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

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

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.

Mother Tongue by Amy Tan: English v. The “Broken Language” Essay

Works cited.

In her essay ‘Mother Tongue’, Amy Tan tries to use her personal experience to describe the importance of language in a society. In this analysis, the author compares perfect English language with ‘broken language’.

Using English as an example, the author attempts to explain how language is important in communications. She says “…language is an essential key in enabling people to understand the definition of their identities”. In addition, the author says that she realized that language allows or authorizes individuals to participate effectively as members of a society.

It is worth noting that Amy Tan is fond of language. For instance, she says that she has written a number of books in English and Chinese. However, she admits that she has never been eloquent or rhetoric when her mother is present. This is the main argument the author has put forward by demonstrating the importance of language in her life. In addition, she argues that communication is difficult without a good language.

In actual sense, this essay is chiefly an analysis of personal views and perceptions of language. The author attempts to describe how language should be used and how people tend to use it in their day-to-day communication. She compares “standard English language” and “broken English language”. To develop her argument, the author has set the essay in the form of a memoir. For instance, she compares her oral use of language with her written language.

Tan informs her readers that the presence of her mother in one of her lecturers made her notice some differences between her oral and written language.

At this point in life, the author realized that she was not using the same language she had been using when communicating with her mother. Instead, she realized that she has been using “broken English” when communicating with her. Therefore, she started reflecting on her childhood and the role that the mother played in helping her shape her language and communication.

From this essay, one notices the manner in which Tan attempts to present her argument. It is evident that Tan is attempting to demonstrate how learning English has an impact in her and her life. The author analyzes her childhood experience. From her analysis, it is evident that circumstances frequently forced her to translate Chinese into English when communicating with other people at school or in her neighbourhood.

She attempts to argue that it is due to her difficulties in communicating in the two languages that drove her to become a writer. It is also clear that her life as a child was difficult because she was supposed to use Chinese at home, but change to English when at school or when with her peers. Her main ideas are good examples of the real life experience in American communities, especially where language barriers are evident.

Her use of personal experience is an important literal technique because it provides some sense of evidence and reality (Tan 1). In fact, the supporting content, which is particularly drawn from her life as a Chinese child growing up and relating with English children and teachers, provides some evidence that her narrative is convincing.

In addition, it is also effective in presenting her ideas. For instance, she says, “I am not an English scholar. I cannot give you anything beyond my personal points of view…” (Tan 1). This statement makes the opening sentence in the essay.

It seems to make the readers realize that the author will present her personal observations and experience. As such, the reader develops some interest in what the author has experienced in her life and what such experience could affect them. Secondly, Tan has presented her ideas that are based on common issues that everyone experiences or observes in nature, especially where immigrants are trying to fit into a new social environment defined by language barriers.

I tend to agree with Amy Tan for a number of reasons. First, I have seen people going through the same processes when trying to fit into new communities. Their children normally face the pressure of learning and using two languages- the “mother tongue” and the language used in the new society (Tan 3). This issue is good but challenging. It provides children with an ability to learn and apply two or more languages at a time.

In fact, it is worth noting that Amy Tan is presenting her ideas at a time when the issue of cultural diversity is common in the United States. America is a home to a large number of immigrants from all over the world. Therefore, the U.S. has become a culturally diverse society due to the presence of people from different ethnic backgrounds.

In fact, the issue of Standard English versus “Broken English” is a contemporary issue, especially in schools, public places and neighbourhoods. Although people must communicate, language barrier is always a problem in most cases. Therefore, the argument by the author contributes to the issue of language barrier, which is a current topic of debate in America.

Tan, Amy. Mother tongue. PDF file. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2024, March 26). Mother Tongue by Amy Tan: English v. The "Broken Language". https://ivypanda.com/essays/mother-tongue/

"Mother Tongue by Amy Tan: English v. The "Broken Language"." IvyPanda , 26 Mar. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/mother-tongue/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Mother Tongue by Amy Tan: English v. The "Broken Language"'. 26 March.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Mother Tongue by Amy Tan: English v. The "Broken Language"." March 26, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mother-tongue/.

1. IvyPanda . "Mother Tongue by Amy Tan: English v. The "Broken Language"." March 26, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mother-tongue/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Mother Tongue by Amy Tan: English v. The "Broken Language"." March 26, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mother-tongue/.

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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.

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To Leave Your Mother Tongue is to Love It More

Ewa hryniewicz-yarbrough on her mother tongue and another.

The following essay appears in the Autumn 2016 issue of   The American Scholar .

Many languages use some form of the word mother to refer to a person’s first language— la lengua materna, la langue maternelle, Muttersprache —and rightly so. The first language we learn is generally the one our mothers speak. This may not be so obvious in monolingual families, in which both parents use the same language, but if each parent speaks a different one, the children in most cases will first speak the mother’s. The words mother tongue suggest that the relationship we have with the first language mirrors the mysterious alchemy of our maternal relationships. Just as the mother is our entry into the world and our first love, the person from whom we learn first meanings, the beacon and the guide, so is the language with which we first make sense of the world. There’s something almost supernatural in the way our mother tongue holds us in its grip. We’re usually unaware of its power unless we immigrate to another country. When that happens, we begin to miss its homey warmth and yearn for its recognizable rhythms and cadences.

We never know another language the way we know our mother tongue. We know it without knowing how we know it. With a foreign language, we have to see its skeleton, its hidden machinery, all those facets that most native speakers can ignore. It takes a long time before the letters or the sounds automatically conjure up the object the way they do in the native tongue. A mother tongue exists inside us with a completeness impossible to replicate in another language; it has its roots in our whole being. Canadian researchers have recently confirmed what previously was only intuitively grasped: people who leave the country of their birth in infancy and have no memories of the language they were born into retain the pathways of the first language in their brains. These findings prove how deeply ingrained in us the mother tongue is. The brain continues to remember what by other measures has been lost. The first language is also the one that Alzheimer’s sufferers lose last. A friend’s father, a professor of Romance languages, fluent in French, Italian, and Romanian, lost the ability to communicate in his acquired languages long before the disease began to rob him of Polish, his mother tongue.

Polish, my first language, was our daughters’ primary language, too, and they used it with each other and with me. In our home in California, my husband and I communicated in English, which they understood but spoke only when needed. But the typical scenario didn’t play itself out in their case. After they entered preschool, the public language of school and the outside world took over. Polish was gradually relegated to bedtime storytelling and reading, and to intimate and private moments between them and me. Today they treat it as their mother’s language while recognizing that English is their mother tongue. Our daughters never experienced linguistic displacement, so the shift from one language to the other happened painlessly and naturally. They still speak Polish, but with none of the ease, fluency, or versatility of their English. If they ever live in a foreign country, they will long only for English.

I started learning English in 1967, my freshman year of high school. I wonder if I would have developed a passion for it if it hadn’t been for my teacher, Mrs. B. She’d just earned an MA in English from the University of Warsaw and moved to our small town in the Mazurian Lake region. Young, attractive, well dressed, she stuck out among the older teachers. On the first day of school, she wore a pale green twinset, a pencil skirt, and high heels, the embodiment of elegance and poise. She had several other pastel-colored button-down sweaters, which we all thought must have come from England. Against the drab and gray background of communist Poland, she seemed like an exotic and colorful bird, bringing in a whiff of worldliness and culture. By the time we entered high school, we had already studied Russian for four years, but most of us hated it. With English, it was love at first sight. I immediately decided I would learn to speak it well. Before long, I discovered that it came to me relatively easily, and in no time I was Mrs. B’s best student.

I had no plans to major in English; I wanted to be a psychologist. But midway through my junior year in high school, I changed my mind. It may have been that I became more aware aesthetically and politically. Just as Mrs. B personified the grace and refinement I aspired to, English turned for me into a symbol of everything that was missing in Poland at the time. It promised an escape from the constraints of a provincial environment into the larger world that I knew existed. Once I decided to study English at the university, I bought a thick notebook in which I began to jot down words to memorize. When Jorge Luis Borges writes about studying a language, he makes a comment that sums up my own experience: “Each word stood out as though it had been carved, as though it were a talisman.” I learned each word separately, marveling at its alluring strangeness and hoping it would take root in my mind. Thanks to this approach, I was never confused by the idiosyncrasies of English spelling. But even though I’m a good speller, to this day I have a hard time writing down proper names someone else is spelling out loud for me. My brain just never made room for the sounding of the English alphabet.

I was admitted to the English department at the University of Wrocław after passing the entrance exams. All our classes were taught in English. We struggled to follow the lives of Pip and Rebecca Sharp or the complicated plot of The Importance of Being Earnest, but gradually novels, plays, and even poems rewarded our efforts. I remember traveling home for Christmas my freshman year and laughing out loud at some of the hilarious adventures of Mr. Pickwick, while other passengers in the compartment gave me funny looks. At that moment, I knew I was enjoying Charles Dickens the way I enjoyed books in Polish. Now and then, I had to use a dictionary, but that only slowed me down and didn’t detract from my delight.

When I got my MA, I could speak, read, and write in English at the level required for a teaching job. English belonged to my professional life and gave me private pleasure when I read. At that time, I had no inkling that several years later I would move to America and use this foreign language daily. In Poland, I was used to having names for everything, being able to find words in any situation, from small talk to conversations about ideas, expressing my thoughts naturally and easily. Suddenly language was no longer a reliable anchor. I wasn’t just troubled by the “paucity of domestic diction” for taking “the shortest road between warehouse and shop” that Vladimir Nabokov talks about. I had to redraft my conceptual map, relearn, and re-experience the world through and in my new language.

As I experienced important life events and crossed many watersheds here, I began to develop a voice in English. You can’t live in a foreign linguistic environment and not be affected by it. After some time, even those who try to resist the intrusion of the adopted language, for fear it might contaminate the purity of their native tongue, will discover that they haven’t remained outside its sphere of influence. Its tide begins to envelop you, its strains and patterns seeping into your conscious and unconscious mind. The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said in an interview that when he lived in a foreign country, inspiration came to him in that country’s language, and he subsequently had great difficulty writing in Polish. He didn’t know the new language well enough to try to write in it, but the possibility fascinated him. Engendering different perceptions and thought, another language can give us a powerful mental boost.

Writers who work in a language other than their mother tongue often feel the need to analyze their choice, dissecting it from many angles, mulling it over in private, and sometimes even offering public explanations. No matter what motivated them, geopolitics or personal history, they harbor misgivings—at least at first—about the artificiality of their decision. Writing, after all, arises out of our most intimate core. And what can be more intimate than our internal relationship to the language that exists in the deep parts of our psyche and is ours by birth? In his essay “To Please a Shadow,” Joseph Brodsky writes that when “a writer resorts to a language other than his mother tongue, he does so either out of necessity, like Conrad, or because of burning ambition, like Nabokov, or for the sake of greater estrangement, like Beckett.” Of the three reasons Brodsky gives, it’s the estrangement that I find most interesting. One may seek it intentionally the way Beckett did, but most often it arrives as an unexpected gift.

Some years ago at a translation seminar sponsored by Boston University, I heard the poet Rosanna Warren say that she urged the young writers in her classes to treat English as if it were a foreign language. She wanted to warn her students against the clichés that so readily spring to mind and hinder original thinking as well as to emphasize the importance of scrutinizing the linguistic boundaries within which native speakers function. Since English isn’t my first language, I have no choice but to follow that directive. Estrangement makes me more attentive and cautious, with none of the flippancy people often exhibit in their mother tongue. Joseph Conrad, the writer whose example is invariably quoted in such discussions, saw himself as “a coal miner in his pit, quarrying all [his] English sentences out of a black night.” I’m not saying that only foreigners have that experience—writing is demanding and grueling, and all serious writers treat language with awe and reverence—but foreigners don’t have to be reminded of that. Estrangement is part of their normal interaction with their new language. They’re acutely aware of its perplexities and never take it for granted. When I write in English, language moves to the forefront, the words coming from outside, as if they only were the source of meaning. I obsess about words, want to know their etymologies, pay attention to their strange provenances, and test where and how far I can go with them.

Another language may expose our linguistic inadequacies and vulnerabilities, but it can also serve as a protective screen. Dubravka Ugrešić, a Croatian novelist and essayist, is convinced that it’s easier to express pain in a language that isn’t ours. If while living in our native language we experience traumatic events, we are likely to relive the pain while writing about them in it. The non-native language, on the other hand, will cause us less pain, create emotional distance, and allow for the indispensable aesthetic detachment. And when there’s no visceral, bodily connection to another language, we can become more daring and say what we would have never said in our mother tongue.

Something like that happened to me. English helped me open up. It’s true that American society has fewer taboos, but it’s the language that gave me the freedom I didn’t feel I had in my mother tongue. We may not think about it, but we live much more in a language than in a country. The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki says in his poem “The Effect of Estrangement” that he prefers to read his own poems in a foreign language, since then he feels less the shamelessness of his confession. Broaching certain topics in Polish would have made me feel awkward if not ashamed; in English, it was similar to whispering my sins through a wooden lattice in the confessional. I knew the priest was there, but he didn’t see me and I couldn’t quite see him. My sense of privacy has changed, but not to the “tell all” extent. I simply began to feel that I could share things about myself and my life, and assume that my experience was worth talking or even writing about.

I grew up knowing you weren’t supposed to reveal information about your family to strangers. But this secretiveness wasn’t just related to political issues, something expected in a totalitarian state. Within our own family, people tended to sidestep fraught personal subjects. As a child, I was aware of things unsaid and of the silence that followed an inconvenient question. The message my family sent me overlapped with the message of society at large, where it was understood and accepted that family members’ misdemeanors—sexual transgressions, alcoholism—had to be covered up. Abuse was never discussed; neither was depression or cancer, as if silence would work its magic and make any problem go away. You weren’t supposed to dwell too much on yourself or mention your successes, because this was interpreted as bragging. If someone brought up some accomplishment of yours, the correct response was to play it down. By the time you finished elementary school, you had absorbed all the dos and don’ts, and knew better than to divulge your feelings. Talking about books, films, and ideas was fine because it could be done at arm’s length. And if your innate temperament tended toward introversion, as mine did, the general standards surrounding privacy could turn you into an even more reticent person whose articulateness could reveal itself only in certain subjects.

When I met my American husband, I was stunned by how freely he talked about his family life, about his father’s manic-depressive episodes, his grandmother’s stinginess, and about himself—his feelings, disappointments, dreams. He seemed to have no secrets while I harbored many. With English giving me protective camouflage, I gradually ventured out into the open. For a while, it seemed that the person speaking wasn’t exactly me and that I was playing someone else’s part. In time, though, I became comfortable in this new persona. I could talk frankly about things that until then had been off limits: my grandfather’s alcoholism and sexual indiscretions, my mother’s emotional remoteness, my failed first marriage. I stopped bottling up my feelings, frustrations, anxieties. I’m not saying that I am no longer reserved, only that my second language has helped me overcome some of my past reticence. That change has also affected the way I communicate with others in my mother tongue. I now share with them what I kept out of view before and tell things my American friends already know about me.

But English helped me get unlocked in more ways than one. Though in high school I toyed with the idea of becoming a writer, I don’t believe I would have begun writing had I continued living in Poland. It’s as if dislocation combined with a new language had freed my creative muse. I began translating—at first into English—and a while later I tried my hand at writing. After the initial period, when I felt as though I were trying to play a four-hand piano piece with two hands, writing in English soon began to feel as natural to me as writing in Polish had been.

As much as I dislike the word reinvent —it smacks too much of self-help manuals—my second language did reinvent me. If the idea of personal transformation is very American, then in the process I have assimilated some of the cultural gospel of my adopted country. The change I underwent was prompted by the change in my external circumstances, but the outward conditions ultimately led me to who I may have been all along. By peeling off the inauthentic layers in myself, I may have reached the hidden core of my innate disposition.

English has also transformed my relationship with my mother tongue, which I have left but not abandoned or betrayed. Thanks to English, I’m more aware and appreciative of Polish. I can go into raptures about its flexibility, about its almost endless possibilities of creating diminutive and augmentative forms, and about the ease of coining new words. In my role as a translator, I avail myself of and rejoice in its resources—the prefixes, suffixes, declensions and conjugations, gender-marked endings, perfect and imperfect tenses, all of which allow for prodigious inventiveness and creativity.

If Facebook had a question about our relationship with languages, my answer could only be: it’s complicated. My two languages have forged a singular alliance. They live parallel and independent existences. For many years, I was in the habit of instantaneously translating from English into Polish in my head, or the other way round, often asking myself how I would say this or that in the other language. I stopped doing that when I realized that one language no longer needed to be bolstered by the other. Now I try to keep them in harmony, not let them clash and contend for position. To keep both happy, I alternate my reading: a book in Polish usually follows one in English. I’ve noticed, too, that my internal conversations are often bilingual, shifting from one language to the other for no apparent reason.

The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz lived in America for well over 30 years, yet with the exception of a few prose pieces, he consistently wrote in Polish. He believed that changing our language meant we had changed or wanted to change our identity, which to him equaled betrayal on two counts. After the political transformations in the former Eastern bloc countries, the word immigration has lost some of the meaning it had at the time Miłosz arrived here; I use it for lack of a better term but see it more broadly as the desire to cross borders, a desire often motivated by the longing for change. Ideally, this results in the expansion of consciousness, not the loss of identity and language. Although I left Poland, I haven’t really left, just as when I leave the United States, I’m still here. In the age of the Internet, this is the experience of many people who live at the intersection of two languages and cultures.

These days, each time I reread Miłosz’s “My Faithful Mother Tongue,” where he writes, “I will continue to set before you little bowls of colors / bright and pure if possible,” I’m reminded that I must prepare my own bowls of colors. But unlike the great poet, I set mine before my two languages: my mother tongue and another.

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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

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Mother Tongue Argumentative Essay Sample

Type of paper: Argumentative Essay

Topic: English , Family , America , Mother , Women , Parents , Language , Literature

Words: 1700

Published: 07/06/2021

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Authors come up with great works by following a set of instructions that help their workflow. There are various ways an author might categorize their work such as problem-solving, attention and awareness. The information should come out clearly for the reader to understand and keep up with the author’s ideas. For that to take place, the author needs to streamline the ideas and give depth to it for the reader to experience. A good flow brings about the best read or understanding of a topic and excites the reader to keep looking for the author’s other works and similar sources.

The reader tries to come up with a blueprint that will help him/her understand the ideas presented in the work of art. For instance, a reader can pick up two different sources and try to see the similarity and differences between the sources. By doing so, the reader is in a position to stretch out their thoughts towards the various ways the authors present in their works. It is important to analyze and synthesis different works if one wants to come up with a better conclusion in the end. Apart from coming up with conclusions, the reader is in a position to come up with their views and analysis of the works hence enhancing their skills.

The paper will look into two works that have similar characteristics that focus on the use of English. The first work to focus on is Mother Tongue by Amy Tan. She is an immigrant from the Asian country. She moved to America with her family. She brings into focus the problems people go through when it comes to the use of broken English. She says that they rarely notice that they use broken English because they have spoken like that since the time they arrived in the country. She brings into light cultural racism but does not point a direct finger into it. Her thoughts come from the difficulty non-Americans face in their day to day life through communication.

She centers on how her mother shy from speaking to people because her English is not proper. She helped her mother in various situations while growing up because people did not take her mother serious because of her accent. She recalls a time her mother gave her the phone to speak to a stock broker because her English was better than hers. For a while, the change of character helped her mother to get her way without people looking down upon her. Tan did not realize that when growing up till the day she was at the Joy Club. She went there to give a short review of her book and felt her English was too academic in comparison to her mother’s English.

Another time she feels the change is during shopping with her mother and husband. Tan said “not waste money that way” and felt odd about it. It did not feel right saying that because it was what her mother used to say. It brought about the two sides of English that she spoke that was the proper English and broken English. The broken English contradicts her mother’s understanding of the language, but it does not imply that she is not intelligent. However, Tan expresses that her mother’s English does not limit her, contrary to what other people felt about her. She recognizes the limitation of the improper English towards her mother’s interactions and opportunities.

Her mother suffered a gruesome experience when she went to the doctor to pick up a CAT scan and the doctors ignored her after many pleas that they lost her results. The doctors’ action was as a result of her English; they looked down upon her because of it. Tan came later to seek out the problem with the doctors who later had a change of her and apologized for the loss and solved the issue immediately. Tan continues with her research on discrimination and how various people suffer due to their language. She comes up with an idea that immigrant’s family play a major role in equipping their children’s language since they tend to pick up from their parents and guardians. She comes up with a thought that she missed some opportunities in life because of her language.

She looks at the education system and finds that most Asians prosper well in math exams but fail in English exams. The English limitation makes her wonder whether the education system tries to direct immigrants to focus nonliterature fields. She relates the discovery of her life as she was looking forward to doing medicine. She challenged herself in changing her career from pre-med to literature. Her aim is to show people that immigrants can be good at English and mentor other people in following her footsteps. She later comes up with books with easy English that the average person could understand. She gave her mother one of her books and she later told her that it was easy to read. Finally, Tan achieved her goals.

The second work is “Concerning the American Language” written by Mark Twain. The book centers on the differences between English and American as a language. True English came from England before the split of some of the Europeans to America. While in America, the people changed how they pronounced some words and sentences. However, the English men did not find the pronunciation correct, and a wall erupted in the dos and do nots of English. Instead of fighting out in changing the American English, they registered it as a language though halfhearted.

Twain begins the paper by echoing a compliment given to him by an English man for the correct use of language. The man said that Twain spoke better English than the other Americans.However, he felt insulted by it and brings up an argument with the man. As per Twain, he did not speak English but spoke American. There was a contrast between the two which he was more than honored to spell it out for the Englishman.

The man found it humorous since to him it was more of a distinction that lacks a difference. However, Twain felt the difference between the two languages were not prodigious though considerable. The languages had equal identities a couple of generations ago. The diversity of people from the south and the west brought about the change in the pronunciation of words and introduction of new words. A major distinction that Twain brought to light was how the two regions talk. The Americans do not through their noses like the English men hence the differences in pronunciation, for instance, the Americans say cow while English people say nao. However, the argument bears no fruit as no party wanted to admit defeat.

The writer establishes other avenues that show the widespread of each language. England and the small part referred to as New England use the English and close to forty-five million Americans use American. The American language shortened the English phrase ‘glass of wawtah’ to a ‘glass of water’ since it felt too long and had unnecessary ‘a’s in it. As per the author, it felt much better than before.

The two text begin by outlining the various situations that surround language. The language in focus is English and how it evolved to what it was today. Mark Twain gives a brief introduction of English and its roots. He establishes the differences between the old English and American English. The difference makes the Britons look down upon the Americans because of their English. They see them as cripples to the language and gather no sympathy for them. The statement speaks for itself from the English man compliment to Twain. The language discrimination appears in Tan’s story. The Americans look down upon immigrants due to their broken language. The scenario of Tan’s mother in the hospital shows the way doctors discriminate immigrants with broken English. What comes to light is the fact that doctors took Tan serious because of her speech. The doctors had a racial characteristic to them, but it is not because of their race but because of the language.

Another thing established in the texts is the zeal both authors try and defend themselves and their people. Tan gets agitated by the education system’s way of diverting Asians into focusing on non-literature courses because of their language. The thought hits her after she takes a look at the performance of immigrants in various subjects. She takes upon herself to undertake the challenge and switch careers to English. Her main focus is to prove the system wrong and bring awareness of the problem faced by immigrants. Mark, on the other hand, battles out with the English man on the differences that exist between English and American. The English man suggests that there was a distinction between the two but no differences. The author battles his points out though no one conceives defeat as they establish different stands towards the matter. The major difference between the two contexts is the targeted audience. The Americans overpower the English in terms of numbers hence they do not face discrimination individually. However, the immigrants are few hence increasing their chances of discrimination. Tan recalls of the several cases that her mother experienced while communicating with other people and their perception. The immigrants are few and have no option but to comply with the language. Their broken English seems to put them down in terms of opportunities that they can get.

Works Cited

Hernandez, Karloz. Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" Summary. 6 November 2009. Web. 20 April 2015. <http://cnslassignment1.blogspot.com/2009/11/amy-tans-mother-tongue-summary.html> Tan, Amy. Mother Tongue. 6 February 2008. Web. 20 April 2015. <https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/guorui/2008/02/06/mother-tongue-by-amy-tan/> Twain, Mark. Concerning the American Language. 2015. Web. 20 April 2015. <http://www.online-literature.com/twain/3276/>

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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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Mother Tongue

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1. Tan’s essay reflects on the similarities and differences between Perfect and Broken English.

• In the end, what descriptor might Tan choose to describe her English? ( topic sentence )
• Explain the purposes for which Tan uses English. In what ways does she use English to accomplish each purpose?
• In the closing sentences, discuss whether English deserves a narrow or a broad usage and why?

2. Tan discusses how her mother’s “broken” English and Tan’s thinking about English have limited them socially. Others perceive Tan’s mother as unsophisticated and stereotype Tan as a STEM student.

• How do the Sociological Limitations of Language affect Tan’s choice to become a writer and how she uses English in her writing? ( topic sentence )

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