Summary of “Mother Tongue”
In the essay “Mother Tongue” the American writer Amy Tan gives her personal account of the different types of English that she has dealt with throughout her life. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants and was brought up in California: in her text she recognizes that because of this combination, and especially due to her job, language has always been a constant subject of analysis. It was the fascination about it that drove her to spend significant time in thinking of how any style of communication can affect the way we create images and express ourselves with complex thoughts. Language, basically, is the tool in Tan’s profession, so she uses all the different adaptations of English that she has heard and used and adopts it in all of her works.
On a recent occasion Amy Tan went through an experience that made her “keenly aware” of the different kinds of English she uses. She was giving a talk to a group of people regarding her life, writing and “The Joy Luck Club”, her first novel. Although she had successfully given the same talk in at least twelve other occasions, this time it sounded wrong to her simply because her mother was part of the audience. “It was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech,” Tan explains, “using the kind of English I have never used with her.” It was during this event that Tan realized the different approaches of the English language that she had always been adopting in her life, from school to books and particularly at home.
In a following passage Amy Tan exemplifies her newly developed awareness of language usage with a situation where she and her mother were walking down the street talking about the price of furnitures. “Not waste money that way,” she remembers herself saying. Although her husband was walking alongside them, she points out in the text, he did not seem to notice that she had changed her style of speaking. On this occasion Tan became aware of that in the course of twenty years of relationship she and her (also American) partner had often used that same kind of English she uses with her (Chinese) mother. She concludes this thought by saying that that kind of English had become a friendly language to her, something to use specifically at home, where people shared the same background and higher levels of familiarity.
Amy Tan points out that however bad her mother’s English seems to be it does not reflect the degree to which she can understand the language. As an avid reader of Forbes magazine and Shirley MacLaine’s books and listener to the Wall Street Week, a TV show about investments on stock markets ended in 2005, the mother obviously has no problem with oral and written comprehension. Her issue, affirms Tan, is only when it comes to speaking language. “My friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese.” To Amy Tan herself, in the other hand, it always sounded “perfectly clear, perfectly natural”. She explains this by saying that the English spoken by her mother is what she grew up listening to, a language (“vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery”) that influenced the way she observes the world and affected profoundly how she expresses her emotions.
It was only after being aware of the way her mother speaks (as opposed to what she is capable of understanding) that Amy Tan started to give this relationship a proper thought. She admits that like others she always described it as “fractured” or “broken”, as though something that needs to be fixed. But Tan says that she does not feel comfortable with these names: “they seem just as bad,” she explains, “as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.” This statement could be interpreted as if Tan’s mother’s English is as deficient as the effort applied by people to understand it.
Indeed, while growing up Amy Tan’s mother’s “fractured” English limited her being understood. The writer says that she was sometimes ashamed of her mother because of the common belief that one’s English is a reflection of the quality of whatever one wants to talk about. Tan cites examples of situations when she had seen her mother being treated differently: while talking to people in banks, departments stores and restaurants, where people “did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.”
Circumstances like that led her mother to make her speak to people over the phone on her place since she was fifteen years old. In these occurrences Tan was forced to complain instead of her mother, and even shout at the people who had not treated her equally because of her “broken language”. Tan exemplifies that with an episode when she had to call her mother’s stockholder to remind him of a due bill. “My mother was standing in the back whispering loudly, ‘Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money.’ And then I said in perfect English, ‘Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived.’” At the end they both went to meet the man’s boss and the mother was the one who did the talk. “I was sitting there red-faced and quiet, and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.”
Similarity, I have had to stand instead of my father in almost all his important phone conversations in English. My father always speaks this kind of “broken” English that limits people’s understanding of him, especially when they talk in a particular topic or reason. Having been learning English in a country where it is not the first language spoken, which is his case, is very difficult, despite the fact that there are many native English speakers teaching. Practicing in an English community, however, will give a lot of support to the English language improvement.
