Summary

According to Amy Tan, in Mother Tongue, she introduces herself as a writer who is “fascinated by language in daily life” and uses language as a daily part of her work as a writer. Tan loves language, and she points out the fact that she uses more than one type of “English” in her life. She realized that she speaks differently when she's around different people. At a talk she gave on her book, The Joy Luck Club, Tan became aware of her mother in the audience because she was using academic language, language she learned from books, and this was not language she ever used with her mother. She observes another experience that made her aware of another type of English she uses, the language of family. She talks to her husband the way she talks to her mother. The author lets us know about the kind of english her mother speaks and how much she knows. Tan’s mother tells a story about a gangster in Shanghai who had the same last name as her family. She uses very “broken” English to tell the story. She reminds us that even though her mother’s English seems somewhat “broken”, it does not reflect her intelligence. Although her mothers english is broken it contradicts how much she understands; she reads and discusses complex books. Ideas and economies regularly.The author rejects the idea that her mother’s English is “broken or limited”. She dislikes that her mother had limitations in her life because of her english. Tan emphasizes the fact that even her mother recognizes that her opportunities and interactions in life are limited by her English. She used to have to call people on the phone and act as though she was her mother in order to get people to pay attention to her like when she had to yell at her mother’s stockbroker for not sending a check. She notices that people are judged by the way that they speak. Once when her mother went to the doctor to get the results of a CAT scan, her doctors essentially ignored her when she complained about them losing the results. It wasn’t until she actually called the doctor that they cared to solve the problem. Tan acknowledges that perhaps her family’s language had an effect on her own opportunities in life. The language we learn as children can affect the rest of our lives. She questions whether or not other Asian students are discouraged from writing or steered in the direction of math and science. In her experience, Tan notices that Asian students do do better on math achievement tests than language tests. The author acknoledges the fact that people were doubting that she could master english and she did. 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. Tan reports that she made a decision to write with a particular reader in mind, which influenced how she wrote. She had a goal in mind, which was for her book to be written in a way that her mother could easlily read it.