‘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.”
