Amy Tan Mother Tongue

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language. Everyone has a story behind them. Unfortunately, for people who do speak broken English, this can be a huge barrier living in America. Also, the world is sometimes unaware of how hard it can be for immigrants and children of immigrants because of this barrier. Amy Tan, the author of “mother tongue” expresses what she learned growing up in a home where broken was spoken. She learned about how she spoke different to different people in her life, how people reacted to her mom’s broken English, and how this has affected her life growing up.
Growing up, Amy was ashamed of her mother’s “limited English”. Her mother though knew that her English wasn’t very good. Some of Amy’s friends would not completely understand what her mom was saying. The moms used to have her daughter “call people on the phone and pretend” that she was her mother(Tan 180). Amy was the one often to respond when someone has been rude to her mother “At restaurants people did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand or even acted as if they did not hear her” referring to her mother( Tan 181). By doing this, Amy realized that people aren’t open listening to people …show more content…
For example, she noticed herself saying this: “not waste money that way”. ( Tan 180)However, nobody commented on the way she said it; she realized that this has become a normal way of speaking with family. Meanwhile, with other, people, like in a speech Amy gave, she found herself speaking with “nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, and all the forms of standard English” that she had learned in school( Tan 182). “Broken English’ would always be a part of how she spoke, just not all the time because of different circumstances in