Mother Tongue by Amy Tan Summary

This essay is about a Chinese-American women, who realizes that when speaking to large groups her dialect was in proper english, but at home with her husband  and her mother she would speak “broken english”. She descibed “broken english as Imperfect non-native speaking, as by a foreigner. In time, she realized that when people spoke to her mother, they would hardly understand what she says; even though her mother reads the Forbes reports, Shirley Mc Clain books and listen to the wall street week with ease. Although people couldn’t understand her, she felt her mothers english was full observation and vivid. In this essay Tan quoted a story her mother told and it was hard to understand in my perceptive, but I was able to interpret it. She also noticed people would treat her mother rude or differently, due to the fact: her english wasn’t good. When Tan was young she had to help her mother socially, she used to pretend she was her mother on the phone and in certain situations where her mother couldn’t communicate efficiently. She also explains how english wasn’t her favorite subject in school; math and science was. She felt her writing in english was judged on a matter of opinion and personal experiences. Unlike math where there’s only one correct answer for everything. After her experiences with writing and speaking with different dialect; she decided to write more like her mother tongue.