Amy Tan Mother Tongue Summary

In “Mother Tongue” Amy Tan discusses the differences in English among different cultural backgrounds. In Tan’s article she focuses on how people are narrow minded towards those of different culture and language backgrounds. She does not criticize nor correct others language. Tan says, “I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.”
Tan argues that it is not about the whether people are correct or not, it is about how they put their words together that make is special. Throughout the article she speaks about the different English’s: the English she learned at school and the one she used at home which showed her background. The two different English’s she uses helped her find her writer’s voice. Her desire for writing came from her desire to want to prove to people that her culture does not hold her back from being one of the few known Asian-American writers.
Being brought up around such language she used this English to communicate with her loved ones and was able to comprehend it clearly. Tan’s friends, when asked, admitted to only …show more content…
English was a not a first language for her and many things. She wanted to learn more about perfect English because she didn’t want her language to block her from expressing herself. Using the perfect language makes ideas make sense to the reader. When writing her first book she doesn’t show that she is a good writer. She made a conscious decision when starting her first book. She wrote to a specific audience, one that would be directed to people like her mother. She impersonated the way her mother spoke. Aside from that she wanted to incorporate her own words and phrases that she would normally use, to hold her passion, imagery, and the nature of her thoughts into the story. The way that Tan thinks is describe by the way she