Amy Tan Family Talk Summary
The paragraph in question contains many things that can easily be examined and be projected across the essay as a whole. To give a summary of the paragraph, the speaker Amy Tan is speaking to a large group of people about her new book. Then she remembers that her mother is in the group, and she feels strange using more formal English than any she has ever used by her mother. Other portions of the essay talk about how her mother’s English can be described as broken or simple, and she feels that this English which she has always spoken with her mother is as she describes it as “family talk”; language used for the family. Throughout the course of the essay she uses her “family talk” and formal English and to talk about her life and experiences
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Her life growing up with her mother led her to lead a sort of double life of how she talks. At home, she spoke to her mother in the “broken” English that her mother spoke; otherwise she spoke in formal English. This paragraph emphasizes her awkwardness as stated “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 speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her.” She feels strange and out of place using such proper English with her mother who while knowing of her daughter’s knowledge of English had never had it directed at her. Her knowledge of the English language in verbal form as she stated “a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with normalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of Standard English” and her ability to make complete and completely formal English through her writing is trying to point out the massive difference between her English and her mother’s. Her constant use of this formal English and various complex English tropes and schemes continue to show how not only her schooling has affected her life but how she can
Her life growing up with her mother led her to lead a sort of double life of how she talks. At home, she spoke to her mother in the “broken” English that her mother spoke; otherwise she spoke in formal English. This paragraph emphasizes her awkwardness as stated “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 speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her.” She feels strange and out of place using such proper English with her mother who while knowing of her daughter’s knowledge of English had never had it directed at her. Her knowledge of the English language in verbal form as she stated “a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with normalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of Standard English” and her ability to make complete and completely formal English through her writing is trying to point out the massive difference between her English and her mother’s. Her constant use of this formal English and various complex English tropes and schemes continue to show how not only her schooling has affected her life but how she can