Omar Mohamed

English 110

Mother’s Tongue Response

This text was very interesting and gave a very important lesson. The author, Amy Tan, starts off by introducing herself and showing her love for writing and “languages”, being all the different types of Englishes she speaks and interacts with. Amy was giving a talk with her mother, whose first language was not English. Amy’s mother was in the crowd hearing her speaking “perfect” English, speaking carefully spoken grammatical phrases, with past perfect tenses.

While walking with her mother, they were talking about prices of furniture, Amy heard herself saying “Not waste money that way”. Her husband did not think anything of it, since Amy realized that her speaking a different type of simpler English with her family for over 20 years. Amy’s mother often communicates with others in English, however most of Amy’s friends say that they do not understand everything that she says.

To Amy, her mother’s English was perfect. She thought it was vivid and clear, since she grew up talking to her mother and knows exactly what she means when she speaks English in a certain way. On the other hand, others describe Amy’s mother’s English as “broken” or “fractured”. Amy was strongly against these terms as she felt that they degraded her speaking ability. At first, Amy was embarrassed of her mother’s “limited” English.

Since Amy was a child, she used to have her make phone calls acting like her, since Amy spoke English in a way others thought sounded much more formal. Amy’s mother also experienced discrimination just because of the way she spoke. For example, when they were at the hospital to view results of a CAT scan, and the hospital staff said that they had lost the results, showing no sympathy to Amy’s mother. That is, until Amy called with her perfect English and suddenly the attitude of the doctor changed, and they were assured that the CAT scan would be found and they apologized for their mistake.

Amy decided to be a writer and author of “The Joy Luck Club”, and other fictional stories. At first, she wrote her pieces in conventional English, to prove she could speak and write perfect English. Later, she embraced all of the different Englishes she grew up with, and began writing texts in all of these different Englishes.

The important lessons I took from this reading is that you do not need to follow the norm of the society to fit in and be seen as normal. Everybody should embrace who they actually are, and speak the way that they like to speak. This text can also be taken as a lesson to sympathize with others who have trouble communicating, such as Amy’s mother, and try to accommodate and help them instead of treating them inferiorly just because of something so irrelevant – an accent.