in foggy mountains, was indeed an accident and even reportedly asked the United States for help in locating it.

None of that reflected a change of heart or a disavowal of targeted killing as a clandestine tool or any regret outside Iran over the death of Raisi and his foreign minister, Hossein Amir Abdollahian, who was also killed in the crash. Both were full-blooded members of the Iranian theocracy, dedicated to its ruthless suppression of any dissent and its proxy wars, especially against Israel. Raisi, in fact, was discussed as a likely successor to the 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iranian exiles were reported to have celebrated their deaths in London and elsewhere.

But Iran, already deeply enmeshed in the Israeli conflict through its support for Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen, only recently risked getting into a major direct war with Israel by launching a massive wave of drones and cruise and ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for the bombing of its Damascus embassy. Accusing Israel or the United States of the killing of the Iranian president would have risked a far more fateful exchange, which no one wanted at this juncture.

Besides, Raisi and Amir Abdollahian probably did not figure high on the American or Israeli enemies list, even if the president was a candidate for supreme leadership. However repugnant, both were tools of the theocracy, not architects of the nuclear, regional or domestic policies that they brutally enforced.

The broad consensus in the immediate aftermath of their deaths was that nothing much would change. There were plenty of other hard-liners lined up to succeed Khamenei, including his son Mojtaba Khamenei, and none of them suggested a promising future for Iran. The only immediate question was how many — or, more accurately, how few — Iranians would show up for the “election” of the next president picked by the supreme leader.

An earlier version of this article misstated the year of the drone strike that killed Qassim Suleimani. It was 2020, not 2000.

How we handle corrections

Romaissaa Benzizoune

Opinion Editorial Fellow

For Kendrick and Drake, Family Matters

Weeks after the rap battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake began — triggered by competing claims to greatness — listeners are still electrified. There’s a general agreement that Lamar won, whether because of his masterly storytelling, triple entendres that stretch the horizons of meaning, or flow that feels like the sonic equivalent of an ice bath.

There’s also the fact that some of his most successful, emotionally resonant bars argue that his opponent has failed as a father, son and romantic partner. In one of the catchiest verses in “euphoria,” Lamar accuses Drake of knowing nothing about raising a son. He also raps as a sort of warning, while using coded Canadian slang for “bro” : “It can get deep in the family, crodie / Talk about me and my family, crodie? / Someone gon’ bleed in your family, crodie .” Days later, Drake dropped “Family Matters,” in which he questions why Lamar hasn’t married his fiancée. Drake accuses Lamar, without providing evidence, of abusing her.

Lamar counters with the tragic “Meet the Grahams,” a point-by-point takedown through a series of vignettes addressed mostly to Drake’s family members: his son, Adonis; his mother, Sandra; and an unnamed baby girl that Lamar claims is Drake’s daughter.

These digs are so provocative because the rich and powerful are beholden to few things other than family .

Family motifs carry hip-hop and rap. Rappers are obsessed with whether the women they’re involved with are wifey material. Are they capable of mothering, or are they just hos? The rapper Future, notorious for having seven baby mamas, apparently dreams of domestic bliss . Lil Wayne, Offset, DaBaby and Lamar have all featured family members on album covers. Artists grapple meaningfully with family, whether that family abandoned them or supported them on the come up.

In her 2022 book “Abolish the Family,” Sophie Lewis criticizes family as a norm that “makes a prison for adults — especially women — out of their own commitment to children they love.” But because there is no alternative, family is sacred; this is especially true for Black people.

The traditional family is an untouchable symbol. Women, who bleed more for it, are its figureheads. This is why attacking your competition’s family members — especially his partner or mother — becomes the most potent way to dismantle the honor of a man who appears to have everything.

It’s hardly Drake’s fault that Kendrick Lamar did it better.

A Tongue-Lashing for a Defense Witness Isn’t Great News for Trump

Eight times a day during his felony trial, a former president of the United States must stand and honor 12 jurors and six alternates as they walk past, eyes straight ahead or down, casting no glances at him. It’s inspiring to watch these ordinary citizens as sovereign soldiers for justice.

On Monday this calm processional was disrupted, as jurors were forced to hurry out after a witness for the defense mocked the authority of the court. Moments later, Justice Juan Merchan ordered the courtroom immediately cleared, and reporters fled in a frenzy.

The reason for all of this was the testimony of Robert Costello, an astonishingly arrogant former federal prosecutor who has defended the likes of George Steinbrenner and Leona Helmsley, borrowing a little of his nasty affect from each.

Michael Cohen testified earlier that Costello and Rudy Giuliani were assigned by Donald Trump to open a back channel to Cohen to keep him in the Trump fold.

Costello testified before a friendly House subcommittee last week that Cohen was a liar. This apparently impressed Trump and — presto! — Costello was the first important witness the defense called after the prosecution rested.

On direct examination, Costello did next to nothing for the defense beyond landing a few more mostly irrelevant blows on Cohen.

On cross-examination by the prosecution, however, you could almost see steam coming out of Costello’s ears. The temerity of this lowly local female prosecutor asking him questions! Merchan ruled earlier that Costello could testify only on certain subjects. When Merchan sustained several objections from the prosecution and struck a couple of Costello’s answers from the record, Costello decided to play judge.

He muttered “ridiculous” and “strike it” after disliking a question. An enraged Merchan excused the jury and said sharply, “I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom.” He continued, “You don’t say, ‘Geez,’ and you don’t say, ‘Strike it.’ And if you don’t like my ruling, you don’t give me side-eye and roll your eyes.”

Merchan apparently didn’t want reporters to hear the rest of his tongue-lashing and cleared the courtroom.

None of this was good for the defense, which struggled all day to build on Thursday’s success in making Cohen seem he was lying about the purpose of his calls to Trump in late October 2016. Cohen looked bad admitting he passed $20,000 in cash in a paper bag to Red Finch, a tech firm that uses algorithms to rig online polls. But Trump looked even worse by directing Red Finch to cheat his way onto CNBC’s list of the most famous business leaders of the 20th century. Classic Trump.

Jurors may conclude that the whole bunch of ’em are liars and reasonably doubt every word out of all of their mouths. At this point, that may be Trump’s best hope of avoiding conviction.

When Michael Cohen’s Lies Help the Case Against Trump

Is it possible to use a lie to illuminate the truth? If the lie is told by the serial liar Michael Cohen in the right context, the answer is yes. Credit the prosecution in the Trump felony trial for pulling off this tricky maneuver.

On Monday, we finally got closer to a key factor in this case: campaign finance law. To convict Donald Trump of a felony, the jury must find that he falsified business records (or directed that they be falsified) with “the intent to commit another crime.” Trump need not be found guilty of any of those other crimes — in this case, it could be tax fraud, intervening in an election or violating campaign finance laws — in order to convict him. But he needs to have crime in mind in at least one of those areas.

Late in the morning, Susan Hoffinger — a prosecution lawyer on her game — drew Cohen’s attention to a letter written by his lawyer, Stephen Ryan, after the Stormy Daniels hush-money story broke in The Wall Street Journal in 2018. At that time, Cohen was still in Trump’s camp, telling the world that he had paid the $130,000 to Daniels on his own. In his letter, Ryan wrote, “The payment in question does not constitute a campaign contribution.”

Hoffinger asked, “Was that a true statement?” Cohen, in his new, polite incarnation, replied, “No, ma’am.” This told the jury: Here goes Cohen, lying again. In other words, because Cohen was such a known liar, it is more plausible than not that he was lying when he said the payment was not a campaign contribution, to protect Trump and himself.

After a sidebar, Justice Juan Merchan turned to the jury and repeated instructions he had already given, during direct examination of Cohen, when the subject of his 2018 guilty plea in the criminal case that sent him to jail for 13 months came up: “Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea is not evidence” of Trump’s guilt.

The judge was basically saying to the jury, “I know you may think these two guys both intended to commit this other crime, but you can’t use Cohen’s guilty plea to convict Trump.”

As Norm Eisen, an expert on campaign finance law, told me during a break, “The jury will listen to the judge, but that’s like saying, ‘Don’t look at the elephant.’”

To emphasize the point further, Hoffinger asked, “Did Mr. Trump approve the substance of these false statements by you?” This brought another “Yes, ma’am.”

The prosecution caught another break when Merchan refused to allow Bradley Smith, a Republican and former chair of the Federal Election Commission, to testify about his conservative interpretation of campaign laws. The judge said if he allowed that testimony — which the defense desperately wants — he would have to let the prosecution call an expert witness with his or her opposing interpretation. Merchan concluded that as judge, it was his job — and his job alone — to interpret how campaign finance law should be regarded by the jury.

All in all, this was an unsexy but significant win for the prosecution.

Nicholas Kristof

Israel’s Denial of Gaza Aid May Lead to an Arrest Warrant

The decision on Monday by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants for leaders of Hamas and Israel probably will not result in anyone being put on trial immediately for crimes against humanity. But it does further tarnish Israel’s invasion of Gaza, add to the isolation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and raise questions about President Biden’s steadfast support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

It’s no surprise that the prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking to arrest Hamas leaders for their rampage of murder, rape, torture and kidnapping on Oct. 7, which clearly constituted war crimes. Those protesters making excuses for Hamas should read Khan’s statement and understand Hamas’s brutality.

The allegations against Netanyahu seem to focus on the Israeli government’s decision to throttle aid, including food assistance, to civilians in Gaza and thus cause starvation. The very first allegation listed by the prosecutor against Netanyahu is “Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.”

That has always seemed to me a part of the Israeli operation in Gaza that is particularly difficult to justify. My view is that Israel absolutely had a right to strike Gaza militarily after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, to destroy Hamas leadership and to try to recover hostages. I have argued that the military operation should have been far more restrained, calibrated to target Hamas officials rather than to level entire neighborhoods, but bombing targets in Gaza was not inherently wrong or unlawful.

What has seemed utterly indefensible has been the constraints placed on aid entering the territory, so that Gaza is teetering on the edge of famine — even as trucks filled with food are lined up at Gaza’s border, waiting to enter. That is what seemed to galvanize the International Criminal Court.

A panel of international experts convened by the International Criminal Court unanimously backed the prosecutor. “Parties to an armed conflict must not deliberately impede the delivery of humanitarian relief for civilians, including humanitarian relief provided by third parties,” the experts said.

I’m not an expert in international humanitarian law, so I’ll leave it to others to argue about whether a prosecution of Netanyahu is justified. But the court’s efforts underscore the moral stain of the starvation in Gaza, in which the United States is complicit.

America’s highest-priority response needn’t be a flurry of legal arguments, but instead could involve a far greater effort — using all the leverage we have — to persuade Israel to allow more aid into Gaza and to ensure that the aid is actually delivered to starving children. Whether or not one agrees that starving children is criminal, it is unconscionable. And preventable.

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

The Dangerous Political Headwind Facing Biden

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

All eyes will be on Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan this week. His lawyers are expected to wrap up their cross-examination of Michael Cohen on Monday, and then will reveal if Trump is going to testify in his own defense before heading to closing arguments, probably on Tuesday. As much as Trump might be tempted to take the stand, he knows very well the lies he has told about Cohen, Stormy Daniels and his business records over the years — lies he could get caught telling under oath. The risk of testifying is enormous for a born liar, and Trump wasn’t born any other way. I don’t see him taking that chance.

For me, this trial has underscored two things: The enthusiasm and loyalty that the Trump base feels for their man, and the dangerous political dynamic that President Biden faces this year. That dynamic, as I see it, is this: Many Americans want change, and while they may respect Joe Biden, they don’t want Joe Biden anymore. Even the Trump criminal trial hasn’t been enough to make Biden look good by comparison, if the latest polls are any measure. My colleague Ezra Klein has a great new column about why this may be , but whatever the reason, the Biden campaign has big choices to make.

The biggest choice to me: His campaign has been focused on getting people to respect Biden — by portraying him as a defender of democracy, a champion of a normal America, a trusted ally to the less fortunate, a more decent man than Trump — rather than on making people want the Biden presidency to continue. He gave a good speech Sunday at Morehouse College in Atlanta about manhood and faith, but given his weak polling in that battleground state, I was surprised he didn’t make a stronger case for why people should want him in office for another four years.

He then headed to another battleground, Michigan, where he is also struggling in the polls. Based on his speech at an N.A.A.C.P. dinner there, I’m sure there was a lot of respect for him in the room, but what’s he doing that’s new or especially persuasive to make more Black voters and others want him for another four years?

On Tuesday, Biden heads to New Hampshire, another traditional battleground where he is polling strongly. As Trump gets closer to a verdict on that day, I’ll be watching New Hampshire to see if Biden and his team demonstrate any new thinking to make the case for why Americans should want another four years of his presidency.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Amy Tan — Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies in Mother Tongue by Amy Tan

Analysis of Rhetorical Strategies in Mother Tongue by Amy Tan

• Categories: Amy Tan Rhetoric

About this sample

Words: 612 |

Published: Sep 1, 2020

Words: 612 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Works Cited

• Tan, A. (1990). Mother tongue. In A. Tan (Ed.), The opposite of fate: Memories of a writing life (pp. 20-29). Penguin Books.
• Block, D. (2012). Mother tongue education and sustainable development: The West African experience. Routledge.
• Canagarajah, S. (2005). Mother tongue as a local knowledge. Routledge.
• Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power, and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Multilingual Matters.
• Kachru, B. B. (1986). The alchemy of English: The spread, functions, and models of non-native Englishes. University of Illinois Press.
• Martin-Jones, M., & Saxena, M. (2009). Multilingualism, second language learning, and gender. Multilingual Matters.
• Pennycook, A. (2007). Global Englishes and transcultural flows. Routledge.
• Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford University Press.
• Romaine, S. (1995). Bilingualism. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Skutnabb-Kangas, T., & Cummins, J. (Eds.). (1988). Minority education: From shame to struggle. Multilingual Matters.

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Related Essays on Amy Tan

As complex as they may be, Tan’s novel pays particular attention to the special connection between mothers and daughters being extremely valued and powerful. For instance, after An-mei’s mother attempts to save Popo by adding [...]

Amy Tan's short story "Fish Cheeks" explores the complexities of cultural identity and the challenges of adolescence through the eyes of a young Chinese-American girl. The story is set during a Christmas Eve dinner at the [...]

Do you ever stop to think about the power and beauty of language? In her essay "Mother Tongue," Amy Tan explores the intricate relationship between language and identity, delving into the complexities of communication within [...]

Tan, Amy. 'Rules of the Game.' The Joy Luck Club, Vintage Books, 1989, pp. 158-166.

Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club provides a realistic depiction of Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters struggling in relationships strained by tragedy, lack of communication, and unreasonable expectations. Tan criticizes [...]

Amy Tan's essay "Mother Tongue" delves into the ways in which language can shape and influence our lives, using personal anecdotes and reflections. Tan begins by recounting instances in which her mother's limited English [...]

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