"Mother Tongue" author Amy Tan

     In her personal essay, Mother Tongue (1990), Amy Tan asserts that language proficiency should not determine a person’s intellect. Tan supports this claim by giving the reader insight of her personal experience, affiliated with preconceptions. Tan shares her self-discovery as a writer of language proficiency in order to help readers capture the essence of “limited English”, just as Tan did with her mother. Tan makes reference to individuals who are or have struggled with language proficiency and even to individuals who judge others of their inability to speak English fluently.

     The author of the passage had a very clear meaning as to what she was trying to get across. While reading through the passage I thought about not only myself, but all of us have had that same situation happening to us numerous times. Whether it was on the side of having someone you grew up with speaking broken English or being in front of someone and having to deal with listening to someone speak English in a way you aren't used to hearing. To some of us broken language is just as normal as Proper English. What I happened to get from the passage was that the author hadn't thought that her mom's English wasn't normal English until she got older and realized how limited her mother was.

     The story Mother Tongue by Amy Tan is about an Asian-American daughter who’s mother speaks “broken” or “limited” English. When growing up no one took her mother seriously and was oppressed because of it. Tan also goes on talking about how she never scored as great as she wanted to on tests in the English section as she did in math and science partly because of the way she was brought up talking and listening to her mom. Tan then writes about how teachers in school, “are steering them away from writing and into math and science, which is what happened to me” (Tan 139) but continues on and explains how she wanted to prove them wrong and became an English major her first year in college.  A great example of how this is true and how I’ve witnessed it myself is when I’m at work, which is Truetts, and a family comes through the Drive-Thru and the parents have the kids from the back seat talking and making the order and even handling the money because the parents can’t speak or understand English. Tan ended up writing in a way she knew her mother would understand and others like her mother, and despite her critic, her mother exclaimed, “so easy to read” (Tan 140) and Tan knew she succeeded when it came to her mother.