Leah Zelson Dr. D. James Language 120013 September 9, 2012
Identifying the “Mother Tongue” In her essay, Amy Tan emphasizes the powerful link there is between language and identity through her experiences growing up in an immigrant family. Tan stresses in her essay the huge effect that her mother’s language had on her identity as a person and a writer. As a daughter of a Chinese immigrant, Tan writes about situations where she saw limitations imposed upon her mother because of her language skills. She also discusses the perceptions and judgments that people make when spoken to with imperfect English. Tan asserts that the link between identity and language is incredibly strong and can trigger equally strong emotions. While discussing her latest novel in a public talk, she suddenly remembers that her mother is in the room. This is when she hears her own speech and realizes the complexity of it, a direct result of years of study, education and pragmatics. She is speaking to this audience in a completely different way than she would at home. Her “mother tongue” tongue”, which refers to “the first language that a person learns and the language used in that person’s home country” is literally her literally her mother’s tongue (mother tongue). The fact that Tan is so moved just by seeing her mother demonstrates that her mother is a bigger part of her identity than she realizes, and speaking proper English makes her feel that she is
omitting a big part of herself. I see this as evidence that the connection between her mother and her identity is incredibly strong. Tan’s identity is so wrapped up in language, that just by speaking proper English she feels she has discounted much of her own background. When Tan changes the way she speaks, it ’s as if she has two separate lives – one with her family and one with the outside world. How someone feels about their own identity relies heavily on outside opinion and perceptions. According to the Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity , “language is a central feature of human identity. When we hear someone speak, we immediately make guesses about gender, education level, age, profession, and place of origin” (Spolsky, B. 181-192). Amy Tan knows this more than anyone. Growing up with a Chinese immigrant as a mother, Tan saw firsthand the limitations of her mother’s broken English. People that Tan’s mother interacted with sometimes perceived her to have low intellect or be unworthy of their time and sympathy. They just did not take her mother seriously, so Tan would have to step in and help. For example, acting as her mother, she would sometimes yell at people over the phone to take care of business. Speaking in perfect English, things were much more likely to work out. At a young age, Amy Tan was already seeing how powerful a tool language was and how others’ perceptions could be very misguided. Their assumption that her mother had low intellect was in fact false; as Tan points out: “You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall 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 (77). The way her mother expressed her thoughts may have been ”
flawed, but there was quality to them. Amy Tan also relays the importance of language for shaping her own world. She believes it is really family influence that shapes a child’s language and attributes the imperfect way her mother speaks to the way she sees and responds to the world. This is really important to her, because she now realizes that the way her mother speaks is so much a part of her own identity. Tan refers to the way that she thinks and sees the world to her “mother tongue”. I agree with the notion that the language someone is exposed to growing up has a big effect on how they turn out to be. I’m sure the more sophisticated, grammatically correct English that I was exposed to as a child helped me to communicate more effectively which largely contributed to my identity. Language also affected the way that Tan performed in school. Tan remembers her days as a student taking achievement tests and never doing well enough on the English section. According to the achievement tests, her strengths lied in math and science. Growing up around broken English gave her a disadvantage when answering word analogies. None of the same expressions, grammatical rules or logistics that someone would hear in a non-immigrant family were present in her household. Tan recalls, “I knew what the tests were asking, but I could not block out of my mind the images already created 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 (79). The fact that Tan has an immigrant mother ”
definitely shaped her identity in that she believed she was weak in English.
However, from her mother she got the wonderful sense of imagery that is so prominent in her writing. Tan heard a fullness and richness in her mother’s speech that shaped how she responded to the world and contributed to her own identity. Amy Tan’s essay is easy for me to relate to, because I often see myself alter my language in different social situations. With my friends I can be a s informal as I want and blurt out whatever is on my mind, but when I am with my family I do have to be more respectful and censor some things. Though I didn’t grow up in a family of broken English as Amy Tan did, I can relate to some of her feelings about separate identity resulting from language. Amy Tan makes two things very clear in her essay: identity depends greatly upon language, and the way that others perceive and respond to language contributes to personal identity. How we hear things growing up ultimately shape the unique way we interact with the world.
Citations: 1) "Mother Tongue." Mother Tongue. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2010. Web. 09 Sept. 2012. .
2) Spolsky, B. (1999). Second-language learning. In J. Fishman (Ed.), Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity (pp. 181-192). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3) Amy Tan. "Mother Tongue." Originally published as "Under Western Eyes" In The Threepenny Review, 1990, pp. 315-320. Reprinted by permission.
