Growing up, my dad would be deployed for long periods of time, and that meant that I would have to spend a lot of time with my mom. It never really bothered me, except when I had to do homework. She grew up in Colombia for most of her life and as a result, her English isn’t the best, to say the least. This would at times be frustrating because she couldn’t help me with my English homework. Fortunately, my dad’s English is really good and I also had a lot of American friends (considering that I participated in American schools) so you probably wouldn’t think much of my English. However, this always gave me this toxic perception that I was somehow better than my mom only because of how “proper” my English was, I would at times even be embarrassed to go out with her. It’s not something that I like to admit, but at one point in my life, that was the case. I eventually grew out of that mentality and started to view the term “proper English” more like Jamila Lyiscott and Amy Tan.

We’ve all grown up from different backgrounds, yet here were are in America where English is the most spoken language. However we all label people (be it in a positive or negative light) based on the way they speak English. Somone of a different ethnicity could be a highly intelligent individual, yet we choose to ignore that fact because of the way they pronounce a few words. Although first impressions are important, and you can’t stop people from judging one another, I believe we should break these negative connotations that “proper English” places on people. We should try to understand one another and hear each other out, even if it can be slow to try to understand what there trying to say, they are no different from you as a person. At the end of Amy Tan’s passage she admits that she chose to write her book not for others, but for her mom so that others could try to understand that lifestyle. Nothing is more powerful than when she said “I wanted to capture what language ability test can never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythm of her speech and the nature of her thoughts”. Watching her confidently break the boundaries of the negative aspects of “proper English” for her mother’s sake was heartwarming, and I wish I could’ve had this mentality much sooner in my life for my mother. Hopefully, a message like this could be sent to like-minded individuals like myself, because I feel like its something that needs to be heard.