Summary of Mother Tongue by Amy Tan

This essay is about a Chinese-American woman who compares her dialect she grew up with, with her use of proper English. She speaks about how in her lectures she speaks Standard English but with her mother it is more of a broken down form. Her culture and how she grew up shaped how she performed in her English classes and her understanding of it. It wasn’t her best subject but still she wanted to rebel and go for it.  She decribes all the obstacles Chinese-American children go through. Also the situations she they went through opened her eyes to all the limitations her mother had and how other perceived her. Even though other people couldn’t understand her mother the way she did, she still felt like her mother was perfectly understandable. She decided to write her essays in the form of her mother’s tongue to tell the story more vivid, describing her “passion, intent, imagery and the rhythms of her speech”.