Anre S. Morain

Freshman Composition English

Prof. Brenna Crowe

10/20/2020

As much as America loves to boast this melting pot of a people if the melting pot doesn’t act homogeneously the part that doesn’t “fit in” often get’s mistreated and or discarded. In Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” she speaks of her experiences as an asian american person growing up. She shows us, the viewers, her struggle with subtle cultural racism by sharing with us anecdotes of events throughout her life that have impacted the development of her speech and the many different forms it takes depending on who you decide to share it with. I believe the main focus of “Mother Tongue” is the how the discrimination molded both Amy Tan and others like her. She appeals to the audience using the anecdotes she chooses which are very deliberate in how they are very uncomfortable stories if you are someone who has been in her position before, that along with her word choice really jams those emotions of sympathy and empathy into the viewer. These stories range throughout her life showing the audience that her struggles being asain-american never truly end when it comes to the topic of language. While one could say that the main argument for the piece is one about the struggles of dealing with foreign parents when you yourself speak the language of, but if you read the whole document this can be easily dismissed. 

Getting into how the specific anecdote choice and the word choice of those anecdotes really kick you in the gut with empathy and sympathy. The first real anecdote she uses is an anecdote within an anecdote, she states that she has a revelation on stage while giving a speech that her stage voice and home voice were so radically different and we can start to analyze from the word choice of the first anecdote “… I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups… The talk was going along well enough until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room, And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, “ The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus’– a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.

Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way.” My husband was with us as well, and he didn’t notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It’s because over the twenty years we’ve been together I’ve often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with…”, this very long passage is two anecdotes wherein Mrs.Tan has a realization about the very nature of her english. Her word choice makes her sound surprised and honestly confused about the reason for her change in speaking. One would see this and assume that this is the first time she’s ever thought about her code switching in depth, but I present you a different narrative, I believe she being a writer has thought a lot about her own speech but because she has spent her entire life codeswitching to and from she doesn’t register it as it’s own significant thing. Code switching is a thing that I’m fairly certain all first generation americans do on a regular basis, and this is something you can see even in her own anecdote when she describes it as having a family language one for intimate people. We can see similar trends in May Tan’s other anecdotes. For instance in this quote, “When I was fifteen, she used to have me call people on the phone and pretend I was she. In this guise I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened that we were going to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, ‘ This is Mrs.Tan’.

And 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.’

Then she began to talk more loudly, ‘What he want, I come to New York tell him front his boss, you cheating me?’ And I was trying to calm her down, make her be quiet, while telling the stockbroker, ‘I can’t tolerate any more excuses. If I don’t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I’m in New York next week…” Later in the passage she goes on to say that she was annoyed, but it is evident from her word choice alone clues you in to the general inconvenience that she finds her mother at that point in time. To unpack that one would question as to why she would be embarrassed of her mother in the first place. Her Mother is who she gets her home speech from in the first place so why would this specific instance inspire shame in her. The only real reason would be schoolyard teasing to the utmost degree, which albiet often times lighthearted can be considered a form of microaggressionary discrimination when done too harshly. 

Even these two short passages are enough to prove that throughout her life Amy Tan’s experiences with language have been filled with diversity and adversity. Given some analysis you can see her early life struggles with language and perception of self, along with How these experiences showed up later in life. When one reaches the end of the essay one would see that Amy Tan wrote her books in favor of her mother’s speech pattern to make it easier for people similar to her mother. This shows growth in both confidence and self assuredness gained through leaning into her failings in english at the beginning of her career and school even as teachers and peers pushed her to pursue any number of rather stereotypical career paths for a young asian woman.