Amy Tans Mother Tongue - Essay Example

Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue Thesis Sentence: Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” is about the immigrant experience and how lack of proficiency in the foreign language leads people to view an intelligent person in a not very flattering light. The life of Amy Tan, the author of “Mother Tongue” is a story of triumph over various odds and the determination of Amy and her mother to make their lives better, inspite of their difficulties. For a child of immigrant parents, language skills were an important aspect of the assimilation process. Amy was proficient in both English and Chinese, but her mother lacked English speaking skills, and inspite of being an intelligent woman, she could not get her ideas across to people, because of her language barrier. Tan knew the power of language, being an accomplished writer, but at the same time she is aware of the fact that English may be a single language, but the various kinds of English spoken around the world are different, shaped by the local idiom and flavored by the metaphorical quality of the foreign speaker. Amy Tan grew up with different “Englishes”, where one kind was reserved for her intellectual pursuits and the other was “our language of intimacy” which the family spoke. It was this language spoken by her mother and family members which she reveled in personally, although, to an outsider the broken sentences and wrong grammar were confounding. Amy’s childhood was hard because of the untimely death of her father, and her brother, who too died when she was very young, yet she continued with her studies. The lack of language skills in the mother caused problems for the young girl in school, for she was pushed towards science subjects, even though, she was not much inclined to study them. In spite of her teachers’ attempts to steer her towards Math and Science, she continued to devote herself to linguistics and went on to do her Masters in the subject. Amy Tan experienced first hand the attitude of teachers towards non-native speakers of English, who tended to direct such students toward the Math and science stream, since the child would invariably score higher in these subjects compared to the ones dependent on language skills. Tan does not blame the teachers but suggests that the tests were constructed in such a way that the scope for using imagination was stifled by the need to be grammatically correct. She says that there are a great many ways to interpret a sentence, her mother and she could do so but their attempts at originality only resulted in low scores for Amy Tan. In this piece, we are not only given a candid glimpse of the mother-daughter relationship, but also the highly protective attitude of Amy Tan towards her mother. This piece is an intensely personal account of the feelings of shame at her mother’s limited English speaking capability which turned into a feeling of pride, when she realized the difficulties of immigrants in gaining mastery over a foreign language, which is far removed from their own. The English spoken by Amy Tan’s mother may have been labeled “broken” or “fractured” for want of a better word, but she calls this English her mother tongue. The use of the phrase ‘mother tongue’ is a wonderful play on this phrase, where the language spoken by her mother is termed the ‘mother tongue,’ while as a daughter she delights in the haphazard conjugation and syntax of her mother’s tongue (speech) as seen in her spoken English. “Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.” Her friends and acquaintances might have found her mother’s English difficult to understand, but for Amy it was “perfectly clear, perfectly natural”. This realization of her mother’s ability dawned on Amy much later, because as a young girl she had felt ashamed of her mother and considered her inferior. This feeling of inferiority was reinforced by what Amy calls the “empirical evidence”, seen in lack of service which her mother had to endure in public places like bank, supermarkets and restaurants. The imperfect way of expressing her perfectly rational thoughts caused people to see her as an imperfect being. To illustrate this point, Amy Tan tells the experience with the stockbroker, where her mother says "Why he don't send me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money,” which when rendered in the daughter’s English sounded something like "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived." In this disclosure of Amy Tan, we see the immigrant’s perplexity and dilemma, who inspite of being equally deserving of public services, has to plead and often haplessly look around for that which is his right by law. Cultural heritage is the greatest asset in the immigrant’s experiences and when they reach into this invaluable treasury, their life experiences are enhanced. Amy Tan found this to be true when she looked deep into her heritage and wrote her best selling novel “The Joy Luck Club”, about a group of Chinese immigrant women and their American-born daughters. When Tan started to write the novel, she confesses that she used, what she thought were “sentences that would finally prove I had mastery over the English language”, but when she later read her first draft, she realized that what she had put on paper was not her true linguistic style. This ability to look at her work objectively imparted to it the unique style which celebrated the immigrant’s rendering of an alien language in their own flavor, adding to it a new dimension. Amy Tan decided that she would write the book keeping in mind her intended audience, and the image the flashed on her mind was that of her own mother. Amy Tan says that her mastery over the various “Englishes”, as she prefers to call the different dialects in which it was spoken in her home, made her book unique. She employed “simple” English to better reach her intended audience and whenever she was in doubt she delved into her mother’s “internal language” which was a transliteration of Chinese into English, and this preserved the “essence” of her narrative. Amy Tan knew she was on the right course, when her mother, after reading her book simply said “so easy to read”. It is this simplicity of Amy Tan’s mother and her language which the author celebrates in this essay, and pays tribute to a woman who forged her identity in an alien land and diverse culture. References Response essay writing: outline, format, structure, topics, rubric ... http://www.custom-essays.org/essay_types/Response_Essay.html Term Papers on My Mother Tongue - Term Papers Lab http://www.termpaperslab.com/term-papers/My-Mother-Tongue/96265.html Joyce Carol Oates - The Best American Essays 1991 http://www.usfca.edu/~southerr/works/anthologies/essays.html Read More