Ann-Marie Totaram

Mother Tongue

“Mother Tongue”   was first published in Threepenny Review in 1990.

Amy Tan is the daughter of immigrants which fled China’s Cultural Revolution during the late 1940’s.

Within this essay, Amy explains that language can be expressed in several ways. She states that language is power, language evokes emotions, visual image, ideas, and simple truth. But not everyone is set out to speak proper English. Language plays a big role in life. If you don’t speak proper no one would take you serious.

Amy’s mother is unable to speak proper. Whenever she says something everyone acts as if they don’t hear her or understands her. I personally don’t like the fact that no one bothers to help her. Just because she doesn’t know how to speak properly, individuals shouldn’t be rude to her and ignore her. Everywhere she goes, Amy has to accompany her. It was mentioned that at fifteen years old Amy had to make phone calls for her mother, and pretended it was her speaking. It’s nice that Amy looks out for her and helps her out.

As much as Amy brags about how much she admires language, and how much she helped her mother out it turns out that English really isn’t her best subject after all. Toward the ending of the essay, it was mentioned that Amy is better in math and she should look into accountant management rather then being a writer.