Mother Tongue and When I was PR – Gilbert

PART 1 – “Mother Tongue” 

“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 freelancer 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” (Paragraph 18) 

This paragraph is important because Amy Tan gives us part of herself, how she is rebellious, ambitious, and has faith in her abilities. She chooses not to let people’s assumptions or opinions about her influence what she wants for herself, instead, she chooses to follow her own path. She stood in defiance, showed resilience, and proved how she is one to act upon what she feels strongly about. 

• Guise: noun – an external form, appearance, or manner of presentation, typically concealing the true nature of something. 

“In this guise, I was forced to ask for information or even to complain and yell at people who had been rude to her.” 

• Empirical: adjective – based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. 

“And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact 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.” 

• Semantic: noun – of, relating to, or arising from the different meanings of words or other symbols 

“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.’.” 

PART 2 – “When I was Puerto Rican” 

“I started up the stairs, my stomach churning into tight knots. All of a sudden, I was afraid that I was about to make a fool of myself and end up in seventh grade in the middle of the school year. Having to fall back would be worse than just accepting my fate now and hopping forward if I proved to be as good a student as I had convinced Mr. Grant I was. “What have I done?” I kicked myself with the back of my right shoe, much to the surprise of the fellow walking behind me, who laughed uproariously, as if I had meant it as a joke.”  

This excerpt is important because Santiago expresses her feelings, she was afraid, fearing she would make a fool of herself. I interpret this moment at the beginning of the stairs being powerful and presenting the writer’s courage. Behind her was her mother, an escape from the feeling of fear, and in front of her were the steps leading to her classroom. She knew that accepting her fate would be better than folding under pressure, she wanted to move forward. She kicks herself in the back, symbolizing a push, despite her worries and discomfort she forced herself and showed resilience. 

• Rebellious: adjective – defying or resisting some established authority, government, or tradition; insubordinate; inclined to rebel. 

“This was probably the first rebellious act she had seen from me outside my usual mouthiness within the family.” 

• Uproariously: adjective – very loud, as sounds or utterances. 

“I kicked myself with the back of my right shoe, much to the surprise of the fellow walking behind me, who laughed uproariously, as if I had meant it as a joke.” 

• Parsed: verb – to describe (a word in a sentence) grammatically, identifying the part of speech, inflectional form, syntactic function, etc. 

“Half of them never showed up, or, when they did, they slept through the lesson or nodded off in the middle of Miss Brown’s carefully parsed sentences.”