In the book, “Mother Tongue”, Amy Tan asserts that language is a tool of communication.
Tan herself speak two kinds of English, standard English and broken English. She realizes that she always speak in perfect English, the standard English, when she gives a speech, when she is giving a speech which her mother attends. However, when she talks to her mother, she changes her language into a limited English, broken English, without any transfer. This is because the language people speak is based on how language can help us understand each other. Her mother only needs a limited English to be able to understand newspapers and radios. Thus, her English is just a transferred Chinese.
Yet, many people use language to evaluate people. They think that people who can’t speak perfect English will people who can’t think perfectly. Her mother is treated disrespectful by a stockbroker, who doesn’t really pay attention on what she needs. Whereas, with Tan saying perfect English, the stockbroker does the work quickly. The hospital that gives her mother a CAT scan doesn’t apologize for the lose of the result until Tan talks with the doctor.
In Tan’s only life, she gets a lower English score on SAT because her mother tongue limited her ability to find out the connection between those English words. Her teacher thought she should study math or engineering since her math score is better than her English score. Amy Tan says the purpose of her writing is to let more people understand her mother tongue. She ends the passage by saying that she has already published a book, “The Joy Luck Club”, and her mother thinks that book is “very easy to understand”(259).
Citation: Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue”, The Norton Sampler, Ed. Thomas Cooley, New York, London, W. W. Norton & Company, 2013 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 253-261, Print.
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