In paragraphs 7-14 of "Mother Tongue,"Tan describes her mother's experience with the English language. Read the passage carefully then write an essay in which you analyze the rhetorical choices Tan m

Mother Tongue

Amy Tan, born in 1952, was raised in northern California. Formerly a business writer, Tan is

now a novelist. She is best known for her first b oo k, The Joy Luck Club (1989), but has also

written The Kitchen God ’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) , and The

Bonesetter ’s Daughter (2001). Her fiction grows out of her experiences as the child of

Chinese immigrants gro wing up and living in American culture.

Known for her portrayal of mother -da ughter relationships, Tan draws on her C hinese heritage

to depic t the clash of traditional C hinese culture with modern -day American customs. In

“Mother Tongue ”, Tan explores “all of the Englishes ” that are part o f her identity.

I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the

English language and i ts variations in this country or others.

I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated

by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the

way it can ev oke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of

my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with.

Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a lar ge

group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk

was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well

enough, until I remembered one major difference that mad e 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. 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 standa rd 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 ove r 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.

So you'll have some idea of what this family talk I heard sounds like, I'11 quote what my mother said

during a recent conversation which I videotaped and then transcribed. During this conversation, my

mother was talking about a political gangster in Shangh ai who had the same last name as her family's,

Du, and how the gangster in his early years wanted to be adopted by her family, which was rich by

comparison. Later, the gangster became more powerful, far richer than my mother's family, and one

day showed up at my mother's wedding to pay his respects. Here's what she said in part: "Du Yusong

having business like fruit stand. Like off the street kind. He is Du like Du Zong -- but not Tsung -ming

Island people. The local people call putong, the river east side, he belong to that side local people. That man want to ask Du Zong father take him in like become own family. Du Zong father wasn't look

down on him, but didn't take seriously, until that man big like become a mafia. Now important person,

very hard to invit ing him. Chinese way, came only to show respect, don't stay for dinner. Respect for

making big celebration, he shows up. Mean gives lots of respect. Chinese custom. Chinese social life

that way. If too important won't have to stay too long. He come to my w edding. I didn't see, I heard it.

I gone to boy's side, they have YMCA dinner. Chinese age I was nineteen."

You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually

understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wal l Street Week, converses daily with her

stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease --all kinds of things I can't begin to

understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some

say they understan d 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking

pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother

tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation an d imagery. That was the

language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.

Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have

described it to people as 'broken" or "fr actured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always

bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and

needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used,

"limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including

people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.

I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my

per ception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of

what she had to say That is, because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And

I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fa ct that people in department stores, at banks,

and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand

her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.

My mother has long realized the limitations of her Engl ish as well. When I was fifteen, she used to

have me call people on the phone to 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. One time it was a call to

her stockbroke r in New York. She had cashed out her small portfolio and it just so happened we were

going to go 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, "Thi s 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 s end 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 of 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." And sure enough, the following week there we were in front of this astonished stockbroker, and I was si tting there red -faced and quiet,

and my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting at his boss in her impeccable broken English.

We used a similar routine just five days ago, for a situation that was far less humorous. My mother had

gone to the hospital for a n appointment, to find out about a benign brain tumor a CAT scan had

revealed a month ago. She said she had spoken very good English, her best English, no mistakes. Still,

she said, the hospital did not apologize when they said they had lost the CAT scan a nd she had come

for nothing. She said they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to

know the exact diagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they

would not give her any more information unti l the next time and she would have to make another

appointment for that. So she said she would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She

wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finally called her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English --

lo and b ehold -- we had assurances the CAT scan would be found, promises that a conference call on

Monday would be held, and apologies for any suffering my mother had gone through for a most

regrettable mistake.

I think my mother's English almost had an effect on limiting my possibilities in life as well.

Sociologists and linguists probably will tell you that a person's developing language skills are more

influenced by peers. But I do think that the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant

families wh ich are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child. And I believe

that it affected my results on achievement tests, I.Q. tests, and the SAT. While my English skills were

never judged as poor, compared to math, English could not b e considered my strong suit. In grade

school I did moderately well, getting perhaps B's, sometimes B -pluses, in English and scoring perhaps

in the sixtieth or seventieth percentile on achievement tests. But those scores were not good enough to

override the opinion that my true abilities lay in math and science, because in those areas I achieved

A's and scored in the ninetieth percentile or higher.

This was understandable. Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least,

the answe rs on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience.

Those tests were constructed around items like fill -in-the -blank sentence completion, such as, "Even

though Tom was, Mary thought he was --." And the correct answ er always seemed to be the most

bland combinations of thoughts, for example, "Even though Tom was shy, Mary thought he was

charming:' with the grammatical structure "even though" limiting the correct answer to some sort of

semantic opposites, so you wouldn 't get answers like, "Even though Tom was foolish, Mary thought he

was ridiculous:' Well, according to my mother, there were very few limitations as to what Tom could

have been and what Mary might have thought of him. So I never did well on tests like that

The same was true with word analogies, pairs of words in which you were supposed to find some sort

of logical, semantic relationship -- for example, "Sunset is to nightfall as is to ." And here you would

be presented with a list of four possible pairs, on e of which showed the same kind of relationship: red

is to stoplight, bus is to arrival, chills is to fever, yawn is to boring: Well, I could never think that way.

I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already c reated by

the first pair, "sunset is to nightfall" --and I would see a burst of colors against a darkening sky, the

moon rising, the lowering of a curtain of stars. And all the other pairs of words --red, bus, stoplight,

boring --just threw up a mass of conf using images, making it impossible for me to sort out something

as logical as saying: "A sunset precedes nightfall" is the same as "a chill precedes a fever." The only

way I would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situ ation, for example, my being disobedient and staying out past sunset, catching a chill at night, which turns into

feverish pneumonia as punishment, which indeed did happen to me.

I have been thinking about all this lately, about my mother's English, about achievement tests. Because

lately I've been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American

literature. Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so

many Chinese students go into engi neering! Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin

to answer. But I have noticed in surveys -- in fact, just last week -- that Asian students, as a whole,

always do significantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this m akes me think that

there are other Asian -American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as

"broken" or "limited." And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing

and into math and science, which is wh at happened to me.

Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenge of disproving assumptions

made about me. I became an English major my first year in college, after being enrolled as pre -med. I

started writing nonfiction as a free lancer the week after I was told by my former boss that writing was

my worst skill and I should hone my talents toward account management.

But it wasn't until 1985 that I finally began to write fiction. And at first I wrote using what I thought to

be witti ly crafted sentences, sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English

language. Here's an example from the first draft of a story that later made its way into The Joy Luck

Club, but without this line: "That was my mental quandary in its n ascent state." A terrible line, which I

can barely pronounce.

Fortunately, for reasons I won't get into today, I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories

I would write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about

mothers. So with this reader in mind -- and in fact she did read my early drafts --I began to write stories

using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English I spoke to my mother, which for lack of a better

term might be described as "simple"; the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term

might be described as "broken"; my translation of her Chinese, which could certainly be described as

"watered down"; and what I imagined to be her translation of her Chinese if she could speak in pe rfect

English, her internal language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor

a Chinese structure. I wanted to capture what language ability tests can never reveal: her intent, her

passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted

when my mother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."